Going HOME

Kingston native KAI NEWMAN highlights the BEST of SPRING FASHION surrounded by FAMILY, COMMUNITY, and the vibrant SIGHTS, SMELLS, and TEXTURES of JAMAICA

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

My JAMAICA FASHION SHOOTS have often treated Jamaica as a backdrop to the story. But Jamaica is a place with an outsize influence on global culture.

The country's musical genres have continually reset the pace of popular music. Its cuisine is imitated but rarely captured. And Jamaican patois remakes language, sounding new chords in the chorus of dialects we call English.

Jamaica is a crucible for all the questions that animate our modern world. Jamaica is a space where questions of freedom, art, and humanity are posed by a people who have made an art form out of everyday life. Countless poets, writers, and philosophers-Claude McKay, Sylvia Wynter, Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Marlon James, and Safiya Sinclair to name a few-have written and rewritten the story of the island.

For this month's shoot with Kingston native Kai Newman, we worked with a local production crew, and the results are electric. The excitement surrounding the shoot is palpable. As Newman tells it, "Jamaica is such a small country. So when it do happen for Jamaica, in Jamaica, it's a big deal."

Kai Newman details the experience in her own words: