Fashion Week coming

There will be a Barbados Fashion Week, Minister of Small Business Dwight Sutherland has promised.

But he has also urged designers to let Government help them form a fashion cooperative.

The Minister was speaking at the Style Out Loud fashion show which was led by designer Cicely Harewood of CH Needleworks. He told the audience in the Daphne Joseph Hackett Theatre on Sunday night that the current administration will do all in its power to make the week a reality.

Sutherland said: “I stand here tonight on behalf of the Government without speaking to the Prime Minister, but I know the Prime Minister is probably listening and she watches on; we will have such a week.

He was responding directly to a previous conversation he said he had with Harewood who told him Jamaica had just celebrated a fashion week and she had been asking for one for many years.

But the Minister for Entrepreneurship issued a challenge to the apparel industry to do its part to ensure the future of its livelihood.

He declared: “I challenge all the fashion designers – stop me from wearing Robert Graham; let me Style Out Loud with a Barbadian fashion designer.

“Help us as we seek to form more bilateral agreements with the African Nations, Suriname and even the US.

“Help us through our vision for style, through our vision for skills, through our vision for empowering and enfranchising this industry that will be supported by working class people such as Ms Harewood and the others. Help us to build out this sector.

“Help us to revive the apparel industry and the fashion design industry that is driven by international foresight such that when we design a product someone from the US, Robert Graham can want to copy it.”

The small business minister suggested that through overseas linkages, Bajan clothing could be exported all over the world.

Sutherland said: “We can send it to Ghana… Kenya… Europe with the names Cicely Harewood in the back.

“We have what it takes when we come together as a people and this Government will create the enabling environment that our businesses will continue to flourish next year or two years from now when I come to the week of fashion I can boast we have truly arrived on the global stage.”

A number of cooperatives had already been formed, said Sutherland, also the Minister for Cooperatives, as he urged the designers to get on board.

He added: “My ministry has in it a section called the Cooperatives Department.

“We just formed in the year 2019 five cooperatives. There are mostly in the transport sector.

“Those working-class people who join together to provide a service to the Ross University students; they form a cooperative.

“Those retrenched workers from the Transport Board came together and formed a transport cooperative led by the Barbados Workers Union.

The Minister said that new cooperatives were also benefitting from exporting their products across the region.

He said: “Recently the artisans and builders of Barbados… cried out loud for not having their fair share of the local market justifiably so they formed a cooperative and there were two other transport cooperatives along with one other cooperative which make[s] products such as soaps… shoes and some are exporting to the Caribbean region.”