The eminent late New Orleans–born photojournalist Bradley Smith wrote for Women’s Wear Daily and took photographs for Vogue during the 1940s before encountering what would become the subject of his first book (of many). Escape to the West Indies: A Guidebook to the Islands of the Caribbean was first published in 1951 and enjoyed multiple reprints. Besides Smith’s written recommendations designed for well-heeled American tourists, it also contained his photographs of these tourists doing 1940s tourist things; my favorite is of a group downing highballs while driving golf balls into the ocean. Smith also produced a wonderfully sharp and characterful portfolio of portraits showing both staff and guests at an unnamed luxury Jamaican resort posing in front of a bamboo screen.
Londoner Bianca Saunders has been traveling back and forth to Jamaica since childhood to visit family and plans to return once more later this year. “It’s been a while since I visited,” she said after her show this morning, “but we’re doing a lot of different projects out there.” In addition to being influenced by Smith’s portraits, her collection was informed by her own snapshot experience.
Saunders’s eye for menswear is simultaneously sensual and sisterly. Here she used it to look through Smith’s historical lens as well as her personal one, blending sartorial and workwear details with her more contemporary impressions. Cummerbunds came layered over silk sportswear while full three-quarter culottes in silk or striped cotton were worn above the new calf-topping leather boots that are part of her first steps into footwear and which, she said, reflected Yardie culture.
Tracksuits in midnight blue sequins and track pants in a night-sky print played against her trademark undulating shirting and twisted-seam jeans. Exhortations, both domestic and God-fearing, provided T-shirt prints. Considering both the process behind this collection and her own upcoming return to Jamaica, she said: “I guess it never really does change. But at the same time, I was like: Oh, am I going to feel like a tourist?”
