The 86 Machetes originated in Georgetown St Vincent, well known as Sugar City because of the town’s cultivation of sugar cane which maintained the economy.

After the collapse of the sugar cane industry the town suffered tremendously but the farmers remained in their hometown. (Johnny Cash sang about it in “Joshua gone Barbados” check that $hit out.) 

The 86 machetes are the children of the people that built that town and the name was derived from the year of their generation and the tool used to cultivate the sugar cane. 

A handful of friends with a struggling town in common….regardless of personal differences the glue that held the friendship together was the hunger to want more for themselves and their community. The realisation that a lot of the circumstances that affected their livelihood was the result of the choices made by people who weren’t even from there…people who they never saw. 

When the friendship group spread out to different counties it became evident that the issues they had in their town weren’t unique to them, anywhere you go there’s a sector of people that farm, that build, that cultivate, with pens, keyboards, microphones, people that get up everyday to do 9-5 jobs with the community in mind while trying to survive the results of the decisions made by men they never see.

So the 86 Machetes friendship group grew into a community of people. They began meeting along the way from similar backgrounds regardless of race, location, religion. The glue that held it together is the realisation that we are the poor majority being governed by a rich minority and so were our parents.

There’s a way to use whatever tools you’ve acquired along the way to bring us together to make changes and to make our own choices and rise above the system that makes the descions for us. On this platform that tool is art, art in different mediums. 

The 86 machetes are farmers, farmers that want to shape their hometown, shape their own destiny, decide how the story ends and share their own story however they see fit.  

They answer to nobody but each other. The community is regulated by the people, for the people…from the bottom where the floor starts and since all seeds grow from the ground up, there’s no better place to begin.

For the amalgamation of all nations and the infiltration of the Babylon system. From the children of the Machetes that farmed our lands we give you these fruits from the West Indies.

Marcia Machete:

Marcia Machete is the 86 Machetes neighbourhood mascot with a crown of fruits and Amerindian carnival costume making the world a tropical place…..and sometimes not.

CityTropics:

CityTropics is not street wear, it’s “what you wear when you’re tired of the street”...wear.

It’s a “….please leave me alone… I’m on a Caribbean holiday at home” uniform, for the people in the belly of the beast who might never see these islands and a novelty for those who have.

An offering of a raw and unfiltered Caribbean experience to a concrete world that needs a vacation from itself…. to a tropical paradise that finds opportunity everywhere else except within.

CityTropics is a rest stop where two worlds meet to take a break from the one thing we all have in common regardless of which world you’re from.

The Pressures from the never yielding System.

So f#ck those emails today, put your feet up, light that and put an umbrella in your drink and we’ll present to you a tropical experience the same way the west presented its “world of wonders” to us.