"It was Jamaican style, and they didn't have anything like that in England": an oral history of self-fashioning

When my father, Barrington Young, arrived in Britain in 1954, he bought with him a distinct style. Jamaican creolized styling, the merging of British/European fashions with African aesthetics provided the basis for styling practices which are uniquely Jamaican. In this chapter, I consider my father as a case study, utilizing oral histories, life stories and personal photographs to demonstrate the importance of style-fashion-dress for the displaced migrants that have become known in Britain as the Windrush Generation. I argue that he actively rejected examples of English men’s fashion to stand out and set himself apart and in doing so he resisted dominant narratives about West Indian men. With his refusal to shrink into the background, West Indian men like my father broke established rules and introduced British men to beautiful, bright, original, and sexy clothing in Britain’s drab towns. Their clothing may have been seen as odd in Britain’s fashion landscape, but to migrants like Barrington, clothing was a serious business. His style-fashion-dress sustained him and maintained him whilst chasing the promise of a better life.