From the small farming town of White River in Mpumalanga, a little girl’s vision of making it in the world of fashion was just the beginning.
At just 33 years old, Sarah Tanya Arguelles (née Mwamwetta) has accomplished feats that many still dream of – becoming the lead designer of two of Beyoncé’s and Adidas’ collections in the Ivy Park collaboration and seeing the Queen herself donning her designs on the world stage during the Renaissance Tour.
Preferring us to refer to her as Tanya, the designer has been living in Los Angeles for the past 10 years and she has also created looks and collections for A-listers like basketball star Steph Curry and famed musicians Tobe Nwigwe, Nas and Courtney Love.
In a conversation more than a month in the making, TRUELOVE got the opportunity to hear more about Tanya’s journey virtually from the comfort of her downtown LA home.
“I’m Tanzanian by birth and I moved to MP (Mpumalanga) to a little little little town called White River when I was six years old. So, I say I’m South African because from six to 18 [that's where I lived] – or let’s say 21 because I travelled but I came back – that’s where my family is, my immediate family. That’s pretty much everything I’ve known.”
Tanya’s path after high school took her to San Francisco and back to South Africa to complete her undergraduate degree at Vega School, where an assignment to start a fashion blog led to an offer to work at Elle Magazine.
She turned down the job offer to complete her postgraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA a decade prior and has since been living, working and building her family with her husband and young son.
A routine sweep through her email inbox almost cost her her golden opportunity.
Sharing how she got the opportunity to design for Ivy Park, Tanya explains, “I delete this email that I get from Adidas essentially saying, ‘okay, we’re looking for a designer to join this team’, and I delete it while I’m reading it and go ‘oh my gosh!’ Undelete it!"
Tanya has worked closely with Beyoncé and the Adidas team designing the Adidas x Ivy Park: Ivytopia collection and designing approximately 60 percent of the Adidas x Ivy Park: Park Trail collection.
Citing the above outfit as her favourite design, Tanya explains how involved Beyoncé is in the whole process, especially when putting together looks for her Renaissance Tour.
“So, she’s very involved in everything. She wants to approve every seam, every fabric, everything. So, really the big vision comes from her, it’s her mind and her team. She has a team, Parkwood Entertainment, that kind of help her curate those things but she is the vision. And then we translate that from her overall creative direction, and we’ll start with concept, with ideation.
“A lot of what has been seen in the last year has been inspired by what at the time was the ideation for the Renaissance Tour. So, if you look at the Ivy Park pieces and what the visuals and the graphics of what the tour have been, they do run in parallel, which is why she wore a lot of the stuff on stage. At least versions of it or interpretations of it.”
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Running on the Break My Soul hitmaker's intensely busy schedule, Tanya reveals that the deadlines for designing the collections can range from a few days to a few weeks.
“Then we will present sketches to her, and she gives feedback, and then we present sketches, and she gives feedback and she’ll share imagery, she’ll share samples, get things from personal archives; from her, from her husband’s personal archive and it’s very collaborative and it really is taking somebody’s vision and bringing it to life in the most honourable way.”
Fashion has been a mode of expression through time.
Tanya explains that her favourite thing about it is, “That there’s no rules, I guess. That you can reinvent yourself. You can wake up and put something on and it can transform your mood and your attitude, and it can give you confidence and you can fake it 'til you make it! Clothes allow you to do something quite incredible.”
Tanya and her husband, creative and skateboarder Felix Arguelles, have since created their own children’s clothing line titled Tribe of Lion, named after their young son.
“We wanted to create something that was accessible in terms of price point. So, our pricing is the same as if you’re shopping at H&M Kids or Zara Kids, that kind of thing, which is difficult to do as a small business. But it was important for me, the mom – because the moms are the ones shopping, that are going to H&M or Zara to buy their kids clothes – care about what their kids are wearing.”
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“And so, we wanted to access those same people but offer something different. So, the whole idea is that everything is neutral in every way. Colour neutral, gender neutral, oversized. Designed so that you can wear it through multiple growth spurts and that you can hand down to younger children,” Tanya explains.
Tanya credits her inspiration and taking the Adidas job to her husband, someone who is a creative himself and actively encourages her to live to her full potential.
"He believes in me more than I believe in myself, 100 percent, and so I'm grateful to be partnered with somebody that can pull things out of me that I don't even know that is possible. I probably wouldn't have taken the job or been able to work with Beyoncé had I not been married to who I was married to ... And so I'm inspired by him, highly. He's very creative, he's spent his life making a living out of being creative. So, from skateboarding to marketing to clothing brands that he launched that have influenced culture."
With that Tanya leaves young creatives with a few words of encouragement: “Take risks. Do something that you’ve never seen done before. And it’s okay to duplicate, right. But if you are duplicating and recreating, find the best person that’s doing what you want to do and do exactly what they’re doing, as well as you can.
“If you’re going to follow someone, follow the best. Because then in that, we imitate people – and you can say imitation is the greatest form of flattery – but we imitate as we’re trying to figure out who we are, right? And then once you’ve figured out who you are, then you do something that you’ve never seen before. That’s never been done before.”
