Borrowed Vibes-The World Is Wearing Our Aesthetic and Won’t Say Our Name

Accela Marketing

August 3, 2026

8

minute read

Borrowed Vibes-The World Is Wearing Our Aesthetic and Won’t Say Our Name

Somewhere in a Bath & Body Works right now, someone is smelling a candle called “Meet Me in Miami” and thinking of a beach that looks a lot like Reduit Beach. Scroll a little further and TikTok will happily hand you “coconut girl” (officially Hawaiian), “island girl beauty” (officially nowhere), and “vacationcore” (officially the South of France). