In Perspective: On Our Birthday, Kingstonstyle Four Years Later

Images from the early days.

Kingstonstyle has been around for exactly four years as of today. Not to boast, but it would be hard pressed to name a fashion website coming out of Jamaica that has grown as much as we have and is still up and running today. It takes a lot of grit, patience and consistency to keep a project like this going but Biggz and I have always done it for the love of it, not because it brings us fame and fortune, but because to us, it is an expression of our art.

When we met approximately four years ago– at the time Biggz a photographer for the Observer and I a journalist for the Gleaner– I knew that Biggz had started a project that was something special and unlike anything coming from Jamaica. We started a collaboration, hitting the streets hard. Him with his camera and me walking up to random fashionistas and saying, “Would you mind if we took your picture for our site?” While at times we parted ways for work on other projects, we always came back to Kingstonstyle.

Now four years later it has grown to be not just a streetstyle photography site but a platform for local fashion news and a place where fashion designers, retailers and artists can be given recognition on an international scale (a large portion of our viewers are from Farin). That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of work to be done still. We have plenty of new projects in the works and great plans for the future. But on this day we can look back and say, “Wow, look at what we’ve created.”