Hot Girl Summer, Jamaican Style 

Okay, But Whose Summer Is It Really 

“Hot girl summer” shows up on the internet every June like clockwork, three months of permission to be loud, sun-drunk, and completely unbothered. Cute idea. Except heat isn’t a seasonal costume here. It’s Tuesday. The beach isn’t an event, it’s a default setting, and the fete doesn’t wait for anyone’s mood to catch up. 

So before we hand the phrase back to the algorithm, let’s be honest about where the energy actually came from. Confidence in the sun, boldness without apology, walking like the room already knows your name, Jamaica’s been doing that since long before it had a hashtag. 

The Monokini That Started a Whole Movement 

In 2015, Dania Beckford went home to Discovery Bay to heal from surgery. Her mother had a theory she trusted completely: “salt water heals everything, and she is not wrong,” Dania says. Healing looked like a beach day and an asymmetric black-and-white polka dot monokini she’d designed for herself, because feeling good felt medically necessary at that point. Her best friend snapped a photo. It went on Facebook. And that was it, the internet did what the internet does, except this time it built a business. 

Plus-size women wanted the suit. When Dania said she’d made it herself, they asked her to make theirs too. Ten years and one very successful brand later, her whole design philosophy still comes back to a single sentence: “There is no one more confident than a Jamaican woman in the right swimsuit, and I design toward that confidence every single time.” Not “flattering.” Not “forgiving.” Confidence. Built with actual skill, “pieces that accentuate what a woman wants accentuated and camouflage what she wants camouflaged, not out of shame but out of skill.” 

Boldness Has Range 

Some of that hot-girl energy is loud on purpose. Vivienne Richards, who crochets swimwear as Zee Richie, makes pieces for what she calls “the risk takers: the bathing suits that ask you to be bold, to take up space, to own the beach.” Own the beach. Not borrow it for the afternoon. 

But plenty of it is quiet, too, which is its own kind of loud, honestly. Saffron Brown of Safari Swimwear designs for a version of confidence that doesn’t need an announcement: “Jamaicans carry themselves with a particular kind of ease. We don’t try too hard.” Elevated, never strained. Beautiful, never performing. Two totally different volumes, same instinct underneath: nobody’s shrinking for anybody. 

The Part Nobody Puts on a Moodboard 

Here’s a detail that never makes it into the aesthetic version of “confidence”: Dania spent years untangling a supply chain most people never think about. “Jamaica does not have the pool of seamstresses I initially imagined it did,” she says, and even among the ones she found, sewing for a fuller figure turned out to be its own specialized skill, “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.” That’s hours of unglamorous groundwork sitting underneath one very good photo. 

And there were people rooting for it to fail, quietly, the whole time. “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.” Ten years and one very loyal customer base later, that argument’s settled itself. 

What Actually Goes in the Bag 

Real talk about building this wardrobe: skip whatever’s trending for exactly eleven days and go find the piece someone actually built for a real body, a monokini cut by a designer who understands compression and heat, crochet stitched by hand instead of stamped out by a machine that’s never smelled Jamaican sand, a bold bead or two that says something specific instead of nothing at all. Sha-Jay Williams of YAJAHS designs hers to do exactly that kind of work, “I want it to land on your skin and remind you that you are already enough.” Pair a well-made suit with a piece that means something, and the whole look stops being an outfit and starts being a mood. 

That’s the whole range sitting at Things Jamaican, resort wear, swimwear, and the finishing pieces, all made by Jamaican hands, all rooted in a version of summer that’s been running long before the hashtag showed up to take credit. And it’s not just for the people already here: Dania’s watched diaspora clients order from thousands of miles away for exactly this feeling. “Things Jamaican has opened new markets for us within the Diaspora,” she says, and what she wants waiting on the other end is simple, “confidence. Confidence in herself, in the fit, and in a Jamaican brand that was made with her body and her pride fully in mind.” 

Alright, Go Get Dressed 

You know the soundtrack already, bass you feel in your chest before you hear it, the kind of song that gets strangers dancing on a beach without deciding to. That’s the energy this whole thing is chasing: not a staged photo, but a real, sweaty, slightly chaotic, genuinely joyful Jamaican summer. Not a trend with an expiration date, a standing invitation. Go answer it. 

Shop Things Jamaican in-store at Devon House, NMIA, and 14 Camp Road, or online at thingsjamaicanshopping.com. Wear Jamaica Fi Summa. 

Editorial Team

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