“Sitting Pretty Presents” launching on Style36 on Monday will enable the 17 designers selling their ranges in the Sitting Pretty store on Long Street the opportunity to sell online to a countrywide audience. It’ll also feature the new Sitting Pretty summer stock.
The Sitting Pretty label was created in Cape Town in 2009 by Emma Longden. Fabrics are sourced and the clothing manufactured locally and sold from the eponymous shop on one of the city’s busiest commercial streets.
In collaboration with fellow local designers Odanata, Isabel de Villiers, a.m.i, a bird named frank, Black Betty, madewithlove, Jinger Jack and gabrielle, a raffle is on the go to raise money to reunite one of Sitting Pretty’s seamstresses with a son she hasn’t seen in 12 years.
“Maria is a refugee from the Congo, has four children and a husband who struggles to find work,” says Longden. “Nearly two years ago her home was robbed and the R42 000 she had hidden was stolen, as well as her household goods. Her husband didn’t know about the money as she had been saving for years to put him through a course at the Technikon so that he can work as a qualified electrician in South Africa.”
However, the main reason Maria was saving that money, Longden explains, was to visit her eldest son in France whom she hasn’t seen since he was seven, when she sent him away with his uncle to avoid domestic conflict in the Congo. The raffle proceeds will go towards buying her son an airplane ticket to visit South Africa. Any leftover proceeds will go towards school fees and needed household items. “Maria knows nothing about this so it will be a beautiful, big surprise,” says Longden.
Raffle tickets are R50 and can be purchased at the Sitting Pretty shop at 111 Long Street or online at sittingpretty.co.za. The prizes are thousands of rands worth of apparel and accessories from these designers.
