Edda Gimnes floors the front row at SA Fashion Week

From the moment the first outfit appeared on the runway for the Edda Gimnes show at South African Fashion Week, the front row sat upright. Phones were pulled out as Instagram went into overdrive and Google fired up.

Who was the designer behind this deceptively simple collection?

Gimnes, from Oslo, Norway, won the 2016 Designer For Tomorrow competition and was invited to show at the fashion extravaganza in South Africa after agent Annette Pringle-Kölsch saw her collection in Berlin.

"I loved the two-dimensional effect," says Pringle-Kölsch. "Her collection is unique. I thought it would be interesting for South African designers to have access to this creativity and to hear her story."

Gimnes studied womenswear at the London College of Fashion, but she struggled with pattern cutting and by her own admission was not top of the class. It wasn't until she met technician Manuel Vadillo that her fashion intuition flourished.

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"I took my weakness and made it a strength," she says. "Playing on the naivety of my designs and really working with the two-dimensional shapes."

The result, for her inaugural collection, was a selection of simple silhouettes reminiscent of cut-out doll clothes, all scrawled with childlike patterns and outlines. Her second collection saw shots of colour and embroidery, and now she's working on her third collection which she'll show in Berlin in July.

"I feel like my graduate collection was just to put my creativity out there," the designer explains. "My second collection was about making it more wearable but still keeping the energy, and this third collection is exploring different fabrications but still keeping it fresh and real."

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Last year she won the BFT/Saga Fur Design Competition for creating a long gilet out of mink. "When I started to work with fur I wanted the drawings to be incorporated into the craftsmanship in a fun and innovative way," she says.

"Therefore all my illustrations are cut out in black sheared and long-haired mink and thereafter inserted into white sheared mink using the [inlaying] technique called intarsia."

That fur competition, she says, really opened doors for her. The New York Times named her one of 10 Fresh Out of Fashion School designers to watch.

The Designer For Tomorrow competition pairs winners with industry leaders. Each year the jury is run by a patron.

In previous years Stella McCartney and Zac Posen have been patrons and last year Alber Elbaz was in the chair, lending not only his insight to the judging process but giving his time and advice to the winner.

Gimnes got to meet Elbaz in Paris. "He had planned the day with what he wanted to show me," she explains. "He wasn't this big dramatic designer, he was really friendly and genuine."

• This article was originally published in The Times.