When people talk about the resumption of relations between the United States and Cuba, they talk mostly about history and diplomacy and influence, and what it could mean for the future in terms of trade and travel, not to mention human rights.
What they do not generally talk about, however, is fashion.
Yet odds are, fashion is about to talk a lot about Cuba — and not just because the current diplomatic situation has given it a timely edge, and fashion is tasked with channeling the zeitgeist. Nor because more relaxed State Department import regulations may affect the apparel flow from south to north, or even because the Minnesota Orchestra just played there.
But because, for an island of approximately 11.2 million people, Cuba has always occupied an outsize space in the designer imagination.
We're not talking about guayabera or Cuban-collared shirts, although they have become a menswear perennial; we're talking about something more abstract and more visual: a sense of color and climate and mood that feeds a fantasy of the "forbidden island" and has been a source of endless inspiration for designers with ties to the country (Cuban-Americans such as Adolfo, Narciso Rodriguez, Isabel Toledo and Alejandro Ingelmo) and without.
It spurred Donatella Versace's spring/summer 2015 men's collection, for example, with white jeans embroidered in gold palm leaves, sorbet shades of pink and sand and ocean blue and lacelike inserts that made references to Havana architecture.
It gave shape to Tracy Reese's spring/summer 2014 womenswear collection of full-skirted, tropical-toned hibiscus-print styles.
It was, Matthew Williamson told British Vogue, the inspiration for the saturated tones and intarsia foliage of his debut 2010 menswear collection.