A car­ni­val cos­tume de­signed by Lon­don-based Trinida­di­an cos­tume and set de­sign­er Clary Sa­landy fea­tures in the new British pass­port.

The UK launch­es a new pass­port every five years with up­dat­ed se­cu­ri­ty and an­ti-forgery fea­tures. The newest is fo­cused on British suc­cess in art, cul­ture, in­no­va­tion, ar­chi­tec­ture and per­for­mance over the last 500 years.

A re­lease said the cos­tume is one of the de­signs for the band An­them that cel­e­brat­ed 50 years of T&T In­de­pen­dence and won the 2012 Not­ting Hill Car­ni­val Band of the Year ti­tle.

Ma­hogany, led by Clary Sa­landy and Michael Ramdeen, has been win­ning the an­nu­al com­pe­ti­tion in­ter­rupt­ed­ly for most of the last few years and has been in ex­is­tence since 1989.

Ramdeen heads the cos­tume mak­ing side of the well-es­tab­lished Ma­hogany, while Sa­landy de­signs for the band and for the­atre.

In 2014 she was award­ed an MBE by Queen Eliz­a­beth for her ser­vices to the arts in Britain.

She is al­so Artis­tic Di­rec­tor of the UK Cen­tre for Car­ni­val Arts, es­tab­lished to pro­mote the de­vel­op­ment of the cre­ative Car­ni­val Arts in the UK.

Ac­cord­ing to the de­sign­er, "it was a half-hour pho­to shoot out­side our work­shop and we had no idea if it would be in­clud­ed."

She sees it as recog­ni­tion of the con­tri­bu­tion Car­ni­val has made to British cul­ture, "it is a tri­umph for the Caribbean com­mu­ni­ty." Ma­hogany is a year-round arts pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny de­sign­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing cos­tumes for in­ter­na­tion­al fes­ti­vals, car­ni­vals and com­pa­nies but is based in the com­mu­ni­ty and op­er­ates an ac­tive out­reach pro­gramme.

The Not­ting Hill Car­ni­val, start­ed in the once run-down part of West Lon­don by Trinida­di­an and oth­er im­mi­grants in the 1960s, has en­dured much over its 50-year his­to­ry, with sev­er­al at­tempts to shut it down, change its na­ture, move the route, rein­vent its man­age­ment and tar­nish its ap­peal by neg­a­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions in the me­dia and by heavy-hand­ed polic­ing.

How­ev­er, the event has over­come all ob­sta­cles to be­come the biggest street fes­ti­val in Eu­rope with bands from many dif­fer­ent eth­nic groups and coun­tries tak­ing part in the two-day fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ed on the pub­lic hol­i­day of Au­gust 31.

Ex­am­ples of oth­er British de­sign fea­tured in the new UK pass­port in which a wa­ter­mark of Shake­speare's im­age ap­pears on every page are the Hous­es of Par­lia­ment and the Lon­don Eye, por­traits and works from painter John Con­sta­ble, lon­gi­tude clock in­ven­tor John Har­ri­son, ar­chi­tect Giles Gilbert Scott, math­e­mati­cian Charles Bab­bage, the Stephen­son rock­et, de­signed by George and Robert Stephen­son, works of art by An­tho­ny Gorm­ley and An­ish Kapoor, and many more ex­am­ples of "pi­o­neer­ing work in the cre­ative in­dus­tries".