Designer, poet to talk on Making Style

Bahamian/Trinidadian writer Christian Campbell will have a public conversation on the topic Making Style with Robert Young, founder of The Cloth.

Campbell is a poet, essayist and scholar whose work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, UK Guardian, the Financial Times and Small Axe, among other publications. He is the 2023-24 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris, a media release said.

Campbell delivered the annual Derek Walcott Lecture for the Nobel Laureate Festival in St Lucia, and edited the forthcoming Farrar, Straus & Giroux book, The Essays of Derek Walcott 1957-2017. He has contributed to books on visual artists for major exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic and won the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries for his work on Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Young said in the release that in Trinidad and Tobago culture, the expression "making style" is "not particularly about fashion, but making style with your person, being bigger than you are, having the confidence to know that you could do more. Like, ‘You figure you’s somebody or what?’”

The talk, Young said, would “investigate the multiple dimensions of ‘making style.’”

Campbell said in the release, “In typical kaiso fashion, I was interested in playing with the pun of ‘making style.’

"Both of us, a designer and a poet, make style for a living. I am interested in the intersections between our practices. I am obsessed with style in my work – style as the body’s individual adaptation or inflection of tradition of the collective (technique),” Campbell said.

“There is a boldness in what I do and what Christian does,” said Young, who showed The Cloth’s signature Caribbean designs in September in the inaugural Tranoï Tokyo, a buyer-to-buyer fashion showcase for ready-to-wear garments and accessories. The Cloth was one of ten African and African diaspora labels participating in the trade show with the support of Afreximbank’s CANEX Presents Africa initiative. The label also showed in Tranoï Paris in September during Paris Fashion Week (SS25).

In New York, The Cloth’s garments are being exhibited in the show Africa's Fashion Diaspora at the Museum at FIT (the Fashion Institute of Technology, a college of the State University of New York). The work is also included in a book by the same title, edited by the exhibition’s curator Elizabeth Way, published by Yale University Press on September 10. It features "some of the best examples of innovative fashion […] and contextualises how diasporic designers' work can speak to contemporary issues, including decolonisation, sustainability, and social equity,” said the Yale University Press website.

Additionally, The Cloth and Young are included in Malene Barnett’s upcoming book Crafted Kinship: Inside the Creative Practices of Contemporary Black Caribbean Makers. Barnett is the founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a global platform and community of independent black artists, makers, and designers. The book is forthcoming from Artisan Books on October 29, the release said.

Young, also the bandleader and designer of the Carnival band Vulgar Fraction, said making style, to him, extends to his work in mas.

He compared his work with Campbell’s scholarship: “He watches the world and writes about it in a style of his own," and while as a Caribbean person Young says "boldly that we could dress a certain way and have opinions where possibly once we were told that we shouldn’t have. Making style is also making a mas, or making cosquelle, or making pretty, or making space.”

The event is on October 17, 6.30 pm at The Cloth’s atelier, 24 Erthig Road, Belmont.

For more info: WhatsApp The Cloth at 774-9368 or e-mail: robertyoung@thecloth.com