Edited by Christine Checinska, this special issue of the peer-reviewed publication TEXTILE – Cloth and Culture sets ‘cloth’ into the wider context of creolised visual and material culture – considering the relationship between cloth, culture, and race from the perspective of the African Diaspora. Textile: Cloth and Culture is for the first time ever is focusing on Africa and the African Diaspora with most of the authors in this issue being from Africa and it’s diaspora
“In her essay ‘The Fading History of Trevor Owen: A Figure of Jamaica’s Independence Fashion Industry’ Joy Gregory reflects on the discovery of the uncatalogued archives of couturier Trevor Owen and the 2013 Artists’ Residency that took place at the Beach House, Owen’s home and atelier in Reading, Jamaica. Owen was celebrated in Jamaica as a couturier and had dressed local residents and tourists from Kingston, the wider Caribbean, the USA and Europe for a thirty year period beginning in the 1950s . This paper on un-catalogued archive of Trevor affords a snapshot of Jamaican social and economic history in the period before and immediately after Independence in 1962.”