THE CLOTH is a Caribbean fashion label rooted in Folk, Revolution, Restoration and Integration. FOLK - the stories of the region and how we express them through design and craft;
REVOLUTION - The way that people of the Caribbean change any part of our lives that limits us;
RESTORATION - The restoring of our relationships with the natural world, our relationships with ourselves as a part of but n
ot the center of the natural world, our relationships with our economies, and our relationships with each other;
INTEGRATION - How we take the disparate aspects of our lives and pull them together to create something new. We root ourselves here, to reach for a pre-Columbian experience of this place. The label designs shapes to celebrate people’s lives: to adorn, to endorse people’s existence, to honour people’s essences, their life choices and their life gains. All manufacturing happens at our atelier in Belmont, Trinidad & Tobago. Collections deliver a series of stories each season; they may roll out all together or be released in parts. We reject the tendency to lose ourselves in someone else’s climate. The dream, our quest, is to make a label that is Caribbean from seed to stitch: not only designed, cut and stitched here but made from materials grown in the soil of this region. Design responds to constraints: what we can access and what we can do. In 1986, when the label was founded, what has emerged is a patchwork, an appliqué craft that we still use today. It is a tradition found in all the cultures of Trinidad & Tobago, foremost of them the indigenous, the African and the Indian. We build a new way through an old folk craft. The act of making clothes tastes of resistance from all our battles: the Haitian revolutionary spirit, to create and assemble as we see fit, feeds that fire in our belly to make change happen.
