Tribe Nine honouring the future and past with St Albans collection
Published:Sunday | July 21, 2024 | 12:06 AMShanel Lemmie - Staff Reporter
With each new body of work, Tribe Nine Studios founder and creative director, Troy-Oraine Williamson, aims to push the boundaries of clothing. With his latest drop, the St Albans Collection, he paid homage to the last institution he attended as a youth in Jamaica and aimed to reinvent the Jamaican khaki school uniform for the stylish adult.
Looking back at how he started over a year and a half ago, he told The Sunday Gleaner, “It all started when I was driving through Denham Town and I drove past this area that seemed really familiar.”
Soon realising that it was his alma mater – St Albans Primary – his wheels began to turn.
Starting first with the typical khaki design, he soon added a printed fabric and then incorporated mesh from his last collection - Seven Miles. Before long it evolved into the 16-piece set that was launched last Wednesday in a fashion show staged on Constant Spring Road in St Andrew.
“This collection was a little bit different from what I usually design. I usually see something or sketch something and I say ‘alright cool, I’m gonna put that together’. This collection, I sat down and said, ‘alright cool, it’s gonna be a capsule collection, it’s gonna have five pieces’ and then it kept on evolving.”
Musing on how this body of work differed from the one prior, he said, “I think now my design process has kind of changed a little bit. I feel like I have kinda landed in Jamaica. I’ve been here for a while and I’ve kind of wanted to pull other inspirations and elements of travels and stuff into my collections. But this one just made me think about where I was from.”
Now with the 16-piece collection ready to enter the world, he says he is happy to continue his personal mandate of gender-neutral clothing, without sacrificing the cool factor or comfortability.
“I always wanted to use a staple that we see every day in Jamaica and put that into a collection. I feel like the khaki just feels very Jamaican, like every time I think about Jamaica, I always think about my school years because that’s what I had [thought] about before I left.”
He continued, “I think the reason why it’s going to do well is because the khaki is so easy to blend with certain things because it’s such a neutral tone. You can put blues with it, greens with it, pinks, prints, any kind of thing. And then people get the idea of ‘this is not a way I have seen khaki before’, this is a new way of seeing it and giving more people access to it. This was created by the British for us to wear as work wear, so now we’re kind of reclaiming that.”
While prior collections were welcomed exuberantly into the fashion Zeitgeist, Williamson says with this one, he is more concerned about creating a body of work that represents Jamaica well.
“I’m not sure how they’re gonna receive it, but what I know they are looking for is just cool silhouettes coming from Jamaica and the Caribbean. Sometimes I don’t think about the perception of it and I just look at the outline, like how does it make Jamaica look to the wider diaspora as well.”
As he looks ahead to other collections, he says he is hoping to launch the Tribe Nine Studios ready-to-wear division.
“After this collection, I feel like people will see a different side of Tribe Nine. I feel like it’s time now to start looking at the business of fashion as well and also what that everyday Tribe Nine look looks like. We’re going some spaces with corporate cool but I definitely want to have a kind of more pulled back version of Tribe Nine with the same aesthetic for the everyday person so they can come in and pick up some of our pieces.”
Regardless of where the future takes the tribe, Williamson says couture will always be his passion.
“I still have things in my head that I want to get out,” he said chuckling.