Ep. 7: A History of Caribbean Style

Traditional or folk style and dress in the Caribbean has a long, intricate history that differs across the region. Speaking with textile researcher Lauren Baccus, we discuss folk style's early origins and its complicated evolution as a staple of cultural celebrations today. Let us know your thoughts via the Voicemail feature on our website!

Lauren Baccus is a textile artist and researcher whose work centers around the construct and deconstruction of Caribbean identity through costume, textile and dress. She is strongly influenced by masquerade, the region’s legacy of resistance through clothing, and the universality of play through dress. Her most recent project, Salt and Aloes, is an archive of Caribbean material culture over the past century.

Strictly Facts Reads

• “Colonization in Reverse” by Louise Bennett Coverley

• “African Lace-bark in the Caribbean: The Construction of Race, Class, and Gender” by Steeve O. Buckridge

• “Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures” by Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez

• “Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas)” by Samantha A. Noël

Strictly Facts Sounds

• Lauren Baccus- Salt and Aloes 

• Dancehall Queen 1997 film

• Sugarcane Magazine- Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test 

• Jounen Kwéyól (Creole Day) in St. Lucia and Dominica