At 34, Sharon Gittens appears preoccupied with finding her place in the world of local fashion design where, so often, talent is held in harness as much by lack of opportunity as by what she believes is the high cost of staying in the race for the attention of a modest market.
Trusted Choice, the name of the business establishment which she has created on Laing Avenue is still some distance away from the status of a high street fashion designer’s clothing and jewellery outlet, but then that is no different to what her colleagues in the profession have to endure. In the world of fashion in Guyana only the ‘big names’ seem to get any real attention.
Sharon says that her “creative skills” were probably “always there” and that these had been sharpened under the tutelage of Deryck Moore and brought to public attention through excursions into the limelight by way of her participation in Guyana Fashion Week 2010 and in, that same year, putting a band ‘on the road’ for Mashramani.
She’d love to do more she says but then the reality is that participating in a “show” can cost the designer $60,000 to $80,000 in participation fees alone, apart from which there is the cost of preparation. The problem, she says, is that even after you make such an investment, you can never be sure that the market will even allow you to break even.
If elsewhere in the region and beyond the fashion industry has mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, Sharon believes that over the years there has been less than adequate investment in the sector locally. However, there is much more to remaining in the public eye and transforming her creations in clothing and jewellery into what in the trade is described as a ‘fashion line’ that finds a lucrative niche in the market.
For a start, Sharon says, the number of local designers far outstrips the modest domestic market so that making a living requires exploring such possibilities as might exist on the external market which invariably means parts of the Caribbean and the United States. Guyana’s gradually growing entertainment industry may have created some measure of design for local fashion offerings but that, Sharon believes, continues to be held in check by a surfeit of imports mostly from abroad, mostly China that continue to flood the local market at prices with which the offerings simply cannot compete. It is, Sharon says, simply a matter of costs of production including the cost of fabric, a problem which she believes the country and the industry should have solved long ago.
Modest though it is, Sharon believes that the local market and the springboard to prominence which it offers is more than worth striving for though she says that the industry appears to have settled into a culture that confines fledgling designers to getting to the top mostly by hitching a ride on the coat tails of the more prominent designers.
Her own journey appears to have transported her to a crossroads of sorts, a place where she must now make critical decisions about both her career as a designer and her future as an entrepreneur. It is a concern that appears to bring
out a greater measure of thoughtfulness in her. She talks about the possibility of some creative initiative that might make a mark as part of the country’s Independence Anniversary Year though, perhaps not surprisingly, her major project this year is a three-month commercial road trip to the United States where marketing her creations and building her overseas customer base are her priorities.
Sharon believes that a greater measure of collective endeavour amongst local designers can help grow the industry much quicker. But that is not all. She is an advocate of official support for the sector, her contention being that it has the potential to be a lucrative industry; and in the absence of a lucrative local market she believes that the response must be to search for more ways of targeting the international market. In this year, particularly, she says, fashion can help shine a light on Guyana.
