Spring Queen

Once a year, Cape Town’s Spring Queen Pageant gives the city’s clothing and textile factory workers the chance to be ‘Cinderella for a Night’. After a rigorous competition to select their own candidate, each factory’s Queen prepares to battle it out at the Good Hope Centre where, instead of being hidden behind machines making clothes for other people, the stage is finally theirs. But as the South African market is flooded with cheap imports, forcing many factories to close their doors, the pageant hopefuls may find they no longer have jobs to return to. With this imminent threat, the contest takes on a new urgency: The new Queen must accept not just the crown, but the responsibility of representing her Union in an uncertain future.