Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

You can't talk Caribbean fash­ion with­out men­tion­ing the name So­nia Noel. Noel is one of the most pro­lif­ic de­sign­ers in the re­gion and un­doubt­ed­ly the lead­ing de­sign­er in her na­tive Guyana.

Own­er of Mariska's De­signs, Noel has been a pi­o­neer in the Guyanese fash­ion scene, stag­ing an an­nu­al Fash­ion Week­end in George­town to give ex­po­sure to lo­cal and re­gion­al de­sign­ers. She has al­so been an ac­tive par­tic­i­pant in many re­gion­al fash­ion events from Trinidad and To­ba­go to Ja­maica and as far as New York and Lon­don.

Noel's sense of en­ter­prise, de­ter­mi­na­tion and per­sis­tence has been wide­ly recog­nised as she has graced the pages of a va­ri­ety of re­gion­al mag­a­zines and even had the ho­n­our of be­ing in­vit­ed to present on Caribbean fash­ion at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.

Apart from GFW, Noel has been the of­fi­cial de­sign­er for the Bar­ba­dos Mu­sic Awards and this year pro­duced two re­al­i­ty shows for Guyana: Guyana Mod­el Search and the De­sign­ers/Styl­ist Port­fo­lio. She al­so pro­duced a pi­o­neer­ing talk show called Di­a­tribe and in 2008, was com­mis­sioned by the Guyanese gov­ern­ment to head the fash­ion com­po­nent of Car­ifes­ta X. Nev­er one to rest on her lau­rels, Noel is now work­ing on her first mag­a­zine called Makin Style, to be pub­lished in Jan­u­ary.

Al­ways one to give back to so­ci­ety, Noel has been deeply in­volved in char­i­ty ef­forts par­tic­u­lar­ly un­der her new ini­tia­tive, the So­nia Noel Foun­da­tion for the Cre­ative Arts. The mis­sion of SNF­CA is to cre­ate ac­cess for tal­ent­ed in­di­vid­u­als through the wider Caribbean.

The Foun­da­tion hopes to en­cour­age and nur­ture raw tal­ent - per­form­ing arts (dance/ dra­ma/ mu­sic), vi­su­al arts (paint­ing/ film/il­lus­tra­tion/sculp­ture/pho­tog­ra­phy), fash­ion arts (de­sign/mod­el­ling/styling), culi­nary arts and oth­er cre­ative en­er­gies.

Noel will be one of the re­gion­al de­sign­ers in Trinidad and To­ba­go this week­end for the Caribbean Plus Size Fash­ion event, the first ever plus size fash­ion show to be held in T&T.