STORY · GLOBAL
Kingston's fashion machine
Well supported
From Clarks and Kangols in the dance to Caribbean runways and global catwalks.
How Jamaican style moved from the dancehall floor to organised institutions - fashion weeks, model agencies and design contests - without losing its street authorship.
Style made on the floor
Long before there were runways, there was the dance. A pair of Clarks, a soft Kangol, the assertive batty rider of the dancehall-queen era - Jamaican fashion was authored on the street and in the session, a language of self-presentation that record lyrics then broadcast to the world.
That authorship was real cultural capital, and from the 1980s an industry set out to organise and export it without pretending to have invented it.
Building the institutions
Kingsley Cooper's Pulse - the first Caribbean entertainment company on the Jamaica Stock Exchange - launched Caribbean Fashionweek in 2001, giving regional designers a runway that drew talent from across the diaspora. It ran until 2019 and made Kingston a fashion capital for a week each year.
The dancehall floor wrote the look; the institutions learned to ship it.
Onto the world's catwalks
Deiwght Peters built Saint International into an agency that placed Afro-Caribbean models with houses from Milan to New York, while producing Style Week Jamaica at home. Designers and stylists such as Dexter Pottinger moved between street and runway, closing the loop between the dance floor that made the style and the industry that carried it out.