“Is there really fashion in Jamaica?” This was a question that I was often asked when I began my PhD research on Jamaican fashion and textiles in 2014. Sometimes it came from a colleague, sometimes it came from academics I did not know at conferences. I often wondered why people assumed that there was no fashion in Jamaica. Was it because, fashion is intimately tied to ideas of modernity and has always been presumed to belong elsewhere – in Europe and not the Caribbean? Yet, as Walter Mignolo argues modernity could not exist without coloniality. While colonised peoples like those in the Caribbean have been positioned as a people without history (whose perspectives do not count), modernity itself could not exist without the structures of colonial domination that shaped it.
Or was it, as one speaker once claimed during an international symposium in London, because Jamaica in the 1950s was so severely underdeveloped, evidenced (she claimed) by the absence of factories? In her view, this was the reason why Caribbean migrants moved to the UK. Her claim implied that the island lacked the infrastructure and therefore capacity to engage with mass-fashion production. Yet archive records showed numerous factories on the island; such as Ariguanabo Textile Mill and Jamaica Woollens, operating across the island and producing a wide range of products. After all, the drive to industrialise in the so-called developing world was, as Murray D. Bryce once wrote, ‘one of the great world crusades of our time‘. In response to this need Jamaica established the Jamaica Industrial Development Corporation (JIDC) in 1952. Their role was the expansion and industrialisation of industries on the island, as well as introducing a number of incentives such as of the Pioneer Industry Laws, duty-free imports of raw materials and machinery and generous depreciation allowances and provides for tax-free dividends. While Jamaica was certainly grappling with the effects of colonial underdevelopment and the decline of agricultural industries that had enriched Britain for hundreds of years, it was far from the non-industrialised economy the speaker had described.
I knew that neither of these assumptions were true. My father told me stories about both Ariguanabo Textile mill and the shirts of Tower Isle. He told me growing up about the importance of dressing up, of wearing the right outfit for the right occasions, and the importance of protecting your special and everyday clothing with yaad clothes. In many Jamaican households, yaad clothes were garments reserved for wearing at home, clothes you changed into as soon as you got in. Often worn-out or garments that had outlived their original purpose, kept for domestic tasks or relaxing, these were clothes that you did not mind getting dirty. Their purpose was to protect your everyday and special occasion clothes. I knew, from the photographs that my father had taken and preserved, of sharply dressed men in bespoke suits and women in dresses that they had sewn themselves, posing with pride on Kingston’s streets or in the beautiful surroundings of Hope Gardens (Jamaica’s botanic garden in Kingston). The above photograph is an image of my father and his younger sister Theresa posing in the garden of their family home. As Marsha Pearce has compellingly asserted, the “practice of getting dressed and attending to the body matters in a region where a colonial past is characterised by its ill-treatment of black bodies”.
What I have learned from the Jamaicans I have spoken to for my research, is that fashion, in the Jamaican context, was understood differently. It was not about the constant change, a chasing of the latest trends, which has traditionally excluded them from understandings of fashion. It was about standing out and standing apart, rooted in an awareness of global and local styles an understanding of fashion which is shaped by place, history and cultural experience. While fashion scholars might have seen them as unfashionable or outside of fashion, this was certainly not how they saw themselves.
At the same time, the idea that Jamaica did not have fashion is a difficult one to challenge. While Jamaica has long been known for its exports like reggae, athletics and tourism, it remains profoundly underrepresented in both global fashion history and design archives. One of the key areas of focus in my research was the Jamaica Fashion Guild Ltd (JFG), an organisation central to Jamaica’s ambition of becoming the first Caribbean fashion capital post-independence (1962). The organisation launched in 1966 with the aim of designing, producing and marketing Jamaican fashion. The idea of the Guild has been attributed to the then Minister of Tourism, John Pringle, who saw the potential of fashion to help reverse the decline of the island’s tourist industry which saw the organisation immediately tied to tourism.
Made up of a diverse range of designers across the island the organisation quickly gained traction in North America with designers showcasing their designs across the continent as well as selling their designs in large department stories like Bergdorf Goodman in New York and T.J. Eaton’s in Toronto, as well as selling their designs in smaller boutique stores. Despite the Guild’s historical significance, I was unable to find any textiles or garments in archives that directly connected to the organisation. The closest I came was a suit worn by a former Jamaican Prime Minister, Michael Manley, designed by Ivy Ralph, a member of the JFG, part of the Institute of Jamaica’s, Kingston, textile collection. This lack of material objects has presented a major obstacle in tracing the fashion history of Jamaica. It is also perhaps this lack of material evidence that has also led people to assume that Jamaica did not have fashion.
In response to this gap, I began collecting garments made by or associated with the JFG. Over time, I expanded my collecting to include textiles and clothing from across the Caribbean, reflecting a broader regional absence within design history narratives. My collection now serves not only as a personal archive but also as a research tool to support documentation and analysis of Jamaican fashion. It contains a range of objects, including textiles and garments that were designed and made in the Caribbean, and a collection of photographs that belonged to my father and document his community in Kingston, Jamaica between 1948 to about 1965. The garments have come to me in a number of ways. For instance, my father’s bespoke suit was something I took from his wardrobe after he passed away. I also have two garments donated by Hope Bolden, a Jamaican woman living in Atlanta, Georgia whom I interviewed for my PhD research. Many others, however, I purchased from online vintage clothing websites after hours of trawling through images of garments. This is a process that is often complicated by sellers using the terms ‘Jamaica’ or Jamaican’ to drive traffic to their websites, regardless of the garment’s actual origin. In addition, the garments are often being expensive because they are recognised by sellers as rare and priced accordingly, even though they have no actual knowledge of the designers or makers. My collection is by no means complete, but it does contain a significant number of garments produced by the JFG and its members.
One of my favourite garments in my collection is a matching culotte and crop wrap-over top designed by the designer Daphne Logan. I have been unable to uncover very little about Logan, aside from a number of newspaper articles published in both Jamaica and North America, which highlight her designs and how they were received by fashion reporters and consumers. In a newspaper article, ‘Jamaican fashion on the move’ published in 1965, a year before the launch of the Guild, the Sunday Gleaner reported on a party held in the apartment of Andrew Goodman of Bergdorf Goodman stores, where many of Logan’s designs were sold. The reporter noted that America buyers had been so impressed with Logan’s initial offering she had received reorders. Most popular were her ‘play-clothes pant sets decorated with Job’s tears, cut-work embroidered play-clothes and outfits with a distinctively Jamaican flavour which of course, is something fresh for the American market’.
What drew me to the garment was not only its bold use of colour, but also the motifs that Logan incorporates into the design. Symbols that have come to represent Jamaica’s independence such as the doctor bird, Jamaica’s national bird, the Lignum Vitae (Guaiacum officinale) the national flower and the Blue Mahoe (Hibiscus elatus), a tree species indigenous to the island. The fabric seamlessly weaves these emblems of national pride with elements typically associated with tropical environments, such as ferns and Monstera deliciosa leaves.
The fabric is machine printed, but there are no indications on the fabric who designed it or which company printed it. There were a number of textile companies operating on the island, such as Stona Warner, Textiles of Jamaica and Jaytex Print Works, all of whom might have provided fabrics for the Guild. Notably, Jaytex Print Works was also responsible for printing the island’s first official independence textile in 1962, a design which was reimagined annually for several years. Sadly, I have been unable to find any physical examples of the independence textiles that were produced. There are still several questions I have been unable to answer at this stage, such as how long the textile was in production and who designed them. The closest I have come to the textile is a photograph of the 1963 version, which my father had and often used as a backdrop for his photography at home.
This fabric can tell us much about how Jamaican designers were imagining ideas of Jamaica and Jamaicanness in the post-independence period. As Stuart Hall observes a nation in pursuit of its identity must navigate complex challenges to construct a narrative – a story that can tell them who they are and where they came from. In this context a textile might become more than a fabric, but the medium through which identity is negotiated and performed. Patricia Mohammed argues the fabric also represents a decolonial engagement with design. Symbols like coats of arms, crests, flags, and other tapping are taken for granted as symbols in the political life of new Caribbean states, becoming dominant markers of nationhood. While Logan’s motivations are unclear to me, what makes the fabric compelling is the way it attempts to reclaim and reinterpret these symbols through the language of fashion and textile design.
In the absence of garments like this in formal archives, they become critical tools through which we can tell stories that have been overlooked or dismissed. They challenge the persistent question I faced throughout my research: Is there really fashion in Jamaica? This garment and others in my personal archive, remind us that fashion has always been a part of Jamaica’s cultural and political landscape. While my personal collection began out of necessity, it has now become an archive of resistance, one that challenges dominant narratives and demands that Caribbean design history matters.