Fashion Week is about to hit in New York and we here on the islands amidst the festivities of Carnival will be following the brands that lead the world.
In our own industry, as local-born designers, we are seeking to find ourselves amidst the cycles of international markets. You must wonder, however: can the Caribbean, or T&T in particular, make a case for our own fashion season?
We are still at the whims of the major markets, and editors, buyers, forecasters, stylists, consumers are all at a loss as to when would be a great time to come here to capture it all at once. For an undiscovered region when it comes to the major fashion cycles we don't have that one tent pole time period with which to attract the wider fashion community to our shores to see what we have to offer. A focused period for the presentation of our designers' clothing is missing.
There is obviously Jamaica's Caribbean Fashion Week (CFW) in June. Trinidad Fashion week died in 2010 because of lack of community unity; in some ways it has found second life in Tobago Fashion Weekend (TFW), which usually happens around May.
There is Dominicana Moda held in Oscar de La Renta's home ground, Dominica, which has attracted stars like Jean Paul Gaultier. There are a number of other satellite shows and while they could be listed here I'll just get to the point.
Knowing these shows exist is interesting but just highlights again that for a small region there are a lot of shows and none of these is emerging as the definitive one that sets the region's season going.
Trinidad's Carnival season seems ripe to become a period within which we can wrestle some space in the international scene for attention and focus. Riding that mega wave from Christmas all the way into the pre-Lenten period makes for an interesting concoction of island creativity and festivity mixed with the pre-season and holiday collections of international brands–by way of timing–and our built-in nature to be ready to be a player in the holiday/resort markets.
Should we then focus on one season before Carnival or are we looking at the development of two–or even three?
There is the Carnival period already mentioned, November (which I will get into a bit more shortly) and then the previously mentioned May/June season which usually hosts CFW in Jamaica and TFW.
Recently T&T has been making a case for a block of creative events from September to October with the T&T Film Festival, followed shortly by Animae Caribe, and November seems like a time when a number of designers have been previewing, showing and or selling in a slowly developing but lucrative pre-Christmas season–in markets, pop-up shops and full on collections.
Last year three designers from T&T showed during New York Fashion Week in September and word is that we are due to see some of them showing again during this fall season with Adrian Foster going to London instead of New York. The question is what could come from an even more defined season and a permanent address as a fixture on the calendar. This will require a lot of co-ordination and communication from press to presser to get things going.
The interesting thing, though, is that we have our own template and machine that can be borrowed to drive this seemingly gargantuan effort: T&T's very own Carnival season. If we can handle Carnival, do we have what it takes to wrestle a focused fashion season?