Curaçao’s Fashion Line Made From Ocean Plastic

At six in the morning, before the cruise ships have emptied their passengers onto Willemstad’s candy-colored waterfront, Sherida Martina is already at Boca Sami, a rocky, wind-battered beach on Curaçao’s less-visited northern coast, filling burlap sacks with the plastic debris that the trade winds and currents deposit there in volumes that seem, even after years of collecting, endlessly renewed. Bottle caps in a dozen faded colors. Fragments of fishing net. Flip-flops, always flip-flops, arriving from origins she can only guess at—Venezuela, most likely, given the currents, though some debris, she has learned from tracking projects, travels from as far as West Africa.

Sherida is thirty-six and runs a small fashion label, Kabana Kòrsou, out of a converted garage in the Otrobanda district of Willemstad, where she and a rotating team of four to six workers transform collected ocean plastic into buttons, beads, woven trim, and—through a process she developed with an engineer friend—a rigid, leather-like textile made from melted and pressed plastic sheeting that she uses for structured pieces like handbags and the brims of sun hats. The line’s resortwear, mostly linen and organic cotton garments trimmed and accessorized with these ocean-plastic elements, has found a growing market among boutique hotels along Curaçao’s coast, several of which now stock her pieces in their gift shops and have begun outfitting staff uniforms with her recycled-button detailing.

“People think I am making a statement about the ocean,” Sherida says, sorting a sack of collected debris into color-coded bins back at the garage workshop, the morning’s collection already drying on a tarp in the yard. “I am not making a statement. I am making a material. The statement is just what happens when people ask why the buttons look like that.”

Curaçao’s relationship to its own coastline is layered with practical tension that Sherida’s work sits directly inside. The island depends heavily on tourism tied to its reputation for clear water and pristine beaches, particularly along its protected southern coast and around the Curaçao Underwater Park. But the northern and windward coasts, less visited by tourists, absorb a disproportionate share of the marine debris carried by ocean currents from across the wider Caribbean basin and beyond, a slow accumulation that receives far less public attention or municipal cleanup resource than the postcard beaches on the leeward side.

Sherida’s process for turning this collected material into wearable textile is laborious and, in its early stages, was largely improvised through trial and error. Plastic must be sorted not only by color but by polymer type, since different plastics melt at different temperatures and behave differently under heat and pressure; mixing types produces a brittle, unusable sheet that cracks under stitching. Early in the label’s development, an entire month’s worth of collected material was ruined this way, melted into a batch so structurally unstable that none of it could be used, a setback that cost Sherida nearly all of her modest working capital at the time and nearly ended the venture before her first full collection was complete.

The rising tension of that early period, she recalls, was not just financial but personal—doubt, sustained over weeks, about whether the entire premise of the label made sense, whether “ocean plastic fashion” was a viable business or simply an admirable but impractical idea better suited to an art installation than a commercial line sold in hotel boutiques. She considered, seriously, abandoning the plastic-textile experiments and building the label instead around more conventional sustainable materials, like the recycled cotton and organic dyes several other Caribbean designers were beginning to use successfully.

What changed her mind was a conversation with an older fisherman in the nearby village of Boka Sami, whom she had gotten to know through her regular beach collection visits. When she described her doubts to him, he told her, matter-of-factly, that the fishermen of his generation had spent decades watching the plastic arrive and simply throwing it back into piles to be burned or buried, treating it as waste with no possible second use. The idea that someone might instead study it, sort it by type, and reshape it into something with value struck him, he said, as the first sensible response to the problem he had seen in years. His endorsement, informal as it was, gave Sherida the confidence to keep refining the melting process rather than abandoning it, eventually landing on a temperature and pressure formula, developed with her engineer friend over dozens more failed attempts, that produced a consistent, workable sheet material.

Today, Kabana Kòrsou’s small workshop operates on a rhythm built around the tides and the trade winds, with beach collection concentrated in the weeks after strong wind events, when new debris is most likely to have washed ashore. Sherida has begun training two young women from Otrobanda in the sorting and melting process, hoping to expand production enough to meet growing interest from boutiques in Aruba and Bonaire, the other islands of the “ABC” trio, who have approached her about stocking similar lines.

On a recent afternoon, walking the finished collection through Willemstad’s Pietermaai district, where a boutique hotel has agreed to carry a small selection of her handbags, Sherida stops to point out a detail on one bag’s clasp—a button made from a bottle cap she remembers finding at Boca Sami nearly two years earlier, its faded blue color, close to the exact shade of the Caribbean Sea itself, distinctive enough that she set it aside specifically, waiting for the right piece to use it on.

“That’s the whole thing about this material,” she says, turning the bag over in the afternoon light. “Every piece has already had one life in the ocean before it gets a second life on somebody’s shoulder. I’m not making something new. I’m just giving something old a different job.”

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