Robert Young is an artist and designer from Trinidad and Tobago whose work centers Caribbean memory, labor, and resistance. Since founding The Cloth in 1986, he has used clothing as a primary medium – capturing social landscapes shaped by Afro-Caribbean life and working collaboratively with communities to dress, empower, and represent themselves.

Rooted in working-class histories, Young’s practice reaches back to sites of resistance and translates their energy into the present. This ethos is central to his role as a designer and bandleader in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, where his long-running masquerade band A Vulgar Fraction creates performance art on the streets of Port-of-Spain. His pedagogical process invites participants to engage ideas through making mas by hand, reclaiming creativity as collective and personal expression. 

Shaped by a family legacy of union organizing and cooperative economics, Young’s work interrogates the enduring impacts of slavery, indentureship, and colonialism, exploring how creative practice can mend fractured selves and strengthen community life.

The Cloth is canon in the Caribbean fashion and design community and is regularly featured in regional fashion events. The brand’s disruptive, bold and distinctive garments have been worn by heads of state and cultural icons and exhibited internationally, featured at Paris Fashion Week, FIT, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.