One Bagga Claat
- Sep 15, 2025
- 7 min read
If A Conversation with SIIM: On Being Jamaican, Becoming a Brand, was about the who behind SIIM, then this one is about the how…and the how much.
“One Bagga Claat” in Jamaican Patwa literally means a bag of cloth (yes, fabric is where this all started). But it can also mean a whole heap of drama. In my world, it’s both. The cloth part? That’s obvious: SIIM began with fashion. The drama? That’s the abundance of experiences, skills, and stubborn Jamaican determination stitched together to form the SIIM brand.
It started on my verandah in Kingston, sewing tiny frocks for Barbie dolls and staging runway shows under the single lightbulb overhead. Tickets torn by hand, chairs lined up, ambition bigger than my yard could hold. Even then it wasn’t just about clothes… it was about creating worlds.
From there it was Vogue magazines in my living room. My mother, a true fashion plate, tearing out pages to take to her dressmaker. Summer sewing lessons in Mandeville, and me as a precocious teenager sewing my own school uniform skirts. That ended with a call to the principal’s office because apparently my “business attire” was too business for sixth form… read “tight”… So I made the skirts baggier, floor-length, paired them with wingtips and argyle socks. If dem nuh waan see no shape, dem aggo see shape-less! The irony? That shapeless look became a trend after I graduated. Drama!
Five years of Architecture school in Canada, then a nine-month solo trip through Asia, filled sketchbooks with designs inspired by places, fabrics, bodies, and movement. Living out of a five-gallon knapsack for nine months bruised my vanity but sparked a persistent question: Why can’t we have clothes that work anywhere, anytime? To the market in the morning, dinner in the evening, and dancing at night…without looking chaka chaka in between? That’s how the idea of a versatile, convertible wardrobe lodged itself in my head. So it was with a likkle Necchi sewing machine in my aunt’s Brooklyn apartment that I stitched the first SIIM pieces in 1999.
“Fashion is a demanding dance partner. After nine years I was tapped out… mentally, financially, emotionally. But the designs stayed fresh.”
Fashion is a demanding dance partner. After nine years I was tapped out… mentally, financially, emotionally. I packed away my fashion dreams… but the designs stayed fresh. Fast-forward through years of working as an architect, art director, and creating my own niche in event architecture, and the decision to relaunch SIIM in 2024 came with hard questions: What was worth bringing forward? Which designs still had something to say? And could this brand be more than just clothing?
The answers came in Patwa (to Raas), in sustainability, and in the conviction that fashion could be a tool for empowerment: timeless, adaptable, unapologetically Jamaican. Print-on-demand was the first step back, reducing waste but introducing new challenges, integration nightmares and quality battles (“We broke Wix” became the running joke). One Bagga Claat became the perfect title for this phase: the joy and the headaches, the experiments and the wins, all tangled up in the fabric of relaunching a brand.
Designing for More than the Runway
What made the relaunch of SIIM possible wasn’t just my love of fashion. It was decades of travel and professional work that sharpened the skills needed to build SIIM as a world, not just a wardrobe.
In1998, somewhere in Laos, I had an epiphany. I had to point out Jamaica on a map to a classroom full of eager young Monks. (Why was I in a classroom of monks, you may ask…) I felt stupid — the map looked funny. I had to look closer. We were not in our usual spot just below the belly button of the Atlantic. Noooo… This was an Asian atlas and there we were, shoved to the far edge, a likkle dot barely clinging to the paper. Yet the moment people heard “Jamaica,” their faces lit up with a Bob Marley smile. That’s when it hit me: even when Jamaica sits on the margins of someone else’s world, we step boldly into the center of their imagination. Small, yes… but mighty. Likkle but Tallawah.
Even when Jamaica sits on the margins of someone else’s world, we step boldly into the center of their imagination. Small, yes… but mighty. Likkle but Tallawah.
That lesson, of seeing Jamaica small on the map but mighty in imagination, mirrors how my career shaped SIIM. Each discipline taught me how to build something bigger than its parts.
Architecture trained me to balance function, beauty, and user experience. Designing offices and residences in Kingston taught me how people move through space, how details guide their attention, how stories are told in glass, concrete, and light. Those lessons are now in every SIIM garment: the way a seam falls, the way a sleeve allows for movement, the way a cut frames the wearer, just like a room frames its occupant.
