Words by Erin Hansen-McKnight, Photo by Martei Korley—
Lately, we’ve been noticing mesh marinas, the netted garment long favored by Jamaican men like singer Cocoa Tea (above), turning up more and more, from retro-styled dancehall videos to the runway. We tapped Kingstonstyle‘s Erin Hansen-McKnight for a comprehensive history of this Caribbean fashion staple, from its roots in Scandinavia to its place today as an iconic rude-boy fashion statement.
One summer night in Montego Bay three years ago, amidst the gregarious chaos of Reggae Sumfest, photographer Marlon Reid asked a long-legged beauty with a floppy mop of blond hair if he could shoot her for our Jamaican streetstyle site, Kingstonstyle. The girl of interest was wearing washed out jean cut-offs, black patent leather sneakers, white socks with a skirt of frills around the ankle and a black, yellow, and green mesh marina. At the time, Reid didn’t realize he was shooting stylist Savannah Baker, who would turn up in Popcaan’s “Everything Nice” video. What caught his eye was her unusual pairing of the coquettish style of Japanese Harajuku with this iconic Jamaican garment staple.
The mesh marina, a tailored muscle tee made from a knitted cotton that resembles fishing net, has an iconic, albeit multi-faceted, place in Jamaican culture. Originating as a Norwegian utilitarian under-garment, the mesh marina has evolved in Jamaica, becoming synonymous with both the classic rude boy style of the ’70s– when it was worn beneath one’s button down shirt– and in the more blatant and colorful manifestations of ‘90s dancehall. The traditional mesh marinas worn by rude boys as far back as the ‘50s came in solid colors, typically white, while decades later the black, yellow and green mesh marina developed on a second wave of popularity, when manufacturers realized their most profitable audience was through Jamaica’s dancehall and reggae culture.
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Busy Signal photo by Damien “LookYah” Baddy
Lately, artists have been playing with the style as a retro nod to the earlier days of reggae and dancehall. The knitted top reemerged at the top of last year in the highly stylized video for “Watch Out For This (Bumaye)” from dancehall deejay Busy Signal and international EDM crew Major Lazer, and was spotted in reggae artist Protoje’s recent “Who Knows” video featuring Chronixx. Aidonia wore one for his “80s Dancehall Style” music video, as do Konshens and Romain Virgo in their old school-themed clip “We No Worry Bout Them.”
Iba Mahr celebrates rudeboy style in his song “Diamond Sox,” a collaboration with producers Notis, describing a uniform of diamond socks, Wallabee Clarks, Arrow shirt and mesh marina, style elements further honired in the song’s Rockers-inspired video. This extends into the realm of Kingston’s expansive party culture as well, with themed events such like February’s “Mesh Marina & Diamond Socks” party popping up around town.
While the garment is currently enjoying a renaissance in Jamaican popular culture, it can’t exactly be labeled a trend. The mesh marina has long been a mainstay item in Jamaica because it provides an important function: to keep dry and cool. The “string vest,” as the mesh marina is also known, was conceived from this simple necessity.
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A company called Brynje (pronounced brun-ya) developed a woolen string vest as far back as the 1930’s, when Captain Henrik Brun of the Norwegian Army became frustrated by the standard issue undergarments provided to his troops. He approached the textile manufacturer to help him develop a top made from woven yarn pocked with holes. The garment– which later adopted the name “health vest” in the United States– would give both warmth and reduce dampness while also regulating the body’s temperature. By the 1940s, the string vest quickly became popularized as a staple undergarment in England.
The string vest was immortalized in England in the late 1950s by Andy Capp, a comic strip about a working class man that drinks a little too much and works much too little, solidifying it as a visual representation of the working class. In the 1980s, the personification was perpetuated with the Rab C Nesbitt comedy series, in which the lead character sports a string vest and champions a life of unemployment. In 2007, British newspaper The Independent declared the string vest was dead. The newspaper wrote: “The modern Brit no longer wants to wear the vest immortalised by Rab C Nesbitt and Andy Capp, and sales have tumbled. Men, or more likely their wives and girlfriends, now associate string vests with old men and pot-bellied plumbers.”
George Harrison and Bob Marley
The exportation of the style to the British Caribbean Colonies in the 1950s took particular hold in Jamaica, where string vests took on new meaning in the hot climate. The expansion of the style in Jamaican culture was further expressed in post-colonial Jamaica’s street culture where the undergarment became a staple. The “rude boy”– a colloquial term for a strong arming or a discontent young Jamaican man– embraced the garment. The marina became symbolic of the rebellious nature of the “rude boy”, who wore his undergarment as outerwear, aligning the garment with street culture. Reggae music put this rebellious culture onto an international platform, further popularizing the mesh marina as it was frequently spotted under the button downs of iconic reggae artistes like Bob Marley and Gregory Isaacs.
