Jasmine Philips is one of the few people who are creating costumes locally for the Carnival. After more than 30 years of creation for her troupe called the Survivors, she has decided to take a step back from this all-consuming passion.
In Jasmine Phillips’ house, feathers, rhinestones and sequins are creatures of habit. But this year, her living room is pretty tidy. There are only a few scraps of fabric and a few tools on the floor between dozen of trophies earned over the years. “It didn’t look like this in previous years, it was everywhere”, she slips into our ear with fun. The founder of Survivors Production has spent more than 30 years creating the costumes of some 300 troupe’s members, both adults and children, who have taken part in the parades on the Dutch and on the French side.
Today, there is nothing more than a few of them who are sill making costumes on the island, the rest is made “abroad”, Jasmine Phillips explains. Even if she has always been helped by a few people because “you cannot do everything on your own”, she has reached the end of this fascinating but very time-consuming journey. Costume confection can take from one day to one month, depending on the difficulty of the piece. “After work, after midnight, we are still making costumes”, she says. “It’s mentally tiring because it comes on top of the music band management and everything else”. The low profitability of one creation was a further argument in motivating Jasmine Phillips to move on. “You see the beauty of the costume but seldom its value. Some of the feathers cost 5 dollars a piece”. Thus a costume is worth between 400 and 800 dollars and can come up to more than a thousand dollars. This is a huge cost for a non-profit organization, which is essentially financed by sponsoring.
FROM CREATING TO COACHING
Hence, since 2019, Jasmine has abandoned confection to focus on coaching pageant queens. She is currently helping 3 candidates work on their speech, their posture, and everything that can help them win the great contest, which is taking place on March 27th this year. However, she is not completely over her passion as she is making the costumes for the candidates. After 30 years, “it’s hard to renew oneself, you always come back to the same patterns”, she acknowledges. But thanks to her experience, the creator has learned to develop her own touch and to perfect her style. “Depending on their age and preferences, some people want something sexy, others want dressier and more traditional costumes. The important thing is to know your customer”.
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