My 3 Caribbean fashion icons who are taking over the Industry
Caribbean fashion is making its mark on the international stage thanks to visionary designers who incorporate their heritage into their creations. Diotima, Wales Bonner, C.R.E.O.L.E… here’s my top 3!
Diotima
DIOTIMA, founded by Rachel Scott celebrates its Jamaican roots through creations that reinvent luxury, highlighting Caribbean elegance. Scott is committed to sustainability, incorporating materials like tropical wools and basket weavings, giving each piece a unique signature. Revolutionizing crochet techniques, the brand offers bold designs that balance beachy sensuality with structured sophistication. Under Rachel Scott's vision, DIOTIMA seamlessly blends traditional craftsmanship with refined tailoring, creating a captivating balance of textures and contrasts.
Wales Bonner
Grace Wales Bonner, a British designer of Jamaican heritage, transcends the boundaries of fashion with a multidisciplinary vision that merges Caribbean heritage and European influences. Since founding her eponymous brand in 2014, she has made a mark with collections featuring sculptural silhouettes, luxurious fabrics, and artisanal details, creating a captivating dialogue between tradition and modernity.
Beyond her designs, she has established herself as a true cultural curator: organizing exhibitions, including her latest, "A Time For New Dreams", publishing books (Echos of the Diaspora), and exploring music (Essence of Sound) to enrich her artistic universe.
She also collaborates with Jamaican director Jeano Edwards on the 2022 film "Horizon Blues", and regularly works with the Guadeloupean brothers Durimel on her music videos, including "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" (2023), which perfectly embodies this fusion of influences.
Her collaborations with Adidas, like her cinematic projects, redefine the codes of luxury and sportswear with a unique sophistication, solidifying her status as a true visionary.
C.R.E.O.L.E
C.R.E.O.L.E is a manifesto about the heritage of the "Creole" diaspora and what we could be in the future. It questions the status of the traditional male wardrobe in relation to unisex codes, through delicate techniques and workwear-inspired silhouettes. The Creole aesthetic is based on exploring expression in fashion, beyond tourism, music, or entertainment. Creole culture is the legacy of communities from colonial backgrounds that sought to rebuild themselves far from their origins. It offers a social, historical, and political perspective from an insider, de-exoticizing the narrative. C.R.E.O.L.E aims to remove the frame of exoticism in a delicate and queer way. It is an expression of identities that welcomes the world with new perspectives and renewed consciousness.
Vincent FREDERIC-COLOMBO is a French designer, born in 1990 in Paris and raised in Guadeloupe. He moved to France in 2008 after graduating from Raoul Georges Nicolo High School (Guadeloupe) in the Applied Arts section. He studied scenography, sociology, and anthropology, then completed his studies at HEAD in Geneva (Fashion Design department) in 2011/12. Based in Paris since 2012, he worked as an assistant manager at the KOKON TO ZAI store until 2017. It was alongside this experience that he began developing the CREOLE SOUL project: a manifesto of visual and fashion research created in 2013.
Subsequently, he began working on this visual project with Fanny Viguier in the summer of 2014. The project combined casting, art direction, design, and photography.
In 2017, CREOLE by CREOLE SOUL marked the first introduction of the brand through a series of photographic portraits exhibited at the Trippen store on rue Saintonge in Paris. This event became the central point of his creative process and the first presentation of what would follow: the LA CREOLE party and the C.R.E.O.L.E fashion brand for the future.
The first LA CREOLE event took place at Le Chinois in Montreuil in 2018. Years later, LA CREOLE has become an essential collective in Paris's cultural nightlife. Since 2013, the C.R.E.O.L.E concept has served as a manifesto for Vincent. His work with LA CREOLE and CREOLE SOUL has created a creative ecosystem, using multiple mediums to clearly introduce C.R.E.O.L.E. The lockdown period provided a perfect opportunity to reflect on the brand's true positioning and philosophy, leading to its official launch in the spring of 2021.
