More Jamaicans scouted for catwalks
Jamaica puts a different face on the runways
His machete blade a blur, Tevin Steele whacks the top off a fresh green coconut. Deftly knifing a window through the tender pith, he inserts a straw and hands the fruit across the counter at Dinga-Fling, his roadside stall outside this drowsy coastal town. Selling coconuts is his livelihood, and Steele, 21, says it is a good one, though neither as promising, lucrative or downright implausible as his other.
It was just more than a year ago that Steele was scouted at his stall by a modelling agent, who detected in his whippet frame and chiselled cheeks the same potential that soon led him to sign an exclusive contract to walk in an autumn 2017 runway show for Saint Laurent.
Roughly 7,500km, and a universe, lie between Port Antonio and Paris.
“I never knew about modelling, I never thought about modelling or talked about it when they brought it to me that I have a nice style to be a model,” said Steele, who on a busy day during high season here might earn 15,000 Jamaican dollars (or 3,900 baht) selling coconuts. “I always wanted to go on a plane and stuff. When they called me for Saint Laurent, my life just changed.”
As it happens, “changing lives and expanding horizons” is both the mission and the vaguely homiletic slogan of Saint International, a small, independent modelling agency in Kingston founded by Deiwght Peters almost two decades ago.
When he started in the business, Peters said even the concept of ethnic diversity in modelling was a long way off. And the beauty standards of the multi-billion-dollar fashion industry clung stubbornly to a “traditional ideal of thin, white and young”, as Jennifer Davidson, editor-in-chief of the website The Fashion Spot, said.
From time to time, a Jamaican star like Grace Jones shot onto the scene, but not until Saint International was there anything one might credibly term a Jamaican modelling industry.
“Why would there be?” James Scully, a seasoned casting agent, asked. “Five years ago, the world wasn’t even open enough to racial diversity for anyone to consider the thought.”
Just how radically that has changed can be seen in the steady stream of island models Peters found at coconut stands and other unlikely places and developed into nascent superstars in a market that has suddenly taken them into its embrace.
Most notable of this new crop is probably Barbra-Lee Grant, a shy and leggy 22-year-old beauty who was working as a clerk when Peters first encountered her and who languished for a time at the agency until Peters encouraged her to grow her hair out in an Afro.
“We then sent her digitals to Balenciaga,” Peters said. “And they immediately booked her for the 2017 campaign.”
There is Brad Allen, a quiet 23-year-old from Kingston, who is starring in a Polo Ralph Lauren advertising campaign; and Jonny Brown, a 23-year-old whose hooded almond eyes peer out from behind a pair of tinted aviators in a new series of Topman ads; and the teenage Vivienne Westwood campaign models Shaun Holder and Tiffany Johnson; and the Saint Laurent campaign star Jenese Roper, whose soft features were toughened up when her hair was styled in a geometric Grace Jones fade; and the elegant catwalk specialists Naki Depass or Tami Williams, who at 19 is a seasoned veteran of shows for Valentino, Dior and Chanel haute couture; and Kai Newman, a 19-year-old who is one of those beings with a beauty that seems to radiate from some deep inner source.
The hits scored by an obscure agency on an island of fewer than 3 million people owe much to the missionary zeal of Peters, a voluble and avuncular man (his models call him Pops) with a shaven head and a cowcatcher smile who, besides running his modelling agency, organises Style Week Jamaica and is host of a popular talk show on cable TV. They also underscore the economic impact that lack of diversity has had on those excluded from opportunity.
“My thought was always to give young Jamaican kids the chance to dream and see a world they may never had known existed and a chance to be world phenoms that they may have thought impossible by their circumstances,” Peters said.
Though his rhetoric may be that of a public service announcement, the facts bear out Peters’ message.
A persistently sluggish economy and the high levels of public debt that have plagued the island nation for decades have kept Jamaica among the slowest growing developing countries in the world, according to the World Bank. And in 2016, the Statistical Institute of Jamaica found that the country’s overall unemployment rate of 12.9% was more than twice as high among the young.
“Now the whole Caribbean is becoming a new space for people to be scouting that wouldn’t have existed without this new wave of diversity,” said Scully, the casting agent.
Five years ago, the world wasn’t open enough to racial diversity