Dania Beckford
Broadtail Designs
Salt Water and a Polka Dot Monokini
Puerto Seco and the Pages of a Magazine
I grew up in Discovery Bay, St. Ann, where Puerto Seco Beach was not a destination but a ritual.
Weekends meant the beach, and the beach meant everything. That rhythm of sand and sea became so deep in me that it never left, and I think it is the reason I design the way I do: always with water in mind, always with a woman who deserves to feel beautiful in the sun at the centre of every choice.
I was always the one choosing. Even as a child I was picking ties for my father, steering my sister away from the conservative choices she favoured, deciding what looked right and what didn’t with a certainty I couldn’t quite explain. My best friend and I used to save our lunch money at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High School and spend it on fashion magazines. Every issue. We would sit together and imagine ourselves inside the pages, in the clothes, in the lives.
I was plus size and I understood very early that the world had opinions about what that meant for how I should dress. Animal prints. Backless designs. Shorts. I wore them anyway. The backless tops I would hide from my parents and change into elsewhere, but I wore them. I took scarves and turned them into tops and beach dresses because I was determined to look like the women in those magazines, and nobody was going to make that decision for me.
My Mother's Black Monokini
My mother had a swimsuit from the 1970s. A black halter monokini with a keyhole cutout right at the navel, and it was the most beautiful swimsuit I had ever seen.
I wore it every week at the beach. I wore it into my adult years. While everyone else handed me suits with what I can only describe as unfortunate prints and cuts designed for a body that wasn’t mine, I kept going back to that one suit because it understood something the others didn’t: that style and the fuller figure are not in opposition.
I started going to my mother’s seamstress and describing what I wanted. Explaining the fits, the cuts, the details that actually worked. At university, living on Rex Nettleford Hall, my friends and I designed our hall carnival costumes together, and I didn’t know then that this was practice, that I was building toward something real. It felt like a full circle moment years later when I began designing for Carnival in Jamaica.
But the true beginning came in 2015.
I had a myomectomy, surgery to remove fibroids, and I went home to Discovery Bay to heal. My mother has always said salt water heals everything, and she is not wrong. My best friend and I were at the beach and I was wearing an asymmetric black and white polka dot monokini I had designed for myself. I wanted to feel good, so I asked her to take a photo. I posted it on Facebook.
The response stopped me. Plus-size women were asking where I got the suit, and when I told them I had designed it myself, they asked if I would design for them. I asked if they would pay. They said yes.
That was the birth of Broadtail Designs.
Designing With the Body in Mind
I had been solving a problem for myself without fully realising it was a problem shared by so many other women. The moment I understood that, everything changed.
Jamaica’s curvy women carry the shape of our ancestry, and we are proud of it. But the fashion world had not always been proud of it on our behalf. Plenty of international brands had simply made their sizes larger without actually redesigning for a fuller figure. Others dressed plus size women conservatively, as though we wanted to be less visible, less seen, less present. That was never my experience of us. That was never the truth.
At Broadtail Designs, our aesthetic is colour, boldness, comfort, and confidence. We make resort wear and carnival costumes with the plus size body genuinely in mind: pieces that accentuate what a woman wants accentuated and camouflage what she wants camouflaged, not out of shame but out of skill. There is no one more confident than a Jamaican woman in the right swimsuit, and I design toward that confidence every single time.
Finding the Fabric, Finding the Right Hands
A creative day for me begins with fabric.
Hours of searching for the right material: thick enough for the compression a swimsuit requires, with the right amount of stretch, draping correctly for resort wear. Then finding the embellishments, building mood boards with colours and shapes and different bodies, working with my seamstresses until they can see the vision and we are fully aligned on what the final piece should become.
That last part turned out to be one of the hardest things I didn’t expect.
Jamaica does not have the pool of seamstresses I initially imagined it did, and I was committed to the brand being made in Jamaica. The JBDC helped me find seamstresses with the right range of talents, but there was another layer: not every seamstress who sews beautifully for average-sized bodies knows how to sew for plus size bodies. The skills overlap but they are not identical. Learning that, and finding the people who could bridge that gap, took real time and real effort.
And through all of it, there were naysayers. People, always non-plus-size people, who thought that plus size women didn’t want to wear swimsuits or carnival costumes. They spoke from a complete absence of experience with what it actually feels like to struggle to find something that fits and flatters. I just kept designing. The clients kept multiplying. For ten years now, Broadtail Designs has been both a fashion brand and a quiet social experiment, disproving those assumptions one woman at a time. What we offer is not merely a design. It is confidence.
For the Woman Who Never Imagined Herself in a Bikini
I design for the everyday woman who has spent years not finding resort wear that makes her feel sexy and seen.
Whether she loves a monokini or has never once imagined herself in a bikini, we push those boundaries carefully: always classy enough that she is willing to try, always designed well enough that once she does, she won’t want to stop. We also do custom designs for specific occasions and specific bodies, because the perfect fit is not a luxury. It is the whole point.
For the woman in the Diaspora who hasn’t been home in years, I want the moment she puts on one of our pieces to feel like one word: confidence. Confidence in herself, in the fit, and in a Jamaican brand that was made with her body and her pride fully in mind.
Start Right Where You Are
Things Jamaican has opened new markets for us within the Diaspora and supported our growth into an internationally known brand. That reach matters enormously for a brand committed to being made in Jamaica and worn across the world.
Five years from now, I want Broadtail Designs in international fashion shows and international stores. I want to own our production house. I want to keep learning how to be a better designer and a sharper businesswoman, because growth is never finished.
To the young Jamaican designer who is afraid to start: that fear is real, and it is also not a reason to wait. My start came while I was healing from surgery, in a beach photo on a Facebook page, because the moment found me before I was ready for it. Your will must be stronger than your fear. Make mistakes. Try again. Keep going until you reach the outcome you can see clearly in your mind.
Start right where you are.
Broadtail Designs is available at Things Jamaican.
