Kingston's fashion machine

Kingston-based model agency and media company that has placed Afro-Caribbean models on major international runways and campaigns, and produces Style Week Jamaica.

Kingston fashion platform produced by Saint International that showcases new and established Jamaican designers, a successor-era counterpart to Caribbean Fashionweek in the island's fashion calendar.

Regional fashion showcase launched by Pulse Investments in 2001 and staged in Kingston through 2019, presenting more than 150 designers and positioning the Caribbean as a runway centre with strong ties to the music and modelling industries.

Jamaican attorney-turned-fashion-and-entertainment entrepreneur (3 June 1953 - 18 June 2024), born in Kingston and educated at Kingston College, the University of the West Indies and the Norman Manley Law School. He practised as an attorney from 1975 to 1980, then founded Pulse in 1980 — the first fashion production, modelling and general entertainment company of its kind in Jamaica, later listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange as Pulse Investments Limited. He created Caribbean Fashion Week, the Caribbean Model Search, the Superjam concert series and the television programmes Caribbean Fashion Weekly and The Search for the Caribbean's Next Supermodel, and was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction in 2007 for building the region's modelling industry. His daughter Safia Cooper is Pulse Investments' chief executive. NOT to be confused with Kingsley Michael "Ibo" Cooper (1952-2023) of Third World, a different man with the same given name.

The 'batty rider', the very short women's shorts that became an iconic, contested item of early-1990s dancehall fashion, especially among dancehall queens, a recurring focus of respectability debates and of Carolyn Cooper's scholarship on the dancehall body. Treated here as a documented fashion term.

Kingston fashion, modelling and entertainment company founded as Pulse in 1980 by Kingsley Cooper; the first Caribbean entertainment firm listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, and operator of Caribbean Fashionweek and the Pulse Centre that houses the Peter Tosh Museum.

The look that grew up around the Dancehall Queen title from the early 1990s: bold, constructed, expensive-looking and made to be photographed. It is a costume for a role rather than everyday dress, and the argument it has always provoked — about respectability, about who gets to be looked at — is part of what the record documents.

Dexter "3D" Pottinger (6 November 1982 – August 2017) was a prominent Jamaican fashion designer, stylist, hairstylist and creative producer. He began as a model with Saint International and won that agency's Avant Garde Designer of the Year competition in 2005, going on to dress dancehall artists and work on styling and design across Jamaican entertainment, including on the film King of the Dancehall (2016); he also became a visible "Face of Pride" figure in Kingston. He was found dead at his St Andrew home in August 2017.

Jamaican fashion executive, founder of the Saint International model agency and organiser of Style Week Jamaica, noted for expanding the presence of Black Caribbean models in global fashion.

Soft angora bucket cap and beret, adopted from mid-1980s hip-hop and worn across dancehall and the wider rude-boy lineage until the brand name became a lyrical shorthand for style.

Footwear style deeply associated with Jamaican rude-boy, reggae and dancehall culture, album/song references and UK-Jamaica style exchange From the 1970s, Clarks became part of the "rude boy" counter-cultural look — khaki clothes, Clarks, hazard spectacles, shirt buttoned to the neck — worn by figures central to the emergent sound-system culture; one Kingston policeman became known for raiding dances specifically to arrest Clarks-wearing patrons. Little John's 1985 single "Clarks Bootie," a tribute to the shoe, was cut on the same riddim as Yellowman's "Zungguzungguguzungguzeng," one of dancehall's inaugural records.