Interview
Preserving Culture Through Design
Quiana Cronie Weaves the Spirit of Aruba Into Modern Workwear
Aruban designer Quiana Cronie is building a world where heritage becomes wearable. Her Cashaca collection revisits the humble workwear once worn by farmers and fishermen, transforming flour-bag shirts from the 1860s into contemporary garments stitched with memory, material, and meaning.
Cronie’s practice sits somewhere between anthropology and design. It’s tactile, archival, and deeply personal. After years studying in the Netherlands, she began looking back home for inspiration, not to nostalgia, but to rediscovery. The vibrant textures, dialect, and folklore of Aruba became her palette. What emerged is a multidisciplinary body of work that merges storytelling, photography, and fashion into a single language.
The Cashaca Collection is an homage to the island’s working class, the women, farmers, and fishermen whose ingenuity once shaped everyday life. In the 19th century, Arubans would repurpose flour bags into straight-cut shirts known as cashacas. Cronie channels that same resourcefulness, but through salvaged cotton tablecloths sourced from local hotels.
Tourism now dominates the island’s economy, so the material choice becomes both poetic and political, a subtle critique and continuation of history. Each reused tablecloth carries its own hidden imprint of service and hospitality, now reborn as durable, character-driven garments.
Cronie approaches each outfit as a character, designing not only the garments but the world around them, the colors, textures, accessories, and even the setting in which they’re photographed. The result is a living archive of Aruban life told through modern eyes.
One look reflects on the island’s old fruit market, once a lively site of community now replaced by souvenir stalls. Bright patterns and Florin-printed fabrics nod to the vitality of the past, while also questioning the cost of commercialization.
Cronie sees Cashaca not just as a fashion collection, but as a growing ecosystem of stories. Sustainability, for her, extends beyond material; it’s about cultural longevity.
“Each trip back to Aruba feels like a creative reset.”
Quiana Cronie
Cronie’s design journey began in classrooms filled with product prototypes and material tests. But it was distance that sharpened her perspective. “Each trip back to Aruba feels like a creative reset,” she reflects. “The contrast between the grey, fast-paced life in the Netherlands and Aruba’s colors and textures keeps redefining my practice.”
That tension between minimal European restraint and Caribbean vibrancy has become her signature. The silhouettes remain clean and functional, while the surfaces, stitched, dyed, or layered, hum with energy. The work feels both archival and forward-looking: memory engineered for the present.
In many ways, Cronie’s practice has come full circle — from her early experiments in upcycling to a body of work that restores what time risks erasing. Whether transforming discarded fabric into workwear or imagining underwater structures that nurture coral, her vision is one of renewal. Through Cashaca, she reminds us that design isn’t only about what we make, but what we choose to keep alive, stories, materials, and the spirit of a place that endures long after the garment fades.
Quiana Cronie previously formed part of the Recent™ Talent Program, an initiative that offers internships to university students and supports them in developing their creative skillsets.
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