For Jawara Alleyne, the carnivals he grew up attending in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands have been a reliable wellspring of inspiration. This season, though, he looked not to the details of the carnival itself—the music, the food, and of course, the costumes—but instead, a certain feeling: tabanca. The word, which derives from a Trinidad and Tobago dialect, describes the sense of longing you might feel after carnival has been and gone, and an agitated desire to live it all over again. “But tabanca isn’t just about the fact you’ve had a good night,” Alleyne said after his show. “It’s about the fact you had a good night with all of those people. It’s always about the people, and the community.”
Despite the brisk weather, and the fact showgoers were seated in a stately suite of rooms at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, Alleyne successfully conjured the atmosphere (and yes, that sense of community) you might find on a morning after the night before in the Caribbean. The first model out wore a sash of gauzy sky blue fabric over his muscled torso, heading down the runway with a devil-may-care strut that was intensified by the pair of neon orange briefs poking out above the low-slung waistline of his trousers, like Alleyne’s take on a bumster. His cast of characters walked at a languid pace, with a film of sweat over their skin, and Alleyne’s signature sliced and knotted strips of fabric trailing in their wake as if torn in a frenzy of dancing.
Look closer, though, and you could appreciate the design chops it takes to concoct these so-wrong-they’re-right sartorial smorgasbords. It helps that Alleyne has a keen eye for color, from the tequila sunrise hues of a slashed polo to cut-outs from a silvery jacquard fused to jersey to create an arresting shimmer, to a sculptural pink and black top of shredded tulle that appeared like a firework bursting from the model’s chest. Many of the garments felt like optical illusions: what at first appeared as a T-shirt floated by and revealed itself as a kind of cocoon top from the rear, while an especially lovely striped knit towards the end appeared conventional from afar, before the model got closer and you noticed the threads of the sweater had been pulled to form bunches and loose, tassel-like strands.
Alleyne also explained that he was “thinking a lot about memory. I was thinking about nostalgia, too, which is a word that always comes up in fashion, but I feel like it’s always brought up through the same lens. So I wanted to pinpoint a feeling that’s familiar in fashion, but completely unfamiliar in terms of… we’ve never seen it like this.” That we haven’t: despite Alleyne’s self-admitted fascination with the designers who grew up admiring, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen to Alber Elbaz, his singular vision celebrates style traditions that have typically existed far from the Paris runways. More specifically, how the women he grew up surrounded by find a genuine pleasure in getting dressed up, and the lessons we can all learn from that—even if you’re not about to slip into one of Alleyne’s revealing, sutured-together-with-safety-pins dresses. “It’s a world where things are not perfect, but it doesn t matter,” he added. “Because what’s really important is the vibe and the energy and the fact that everybody’s having a great time.”
Might there be parallels between those feelings of tabanca, and what a fashion designer must experience the morning after sending out a new collection? “Absolutely,” he said. “But you know what I’m going to do this time? I’m going to try and just stay in the collection.” What does that mean for him? “If you stay in it, you don’t have to feel that sense of loss. Because there’s a sadness in tabanca, but there’s also joy. There’s a joy in the memory. There’s joy in the fact that it happened.” If the whoops and cheers of the audience were anything to go by, those feelings of joy were very much communal.
