As a tool, fashion is reflective of the conditions of society and its citizens. Dress is politicized within the contexts it appears in. Mazzarella and Black’s (2023) Fashioning Change, sees fashion as a tool in the preservation of culture and identity. This Masters study investigated the principles of fashion and Design activism amongst South African designer-activists and students. The study explored the principles that make fashion (dress) a vehicle in South African politics and social contexts. In gaining in-depth knowledge on how designer-activists approach fashion as a tool, themes of design legacy and decoloniality in fashion knowledge and history were brought up. The study’s approach to ‘Artivism’ is one that questions the silencing of South African fashion legacies. In understanding how we define fashion activism, there is a disconnect between how South African audiences may engage with local fashion activism and international practices of fashion activism. There is an overexposure to Euro-Western ideas of fashion, fashion history and activism, while simultaneously silencing the already fading histories of fashion and activism in South Africa. It assumes South Africa as supposedly devoid of a fashion history. For example, the activist presentations of Danyism are known to most yet not many know of the South African interpretation of the Dandy - In the 1880s, Kimberley, as Black and White individuals engaged in tense social, political and economic relationships on the mines through dress systems. There is an underexposure of local cases of the use of sartoriality in the rehumanizing and preservation of the South African body in moments of resistance. The study revealed a need to interrogate South African history in a search for local legacies where sartoriality was witness and agent within the spaces of social justice. Moreso to preserve a South African identity and accounts of fashion activism.