Riddim Runway all started with an audacious email from Kadiya McDonald, Tribe Nine Studios founder and creative director, Troy-Oraine Williamson, told Living. Though McDonald maintains that Williamson paid her first correspondence no mind, after some persistence, she got hold of the Tribe Nine boss and sold him on her vision of merging fashion and music in a flamboyant spectacle of Jamaican culture.
Further explaining, Williamson said, “Riddim Runway is us paying homage to dancehall culture, to the style of Jamaica, to how stylish Jamaica is and just showing all the creatives onstage, all the things that we have been doing, just showing that in one place.”
A match made in creative heaven, McDonald said choosing Williamson as her collaborator was a no-brainer.
“Troy’s designs are really, really fly,” she began. “He has a store and has been really upscaling, and I thought that he was capable and was ready to pull off so many outfits. I’ve just been watching him over the years and how he’s really in the music industry. I used to work with my sister Kamila (McDonald) when she would host (Reggae) Sumfest, so I would always see all of the celebrities, and so many of them would be in Tribe Nine. So he’s already in the music space, so it felt only right.”
At the sunset show held at Skyline Levels in Jack Hill last Sunday, the audience was treated to a three-part fashion show featuring pieces from the Tribe Nine Collections Xamayca, Horizon, 7 Miles and St Albans.
Making their entrance from the back of the venue, the models first entered a slightly elevated stage, where they played and interacted with a series of props while showing off their outfits.
Soon exiting stage left, the models took a lap outside so anyone ‘chilling’ on the porch could examine the designs up close before settling on the main stage. With a showcase structure, the models had the freedom to leave the stage, talk to each other and interact with whatever was around them.
“We wanted to just break it up and feel just real,” 25-year-old McDonald, a self-proclaimed second-generation ‘reggae baby’, went on, “If there are mistakes, there are mistakes, if there’s a moment where you interact with the crowd, that’s what it is. We didn’t want to do the regular catwalk, high fashion stiff thing. We wanted to feel roots, you get me, like how we really are. Show up late is alright we flex, you get me, not really, but whatever. We wanted it to feel super, super down to Earth and like we were friends with the audience. We didn’t want it to feel like we were higher than them. It was really important for us to kind of just change up the space and keep people having somewhere else to look at rather than having an elevated space and the people lower, it’s power play.”
Describing the process of building out the show as ‘weirdly smooth’, she said the show paid homage to three legends in dancehall.
“Three is the trinity, so, of course, it balance off dem way deh. Also, it just felt right to focus on three and not go too wide. Our dancehall culture is very big, and we have so much time to continue to explore all of those, but I picked those three because [we are] highlighting ‘riddims’, I just had to think about my peers. And celebrating legacy, I wanted really to bring on Remus and Tara, Xterminator, and Harry J sounds. So I started with my friends and their families’ catalogues.”
Breaking up the fashion segments, the event had performances from dancers Racquel Monteith and Tracy-Ann Hay, violinist Jovani Williams and even a special appearance from McDonald’s parents, Eric ‘Makaya Chakula’ McDonald and Krida ‘Goldilocks’ Scott.
By evening, when all the had been showcased, the night devolved into a true stage show with performances and freestyles from Naomi Cowan, Runkus and Royal Blu, Yohan Marley, Kayla Arnold, Zac ‘$toney’ Jone$ and Kellisa.
