Back in 2020, during the heart of lockdown, Nonhlanhla Ndlovu came up with a plan: she was going to teach herself how to crochet.
At the time, Ndlovu was studying nature conservation in Cape Town and struggling with the anxiety that came with COVID and suddenly having her normal life reduced to the confines of lockdown. “I started researching ways to deal with my anxiety,” she remembers. “I went to my local wool store, bought wool and Googled how to crochet on YouTube. It was initially just to cope with my anxiety.”
There was no grand fashion ambition attached to it yet. Ndlovu liked crochet clothing and, more importantly, could not find anyone around her making the kinds of pieces she wanted, so she began figuring it out herself. The first results were rough.
“I had to use my friends to wear these distorted crochet bikinis,” she says, laughing at the memory. “It took me months just to make the first bikini collection. I had to learn sizing, different stitches, what works with water, different body sizes. Once I could ace the bikini, I took it to a new item, then a new item.” Somewhere along the way, the thing she had started to quiet her mind became the thing occupying most of it. “I was crocheting in lecture halls. I was crocheting in the morning. I was crocheting on the shuttle to campus. I was getting obsessed.”
The shift from obsession to business came in an unexpected way. A man living in her building approached her about investing in what she was making, but wanted the business registered in his own name. Ndlovu was suspicious enough to speak to her father, who gave her much simpler advice: register it herself. “That prompted me to be like, no man, there’s something here,” she says. “If someone else can see potential and think they can make something out of this, then maybe I should actually do it myself.” Crochet Couture ZA began to look less like something Ndlovu did between lectures and more like something she could build around herself.
The first moment that proved the idea could travel arrived through Uncle Waffles. Ndlovu remembers discovering that a piece she had made for the DJ was being worn around the Coachella moment while she herself was travelling to Cape Town for graduation. Someone sent her the image with a message: “Hey girl, is this you?” She had not understood the scale of what the piece was being used for beforehand.
“And then from there, everything went crazy,” she says. “That’s when I started to gain global recognition because I started getting international orders immediately after that. It was my birthday and my graduation. That was the best week of my life.”
What happened next is central to how Ndlovu understands her place in South African fashion. Crochet began appearing more visibly around female DJs, festival stages and amapiano’s increasingly expressive fashion language. Ndlovu believes her work helped open that door. “I feel like I put female DJs and crochet clothing into the same sentence,” she says. Soon she also began seeing versions of ideas she recognised appearing elsewhere. “Initially, I used to feel a certain way when I saw people copy stuff. But then I realised, when people see a piece, even if it’s not made by me, someone will come and ask me, ‘Hey, is this you?’ The fact that somebody thinks it’s me first lets me know that I’ve already paved the way.”
There was also the less glamorous education of turning craft into a functioning business. In the beginning, Ndlovu accepted unpaid work because of the familiar promise of exposure. Eventually, the maths stopped making sense. “Exposure doesn’t really pay,” she says. “Crocheting can’t be replicated by machine. Everything is done by hand.”
She assembled a team around 2022 and 2023, learned how to navigate contracts and intellectual property within a craft where patterns can be difficult to protect, and later completed a business management certificate. “I may know more about crocheting and wool, but I might not know things from a business point of view,” she says. “You don’t have to know 100 percent, but you need to know what’s happening.”
Her interest in styling developed with similar patience. Instead of deciding that making clothes automatically made her a stylist, Ndlovu spent months turning up on sets to assist other people, asking questions, watching how mood boards became looks and how clothing could help tell the story of a song or artist. Sometimes she paid her own way simply to be present. “I didn’t necessarily wake up and say, I’m going to put stylist in my bio,” she says. “I took time. I was following people around on music videos and sets, using my own money to get myself there just to see how everything works.” Her portfolio today extends into wardrobe, music video styling and creative direction alongside the crochet work that introduced her.
But it is crochet’s resistance to speed that Ndlovu keeps returning to. Fashion has only accelerated since she began Crochet Couture ZA, while the method she works in remains stubbornly dependent on human hands. True crochet still cannot be mass-produced by conventional textile machinery in the way machine knitting can. “Not everything needs to be rushed,” she says. “The fact that there is no machine in 2026 that can replicate a crochet stitch properly tells you everything you need to know. You don’t make an outfit in an hour. It can take one week, two weeks. You can spend 40 hours completing a piece. I feel like that’s the luxury in it.”
That relationship with slowness also connects neatly back to the nature conservation student she was when all of this began. Ndlovu says the wool she works with is sourced locally, and she talks excitedly about South Africa’s wool economy and what might happen if more of that raw material becomes finished South African design. South Africa has a long-established Merino industry producing high-quality apparel wool for global markets, something Ndlovu sees as an opportunity rather than simply background to her work. “That’s the amazing part for me about being a crocheter in South Africa,” she says. “All the wool that I use is made here.”
Now she wants crochet to leave the wardrobe entirely. With support from one of her wool suppliers, Ndlovu is working on a two-seater crochet couch, a prototype that she expects will take months to finish. The idea grew out of asking herself what happens when crochet becomes oversaturated as clothing and where the skill can go next. “I’m always trying to be one step ahead,” she says. A conversation with artist Samurai Farai also shifted her thinking towards objects as collectibles. “I looked at what he has done with his paintings and thought, why can’t I do that with crochet? Furniture can be a collectible too.”
The longer-term ambition is even broader. Ndlovu has already been approached about teaching crochet at university level, an experience that made her think seriously about education, wool, sustainability and becoming something closer to a specialist in the field than simply a designer associated with one aesthetic moment. “I want to go back to the root,” she says. “I want to educate people about wool and tap into the economy around it. My degree in nature conservation has always been the basis of my work. I’m very environmentally conscious. I’m a green girl.”
Five years after opening YouTube because she needed something to do with her hands, Ndlovu is no longer asking whether crochet can become a career. She is asking how far one craft can stretch before it becomes something else entirely.
And, crucially, she is in no hurry to find out.