While the mesh marina never really disappeared, the rise of dancehall led to a new use of the top, giving it a definitive resurgence in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with artistes like Buju Banton and Terry Ganzie– whose name is taken from the term “ganzie,” meaning shirt/top in Jamaican patois– and dancers like Bogle and the Black Roses Crew, who revolutionized dancehall fashion with outrageous ensembles. Wearers now shed the button down and sported it as a top alone. Jamaican designer James Black of the label Yahdie Conscious was a young girl in the early nineties and recalls being perplexed by the style. “My first memory of mesh marinas was in prep school, and this guy actually came to a ‘fun day’ in one and I was like, ’that’s so crazy, I can see your nipples.’ To me, it was like, ‘you’re wearing this to an event?’”
Note the mesh marina graphic in the top left corner.
In his music video for “Work,” artist Barrington Levy wears a mesh marina under his vest. On the infamous Black Roses Crew corner, Levy dances vigorously to the beat with others dressed in work wear and and sings, “Everybody must work, work hard.” Despite the garment’s popularity, if you look back on ‘90s dancehall videos, you won’t see a lot of mesh on the artists. Far more common are oversized suits worn over bare chests, Coogi sweaters paired with shorts, and lots and lots of gold. Aside from the occasional front-and-center appearance like Terry Ganzie’s casual ensemble in a mesh marina for the cover of his 1992 LP Team Up, the mesh marina remained a style for the streets.
“There was a moment in the later ‘90s where having the mesh marina got taken to a whole different level. You had them in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties but between ‘89 and ‘95 it blew the fuck up,” says Walshy Fire of Major Lazer. He recalls a little-documented but memorable trend of sleeved, mesh shirts—such as the one recently worn by Popcaan in an interview with Boomshots.com—also popping up. “There was a particular company and brand [Pendeen] and, just like Patrick Ewings, it came out in the weirdest colors. One sleeve would be purple, one would be orange and one would be green, and that was the hottest thing you can get.”
A young Buju Banton wears a mesh marina while Spragga Benz, to his left, sports a standard ribbed white cotton tank. Photo courtesy: Super Beagle.
The garment became identifiable by an international audience as a Jamaican cultural “thing.” Mobb Deep’s Prodigy nods to it on their 1996 track “Still Shinin” (“Put holes through your shirt like Jamaican clothes”) and Cam’ron makes a similar reference on 2004’s “Family Ties.” But use of the mesh marina in everyday wear dwindled somewhere in the late 90s as prices rose, leading men to switch to the more internationally ubiquitous ribbed white cotton tank. As a result, mesh marinas became more of a style choice than a practicality, reggae artist Protoje recalls: “I never use to wear a mesh marina, I wore the normal top. You understand, other marinas are more of utility thing, you have them under your shirt. Mesh marina definitely is a style and an image that comes along with it, it’s very rootsy, very Jamaican roots. It’s definitely a statement piece.”
Today, young dancehall and reggae artistes are utilizing the mesh marina primarily as a style choice, part of a broader identification with retro fashion. James Black wears her own mesh marina as a nod to ’90s dancehall but combines it with more modern trends. However, she acknowledges that the style is still solidified in the streets. “I walk around everyday and I see at least one man in a mesh marina, whether its a taxi man or a man selling on the road,” she says. “That’s just like a Jamaican staple for the masses, it’s not even something that fashionable people are really wearing.”
Chronixx wears a marina (under his life vest) for a nautical scene in Protoje’s “Who Knows” video. Photo: Yannick Reid.
“Bumaye” and “Diamond Sox” video director Jay Will clarifies its double usage. “There are still people nowadays that it’s a utility and it’s based on the lifestyle and the demographic of the person: a downtown, old school type of big man or rasta man ting. It’s not about the style for them its more of a way of life.” This explains that the trend is distinguished by the movements of Jamaica’s youth culture. Jay Will continues, “When somebody actually sees a young person dress like this it’s considered a style because they’re thinking that’s no longer how we dress anymore. But there are still some people who have not been affected by or influenced by the outside culture and stayed true to that culture through the years.”
