End of Summer, Start of Something – What’s Next for Jamaican Fashion
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Editorial Team
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Nobody Here Is Actually Slowing Down
The sales wind down, the beach days give way to routine, and it’s easy to file summer fashion under “closed chapter until next June.” But talk to the people behind this season’s best pieces and a totally different picture shows up. For almost every one of them, this summer wasn’t a peak, it was a step. Here’s where they’re headed.
From a Facebook Photo to International Stages
Ten years into Broadtail Designs, Dania Beckford’s five-year plan is not small: “I want Broadtail Designs in international fashion shows and international stores. I want to own our production house.” She’s built a decade of proof that plus-size Jamaican women wanted exactly what she was making, “what we offer is not merely a design. It is confidence.” Next chapter’s about scale, without losing the thing that made it work in the first place.
A Fashion Economy With No Ceiling
Mikayla Salmon’s vision for Young Addiction reaches past her own label entirely. “Five years from now, ultimate success looks like a thriving, sustainable fashion economy where Jamaican designers are not limited by materials, by labour, by funding, or by the cost of getting their work into the world.” She’s been loud about the barriers, limited local fabric, brutal shipping costs, and her hope is bigger than her own win. It’s the whole landscape, changed, for “everyone who comes after me.”
Sustainability Stops Being the Exception
Saffron Brown sees By Saffron Safari’s next chapter as sustainability at real scale, “100% sustainable fabrics, ethical production all the way through”, plus something bigger than the brand: a foundation teaching marginalized women and girls to sew, “not as charity but as power. A life skill that can change the entire shape of a future.” Success measured in impact, not just growth.
Luxury, Rebuilt From the Ground Up
Jermaine Edwards wants Lannaman Gems recognized globally for exactly what it is: “natural materials elevated to luxury, stocked in the right spaces, worn by people who understand what they are holding, and still made with Jamaican hands. That last part is not a detail. It is the whole point.”
Craft That Outlives Any One Season
Sydia Sidcile’s family has already proven Jippi Jappa straw can survive sixty years and counting. Her hope for the next five is reach: “More people on more continents discovering that a piece made in Jamaica, from fiber pulled from Jamaican earth, can be the most beautiful thing in any room.” Her mother, who started the brand in a front room in Sandside in 1962, left behind a lesson that carries into every future collection: “Your hands, your culture, and your story are not your limitation. They are your greatest advantage.”
Being Exactly Who You Are
Sha-Jay Williams of YAJAHS offers the line worth closing the whole season on: “Being exactly who you are is not a limitation. It is your greatest power.” Every maker in this campaign proved some version of that sentence true this summer, not by becoming something else to fit a wider market, but by getting more specifically, unmistakably themselves and letting the world catch up.
None of Them Waited for the Perfect Moment
Shanna Campbell of Vintage Chic DESIGN has a line that basically explains why nobody in this campaign is treating September as an ending: “The perfect moment is not coming. The work you make today, with what you have today, is how it begins.” None of them waited for ideal conditions, not Dania Beckford healing from surgery with a Facebook photo, not Mikayla Salmon running a fashion business a full year before she ever sat in a classroom for it, not Davia Hines noticing a gap in the local market during a pandemic lockdown and simply deciding to fill it herself.
That same instinct, start now, with what’s actually in front of you, carries every one of these brands straight into next season. It’s also worth carrying into your own shopping this week: the pieces that catch your eye right now won’t necessarily still be on the shelf by the time the Post-Summer Sale wraps up.
See You Next Summer (Or, You Know, Next Week)
The Wear Jamaica Fi Summa campaign wraps with the sales in September, but the work it’s spotlighting was never really about one season to begin with. It’s an island’s fashion industry that keeps building, one maker, one piece, one refusal to wait, at a time. Summer ends. This work doesn’t. Post-Summer Sale is now on at all three Things Jamaican locations and online.
Until Next Time
Whether this is the first Things Jamaican piece you’ve ever bought or your closet’s already half full of them, there’s always another story arriving next season, from a maker you haven’t met yet. From all eleven artisans in this campaign, and everyone at Things Jamaican: thank you for spending part of your summer with us. Every season starts the same way, someone deciding to make the thing only they can make, with whatever they happen to have that day. That’s not going anywhere just because the calendar flips.
Shop Things Jamaican in-store at Devon House, NMIA, and 14 Camp Road, or online at thingsjamaicanshopping.com. Wear Jamaica Fi Summa.
