Designers identified many challenges to a T&T fashion industry, but said that with enabling support from Government, the sector can revive and truly grow.
Main challenges they mentioned included: competition from foreign products, difficulty in accessing raw materials, a pressing need for local manufacturing hubs, and a need for better business management among individual practitioners.
Sourcing reliable skilled labour is also a problem, some said, as well as a need for more shopfronts to sell local fashions.
Small local market
Economics informs design, said Robert Young, owner and designer for The Cloth fashion business. Young was making the point that no matter how creative the idea, a fashion product must be shaped by what raw materials are available, the size of the market, how you will make it, and the skills of available workers.
He spoke of the small size of the local market for locally made Caribbean-styled clothing:
"A small percentage of the 'middle class' in T&T buys from local designers. It's a market size problem. ...And I have to design for different body types. If I am making clothes, should I hang a size 2 and 4 and 6 and 8 and 10 and 12 and 14 and 18? ....So, I might instead design a set of looser fitting clothes, to accommodate different body types."
Many small scale cottage industries find it difficult to stay afloat, turn a decent profit, and expand, hampered by the small local market as well as production, financing and other issues. So this means that many remain subsistence industries. "Yes, 30 years on, and it's still a start-up," said Robert Young of his own business The Cloth.
The challenge, then, is to expand markets.
Chinese competition
Dianne Hunt, former co-owner and designer of the successful local retail chain Radical, said Radical's business was good in its first ten years; but by its second decade, when it expanded perhaps a bit too quickly, it soon faced issues of an unproductive labour force, competition from China, and management challenges, which led to a decision to shrink the business in 2008. By 2010-11, she'd decided to get out entirely.
The might of Chinese and other foreign competition is the biggest challenge today, said Hunt. But this does not mean we should not even try to compete: we just have to be more strategic about how we do this, she said. If China churns out cheap mass products, perhaps we should focus on unique, creative, well-made products: "You could come up with something innovative that the rest of the world will want."
On the issue of labour, Hunt noted that the current stock of skilled garment stitchers is an aged labour force. And of the younger workers, many are either not receiving the training needed to produce with competence, or are "complacent and lazy." Young, while agreeing that training programmes needed to include producers, not just designers, disagreed with the poor work ethic: he maintained workers were not lazy, just unmotivated to be exploited as cheap labour, with no stake or ownership in businesses.
Create a fashion district
Hunt suggested the creation of a fashion district in T&T, to help with manufacturing, promotions and sales.
"The government has a lot of warehouse shells all over the country. They could designate a fashion zone or hub, with a few warehouses," she suggested. "One could just be stitching and machines. Even jeans production is a huge business–South America produces jeans for all over the world. So you could have different types of manufacturing, and finishing. Finishing is a whole subsector by itself.
"Then you could also have showrooms, where buyers could look at designers' collections; boutiques could go there to order. And you could send invitations to boutiques all over the Caribbean, to have them visit and show here."
The drug of creativity: Training needs
Sometimes, a designer just cannot do it all: design, produce, identify markets, sell, do the accounts, and manage staff; as well as create his or her own job, if none exists in the market. Dianne Hunt made a strong case for better business training of fashion sector workers, and the development of partnerships between creatives and business managers:
"Trinidad has a huge creative resource, and nobody wants to tap into anything else," she commented.
"Creativity is like a kind of a drug, where you could get totally lost in it. Nobody's saying you shouldn't be creative; of course, be creative. If you are happy to settle with just making a couple little things to express yourself, that's fine. But if you are really ambitious, and you want to create an international brand, you then have to look at things with a different eye. You can't be in a room, just designing clothes, and just loving the creation of the clothes, but yet you're not thinking about: How can I produce this? Who am I going to sell it to? And I think this is where most of the young designers are caught."
She said training programmes needed to focus not only on fashion design, but equally on fashion production, fashion merchandising, and retail management. Some of this is now being done at UTT.
To market, to market
Hunt believes that with today's online technology and other marketing advances, promoting local fashion is not the daunting prospect it once was. However, as the powerhouse behind one of the country's most successful, visually stimulating and popular fashion promotional events to date–T&T Fashion Week (FWTT), held in 2008, 2009 and 2010–she says the State missed an opportunity to capitalise on that success when it withdrew its funding support for the 2011 show. This happened after a change of government in 2010. There has not been a national fashion event of comparable impact, style, scale and inclusive appeal since then, she said.
She's not being boastful: other designers agreed that FWTT was a shot in the arm of a struggling fashion sector, and could have been continued and used to catalyse a number of other initiatives.
Said Robert Young: "Fashion Week T&T was an important showcasing event for young designers, as well as older ones. People who hadn't shown in ten, 15 years were able to find a home. Anya Ayoung-Chee would not have been seen the way she was seen, without that. There are other people whose businesses grew, and whose ability to create collections grew, from the show, for instance Christian Boucaud: her ability to develop collections shifted, and visibility happened, and she now has a business running out of Woodbrook."
Young said although some good new fashion brands have emerged in the past few years since the end of FWTT–such as Noor (designer: Noorulain Agha), CLD (designer: Charu Lochan Dass), and designers Adrian Foster and Mark Eastman–Fashion Week TT afforded a lot wider scope to the local industry, because it featured as many as 70 designers, with only five from outside of T&T.
There are, of course, other fashion events–designers eagerly plan collections for Caribbean Fashion Week in Jamaica at the beginning of June, and the Tobago Fashion Weekend (now branded as 2TFW) is this year expanding into a week of activities in May –but they don't have the immediate local impact or pizzazz that FWTT had, say observers.
Meanwhile, new ways of marketing could include targeting the Caribbean diaspora (rather than foreign big box stores), roving pop-up shops, websites with online magazines, LookBooks and online ordering, and even Robert Young's idea of mobile containers which could travel around the country, selling product locally; containers could even be sent to popular regional festivals, he suggested.
Need for a strong representative body
Several groups now represent fashion sector interests: Fashion Association of T&T (FATT); Fashion Entrepreneurs of T&T (FETT); and Fashion Industry of T&T (FITT).
Young advocates the need for a single representative body for the fashion sector. This would not preclude separate associations for subsectors–designers, producers, retail sellers, for instance. But small players must make alliances to succeed, and have a common representative body which helps to regulate, represent and negotiate for the sector, he said. There's a need for sharing of expertise and information: a single, strong fashion business association would help, he said.
"It should be a home for designers and producers, for self-development, for communication, sharing, for breaking separation, for breaking class divisions, race divisions, space divisions, knowledge. For mentoring, for building alliances, making collaborations, for finding other designers in other parts of the world, for sourcing interesting raw materials to try to experiment, to innovate. People think innovation has to be something that comes from somewhere else. There are innovations under our nose that we don't see."
FASHION SECTOR WISHLIST
�2 A clear State policy on fashion, and transparent criteria and procedures, especially for submission and assessment of project proposals for funding.
�2 The right mix of training, mentorship, and collaboration, to produce relevant local labour, business and creative skills to industry standards.
�2 An inclusive, dynamic T&T Fashion Week to showcase the fashion sector.
�2 Local manufacturing hubs, including models for worker-owned cooperatives.
�2 Collective spaces and avenues for sales, locally and abroad. This includes local retail stores, online sales, links to diaspora businesses, as well as new ideas such as mobile, revolving containers that could move about the country or to different islands, to regional events such as the St Lucia Jazz Festival or Jamaica Sunfest, showcasing T&T fashion products.
�2 Concessions and incentives for local fashion businesses.