When Victor Dlamini walks into a room everyone notices his shirt. Unusually it’s the men in the room who'll be casting admiring glances at his attire - always a fitted shirt, custom-made, and using just the right amount of gloriously patterned Batik wax-printed fabric sourced from West Africa, to attract the eye. The flashes of colour are stitched into the design, sometimes with added embroidery.

Over years of travel Dlamini has become an obsessive collector of fabrics - and many other beautiful objects - from typewriters that speak of a golden age of writing to art and sculpture, and an extensive jazz vinyl collection that prompted him to design a display cabinet so Miles Davis was always within easy reach. The jazz records are played with intensity in the early hours of the morning to rouse his Killarney neighbours, from the same apartment where bolts of brightly patterned cloth fill the rooms.

“There’s something odd in Joburg when it comes to matters sartorial," he says. "Here we slavishly follow Europe and while I love what is produced, I noticed when travelling in West Africa that friends will rock Brioni and McQueen but also wear traditional fabrics. Coming back to Joburg I thought there had to be a way of negotiating with the aesthetics at our disposal to create clothes we can wear every day, so that African prints are not consigned to tradition or spectacle, but taken seriously as part of our everyday identity.”

Once he found the tailor who could stitch his vision to life, wearing the shirts became habit, and people started to take notice. From deeply exuberant to restrained fitted shirts, Dlamini’s creations are being worn in boardrooms and on world stages. As in every other area in his life, Dlamini, a powerful presence says he wants “total autonomy” in the process. When you order a shirt you are merely requesting a delivery date. “I didn’t want to be a tailor, I want to be a designer”

When he first purchased fabrics he didn’t start out with the idea of a shirt business. A few years ago while in Dakar for a Festival he was struck by how decidedly different Senegal was to South Africa. “I was there for a month, I looked at how people dressed and started buying fabrics. I just stored them. One day I woke up and realised I had 40 fabrics and thought I better do something. I started creating conventional shirts and over time began to refine the design. It only became a commercial venture after I noticed how people would comment on them. I kept getting asked: "Where can I get this?" It took me making them for myself to see the opportunity."

So far, all by word of mouth, and with no shop-front or online store, Dlamini’s shirts have graced the stage of Ted Global in Rio, been sported at Cannes and in New York boardrooms.

He says "It was a wonderful coincidence of what I wanted and what a lot of people wanted. In that time there has been a global realignment of what people want to wear, a very serious re-negotiation. You see the inspiration in the artwork of Yinka Shonibare, in Oswald Boateng’s work. There’s a clear sense of this African aesthetic moving from the side street to the main street. We are all global nomads. We mix it up. We appropriate. We borrow. What makes forms beautiful is the extent to which they borrow and appropriate. If things stood still it would all be boring.”

Shirts start from R1200. Contact Victor at Victor@victordlamini.com