"I think that every­body should be able to have the Car­ni­val that they want. That’s what I want for Car­ni­val, for all of us."—El­isha Bar­tels

One of the biggest crit­i­cisms of the mod­ern T&T Car­ni­val has been the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the biki­ni and beads type of mas. It has been called vul­gar, unimag­i­na­tive, and a sure sign of the degra­da­tion of the na­tion­al fes­ti­val.

But there has been sig­nif­i­cant push­back on that nar­ra­tive from the de­sign­ers and the mas­quer­aders who sup­port them. They say a change has come, and sex­i­er cos­tumes will lead the way.

For the lovers of the ear­li­er days of mas, when Bai­ley and Berke­ley ruled the roost, there may be very lit­tle in the cat­a­logues of Harts, Tribe and Yu­ma to in­spire their de­vo­tion. Pe­ter Min­shall’s car­ni­val pre­sen­ta­tions have al­ways been hailed for the bril­liant way they en­com­pass de­sign, mean­ing, and mes­sag­ing. His abil­i­ty to cre­ate rivers in town is un­matched.

Min­shall’s name is of­ten called up­on as the stan­dard to which the mod­ern Car­ni­val band can not hope to reach. Usu­al­ly as a crit­i­cism of their lack of cloth, and his skil­ful use of yards of fab­ric. But true Min­shal­lites know that he dab­bled in nu­di­ty be­fore. Most telling­ly for his band Pa­pil­lon. His Queen, "Fly, Fly Sweet Life," was ful­ly dressed in a body­suit that fea­tured paint­ed nip­ples and pu­bic hair to sim­u­late nu­di­ty. It caused a stir.

De­sign­er for Yu­ma, Keisha Col­lette would like to chal­lenge the no­tion that her de­signs are lazy and lack cre­ative thought. She works with her seam­stress very close­ly on the place­ment of every­thing on her cos­tumes.

She ac­knowl­edges that her de­sign­ers are sexy. "We could want to be sexy," she says with an imp­ish grin. "We want to play mas. We want to have a good time. We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want all our things out, but we want to be sexy!"

But Col­lette doesn’t con­sid­er them skimpy. "It’s not a bad word, it’s just not my style," she says.

"My mas­quer­aders, for the most part, will find that I pro­vide a cos­tume that is sexy but is not skimpy. But then an old­er, more ma­ture per­son might say, that is skimpy." What about nu­di­ty? El­isha Bar­tels plays J'Ou­vert with 3 Canal. Re­cent­ly she has evolved in­to com­plete top­less­ness, save for paint, and her long dread­locks.

"I had been say­ing for years that I should re­al­ly just play J'Ou­vert as naked as pos­si­ble be­cause that is me.

"J'Ou­vert is re­al­ly about re­birth," Bar­tels ex­plains.

"For me, that is why I play J'Ou­vert the way I do, be­cause it is about me com­ing back to my­self, and re­set­ting my­self and re­con­nect­ing with my­self, so I want to be com­plete­ly my­self. En­tire­ly my­self. That is the mas I play for J'Ou­vert, I play the mas of me."

What does not oc­cu­py her time while she is on the road are those who are shocked by her nu­di­ty. As Bar­tels says it, if you come to J'Ou­vert to be shocked rather than ex­pe­ri­ence the mag­ic of the fes­ti­val, then you are wel­come.

This year lovers of naked mas will have a song that un­der­stands their joy per­fect­ly. In the bridge to his 2020 hit Gamal Doyle, bet­ter known as Skin­ny Fab­u­lous, sings, "I want to get naked, naked, and jam on some­body!"

Doyle says when he en­tered the stu­dio he had the hook, "Oh, the place, it hot!" It was record­ed on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year. But in record­ing and re-writ­ing, the joy of play­ing mas nude, or near­ly nude, en­tered the lyrics.

Doyle is al­so a band­leader of Oxy­gen Mas in St Vin­cent. He says as a band­leader he ap­pre­ci­ates the re­spons­es his con­sumers have had to their de­signs. "We know there is a cer­tain part of so­ci­ety that re­al­ly would re­pel the idea of get­ting more and more naked, and so it didn’t both­er us." Be­cause those peo­ple are not his tar­get au­di­ence.

The de­sign­ers of Doyle’s band are Trinida­di­an. "In 2020, I think, more and more there’s no way, at least at face val­ue, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate a Trinida­di­an cos­tume ver­sus a Ba­jan cos­tume ver­sus a Ja­maican cos­tume be­cause we’re all sewing from the same fab­ric," he says.

Col­lette, her­self, has just re­leased a cos­tume de­signed for a band that is based in St Lu­cia. She has de­signed for Car­ni­val bands all over the re­gion.

This may val­i­date the crit­ics of the mod­ern Car­ni­val cos­tumes. The ones who say, the prob­lem they have isn’t the nu­di­ty, but the fact that there is lit­tle one can do to make the cos­tumes look dif­fer­ent from each oth­er. If in every sec­tion there are swim­suits adorned with beads and feath­ers, then it’s on­ly its colour that can dif­fer­en­ti­ate one cos­tume from an­oth­er.

But if the peo­ple who play mas and are pay­ing for their cos­tumes are hap­py with the cur­rent state of un­dress, the sit­u­a­tion will re­main.