Bahamian style
WBN09 - Feature_Bahamian style
Bahamian style
Island fashion designers creating a buzz
The glamour of The Bahamas is often appropriated to sell clothes that come from somewhere else. The Harbour Island sweater, whose jaunty nautical appeal graced the pages of GQ magazine in 2008, may well end up being worn by visitors to that Bahamian idyll, but it certainly didn’t originate there. And the whole Tommy Bahama line is based in Seattle.
The associations of ease, luxury and casual elegance that cling to the Bahamian name make it a perfect brand for fashion products. And in some areas Bahamians themselves have been quick to take advantage.
Owen Bethel, organizer of 2008’s inaugural Islands of the World Fashion Week in New Providence, points out that, “in terms of accessories and jewellery, Bahamians have been quite successful. [The late] Harl Taylor is the exceptional example, whose customized straw bags have been sold in Saks and Bergdorf Goodman. But in clothes we’ve been lagging behind.”
That may be changing. The Islands of the World event brought designers from around the world and won praise from world press and industry insiders. Bethel is careful to point out that “the idea is to use The Bahamas to showcase island-based or island-born designers from around the world, not use this event to showcase Bahamians.”
However, Mode Îles, the company he founded to organize Fashion Week, will offer “support for local designers and introduce them to the world,” says consultant Loweena West. Out of nearly 40 designers showing their work, 11 were from The Bahamas.
Island designers excel
“We’ve already been in talks with several young designers to either act as their agents or produce a collective brand so they can all be marketed together,” says Bethel. “Fashion Week was a great way to show them how much work they have to do and how to … compete internationally.”
At the same time, the event showed how much well-established talent is here in The Bahamas, just waiting for a wider audience.
“Apryl Weech, Percy Wallace, Basheva Eve and Jeff St John have all come into their own and made a name regionally, or further afield,” says Bethel. “And at Fashion Week, Jeff St John won the Seal of Excellence award from the judges.”
At the vanguard of Bahamian high fashion, St John learned his first lessons in design from his mother, who was a dressmaker, and has more than 40 years experience in the industry. Although he has worked in New York, he returned to Nassau full-time 20 years ago to establish the House of St John.
His award-winning designs for Fashion Week, he says, were intended to reflect the Caribbean’s cultural debt to Africa, “it’s rhythms, its colours,” and in one case—a towering conical hat—even its drums. But always he returns to his own roots, finding inspiration in “the natural beauty that surrounds us in The Bahamas and in the elegance and good manners of its people.”
Wraps, scarves and bikini or tube-style tops featured heavily in his award-winning collection, and among the rich berry and teal colours there was the flash of tropical, printed gowns occasionally trimmed with straw accents.
Emphasis on Bahamian
Percy Wallace, of Garfi Designs, is another who likes to make use of this Bahamian material. “I use straw and plait on my trimmings,” he says, “and you could say I’m trying to bring the straw market into the fashion world.”
Another long-established figure in Bahamian fashion, with “20-plus years” experience and a one-man operation that produces 500-600 pieces a year, Wallace is better-placed than most to comment on the future of Bahamian clothes design.
Despite his overflowing order book, he still finds time to teach fashion at BTVI (the Bahamas Technical & Vocational Institute).
“Things have been looking up here for quite some time now,” he says. “Elvardo Wilson and Treneil Hanna are designers to look out for. And Olivia Persaud is having great success with her Lulu line, designed for young women of about her own age—somewhere between 20 and 25.”
In contrast, a lot of Bahamian fashion is aimed at more mature women. “Because of the cost of materials and labour, most of our design is what you would call couture,” says Bethel, “where price is not so much of an issue.”
Women of a certain age
Jeannie McQueeny, the alter ego of designer Eugenie, Lady Nuttall, attributes a lot of her success to “making clothes for women of my age, in their 40s to 60s, that lets them look good without looking like mutton dressed as lamb. There’s not a lot in that age range that allows women to be youthful and feminine without also looking like they’re trying too hard. You wouldn’t believe the number of husbands who’ve come up and thanked me.”
Lady Nuttall is hardly a conventional designer. And she is certainly exempt from a charge levelled at many of the others. “Parochialism,” says Bethel with a shake of the head. “Although they’re making high-end clothes, our designers are often content to dress local celebrities and politicians’ wives, so they’ve remained here rather than looking outward.”
The clothing in the Jeannie McQueeny International line is made in Katmandu—“by the descendants of Mogul craftsmen,” says Lady Nuttall—before being shipped to points as far afield as Dubai, Sweden, Palm Beach and Harrods, in London. For 10 years Lady Nuttall ran Jeannie McQueeny as an essentially one-woman operation, travelling to Katmandu three times a year to work on the designs and choose colours, fabrics and threads. The only real attempt at marketing was to wear her own creations.
“Every time I did, people would ask me where I got it from and could I get them one. Then a great friend, Nan Kempner [the New York socialite who contributed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of haute couture] took one—I was showing some to her, and she said, ‘I want that!’—and she wore it all the time.”
Terry Kramer, the heiress and Broadway producer, was similarly attached to a gown she was given as a gift, and between them the two grande dames of American society spread the Jeannie McQueeny name.
“Then Oprah bought one and wore it on the cover of one of her magazines, and that started a whole new conversation in the States,” says Lady Nuttall.
Bahamian accents
The transition from Jeannie McQueeny to Jeannie McQueeny International, however, was more a response to personal tragedy than a testament to personal ambition.
When her husband, Sir Nicholas Nuttall, died in 2007, “A friend suggested that instead of just having it as a hobby, as it were, I should turn it into a proper business and put together a board of directors. It was a wonderful focus to have something like that to absorb my attention.”
For the first time the clothes were taken round the international fashion circuit. “London, Paris, New York... Milan was the only one we didn’t do. The response was fabulous.”
The company trademark is refined, richly embroidered clothing in luxurious materials. “Everything is hand-embroidered and hand-beaded,” says Lady Nuttall, “but everything has to be comfortable to wear. For example, I use pashmina fabric to make tunics and kaftans lined with silk crepe that feels marvelous on the skin.”
Although her designs are realized on the other side of the world, Lady Nuttall is at heart a Bahamian girl. “There’s a lot of coral-based beadwork and embroidery, and a lot of the designs are sea-inspired. It definitely stems from here.”
The current wave of Bahamian designers is filled with proud individualists, but a certain local style seems to be emerging. Comfort mixed with luxury, hand-crafted details, a nod to the beauty of the natural world and a hint of the exotic —at last the fashion of The Bahamas is developing as a brand in its own right.
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