A broader affection for retro style is behind the recent influx of mesh marinas in reggae/dancehall videos. In their “Who Knows” video, Protoje and Chronixx tell a visual story as they travel cross country, shedding garments as they go, eventually pairing down to mesh marinas. Notis and Iba Mahr’s “Diamond Sox” song is an ode to the old school, as is Aidonia’s “80s Dancehall Style.” Director Jay Will played with the style in his video for “Street Bullies Medley” in 2010, the same year director Storm Saulter’s politically fueled seventies era film Better Mus Come debuted in Jamaica with a few mesh marinas speckled here and there. In “Street Bullies Medley,” Shaggy can be seen evoking the ‘80s rude boy style referenced in Iba Mahr’s song: white mesh marina, diamond socks, Arrow shirt and slacks. “We used mesh marinas to capture that rude boy spin,” says Jay Will of the video’s style inspiration. “Man would a roll up, a newspaper in his back pocket, button his top button and leave everything else open and just have his mesh marina. But inside his newspaper would be his knife. That was just a type of dressing that was referred to as Spanglers [as in the infamous posse].”
Diplo on the set of “Bumaye.” Photo: Damien “LookYah” Baddy
In Major Lazer’s “Bumaye” video, the style conjured up the late ’80s/early ’90s dancehall era, with inspiration coming from Chaka Demus and Pliers’ “Murder She Wrote” video. “Probably Wes [Diplo] was watching the “Murder She Wrote” video,” Walshy Fire says of the idea for the video’s look. “I think everybody else after that was like, ‘lets do that.’”
With style cues in place, Jay Will expounded upon the theme with extensive research of ’80s and ’90s dancehall style and dance moves to create a cohesive look for Major Lazer’s “Bumaye” video, with styling assistance from Earl “Biggy” Turner, the Jamaican designer behind the fashions in many of those same videos. “I was thinking, what were the dance moves? What was the fashion? For female fashion you had the Ouch Crew, they were the hottest things, you had Patra styling up herself, you had Shabba Ranks, Buju Banton, Capleton, all these guys were dressed by Biggy.”
For her spring/summer 2013 collection, dubbed “Murder She Wrote,” James Black designed her pieces based with the same iconic music video in mind. “90s dancehall fashion on a whole inspired my line and of course from that era there was a lot of mesh.” Ultimately, ’90s dancehall has had a profound effect on the current generation of Jamaican musicians as well. “There are certain eras where stuff was really good,” Jay Will reminisces, “The nineties were one of those glorified eras both in music and fashion.”
Wiliam Okpo Spring/Summer 2014 Collection. Photo by Bee Walker.
On a global sphere, too, there has been a resurgence of ’90s style in the last few years. And, though it may or not be related to that trend, the mesh marina is breaching the borders of Jamaica and being revisited in new textures and forms by global fashion designers. The S/S14 William Okpo collection champions a white mesh top with a cartoonish face printed on it while the S/S14 Gucci collection played with a more sporty black version tailored with architectural seams. Other S/S14 mesh emergences on the runway could be found at The Row, from those clever Olsen Twins, who utilized mesh knitting in dress form for their collection, and at Céline, where a knitted mesh skirt was paired with black and yellow sneakers.
At times the mesh trends are sportswear-influenced, such as those in the colourful collaboration between Jeremy Scott and Adidas. And the marinas in a recent collection by Rebels to Dons, a Brooklyn streetwear label with roots in Trinidad, are directly inspired by the item’s place in Caribbean fashion. James Black also sees the impact being made in the fast-fashion industry, where sadly most interesting trends go to die. “I realize that if I go to like H&M I can see a mesh marina, so clearly it’s a trend that is happening all over the world. But I would like to think that it’s a trend that originated here.”
Stylist Susannah Baker. Photo: Marlon Reid/Kingstonstyle
Whether the international market is deriving inspiration from Jamaican dancehall and reggae culture is uncertain, but it can be seen within the confines of Jamaican culture itself that the mesh marina is experiencing a renaissance amongst young tastemakers. From music videos to parties and manifestations in fashion collections, the mesh marina is recurring and like Baker’s ensemble that hot night in August when Marlon Reid stopped to snap a photo of her, it is both oddly fascinating and culturally interesting.
Walshy Fire, who recalls blending his Jamaican heritage and American surroundings in the early ’90s by customizing his mesh marinas with spraypainted graphics in line with hip-hop fashions of the day, says he’s surprised by the development. “I thought Jamaicans would always be on that foreign brands shit,” he says with amusement. “I thought I would be the only one still wearing diamond socks and Clarks and a mesh marina looking like I came out of Rockers. Now it is a real look again… This is a true resurgence of Jamaican culture and style and identity.”
Gregory Isaacs (at center with Peter Broggs, left, and Flabba Holt, right) wears a green mesh marina. Photo via: Midnight Raver.
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