Event architecture showed me how to choreograph atmosphere. Designing for Jamaica House at the O2 Arena in London in 2012 meant translating national pride into a physical experience: stages, lighting, flow, and rhythm carrying thousands of people through a shared story. That same thinking powers a brand launch, the mix of energy and intimacy that makes something unforgettable.
Film art direction taught me to see each frame as a world. Getting dressed in SIIM means stepping into a scene. The folds, colors, and proportions are chosen with the same care as a set backdrop, because they are part of the story you’re telling… just by walking into a room.
So, the verandah shows taught me to create. Architecture taught me to structure. Events taught me to immerse. Film taught me to frame. Travel taught me to see and aspire. And fashion… fashion is where all of it comes together.
Jamaican-isiim
SIIM is clothing you can travel with, live in, and hand down. It’s a wrap skirt that started as a solution to a very real Southeast Asia bus problem (a story for another time). It’s fashion that comes from problem-solving, much like Architecture. Identify the challenge. Set the parameters. Create a solution that feels inevitable.
I’ve seen firsthand the waste of fast fashion. I’ve committed the crime myself… So, for SIIM, sustainability is a necessity not a marketing angle. We are slowing things way down. Every piece is meant to last…not only in your closet, but in your story.
So what’s the message in the seams? Jamaican flair doesn’t apologize; we flaunt our identity and how we dress tells stories about movement, migration, and the refusal to be boxed in. Even the way we speak in Jamaica (Patwa) is colourful and strategic. It’s an unwritten language that allows for freedom, play, and creativity. It slips into other cultures effortlessly, giving them new ways to express things they couldn’t say before. Patwa is a cultural export, just like reggae or jerk seasoning… and it’s sneakily addictive man!
From Kingston Girl to Global Brand
SIIM grew out of ambition, but also frustration. I wanted to expand Jamaica’s global identity to include people like me.
The brand that became SIIM grew out a frustration with the limits placed on identity, on style, on what “being Jamaican” is supposed to look like. At first it was just about clothes, but as I’ve grown, so has the brand’s ambition. We’re now shaping SIIM into a lifestyle brand (fashion first, yes), but with books (Gallivant), food, games, and tech in the pipeline. Each element tells a different chapter of the same Jamaican story.
But SIIM was never going to be about parroting clichés of “island life.” No sah! SIIM is about leaning into complexity and contradiction. Humor, irreverence, intellect, innovation. From Kingston’s UNESCO Creative City of Music status to the unclaimed global influence of Jamaican sound system culture, Jamaicans are already world-shapers. SIIM’s job is to carve out and claim a space, visually, physically, sustainably on the world stage.
The Bigger Picture
I want SIIM to be a global lifestyle brand rooted in a lesser-known Jamaica. Not just rum, reggae, and resorts. But Kingston rooftops at sunset. A pot of red peas soup on the fire wid a whol’a Scotchie pon top. A conversation that swings between Patwa and the proper Queen’s English while we debate existentialism and the rise of phygital experiences. A sound system bassline shaking your ribcage at 2am… but its tech house or Amapiano not Reggae that you’re dancing to.
Beyond SIIM, my creative life stretches far past the sewing machine. I’ve shaped national moments, helped brands like BMW tell their stories through space and spectacle, and built worlds that existed for just one night or one scene, but left an impression that lasted years. For me, “One Bagga Claat” is more than a Jamaican idiom. It’s a declaration that this brand is the sum of many disciplines, many influences, and many stories. It’s the acknowledgment that yes, the relaunch is full of drama, but it’s the kind of drama that makes things unforgettable. And as every Jamaican knows, if yuh ah go dweet, dweet big!
From fashion to food, from media to tech, SIIM is building a movement… reverse colonialism: our rhythms in your headphones, our fabrics on your skin, our language in your mouth.
From fashion to food, from media to tech, SIIM is building a movement… What I call reverse colonialism: our rhythms in your headphones, our fabrics on your skin, our language in your mouth. The next chapter is already in motion, taking SIIM’s versatile designs and Jamaican attitude to the Caribbean, the UK, the US, Japan, and beyond. Because SIIM isn’t just a bag of cloth. It’s a way of thinking, a way of moving through the world. And truss me, dis bagga claat journey? It’s only just getting started.
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