Rastafarians

Youth movement, lifestyle and spontaneous fashion movement. It took root in Jamaica and invaded England at the beginning of the 1970s. It was linked to the spread of raggae music. The “rastas” generally wore camouflage uniforms, jeans, rough-weave wool caps in the colors of the Ethiopian flag (red, green, and gold) and wore their hair long, braided into the distinctive dreadlocks. This style, which in the 1980s also influenced such fashion designers come Vivienne Westwood, is not limited to clothing, but also has a genuine ideology that basically breaks down to a movement for the proud affermation of ethnic identity among the young Jamaicans, but which also calls for the existence of a great black nation and a messiah, identified in the person of the late emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, the ideal leader of the struggle for the redemption of the black race and its return to the promised land of Ethiopia.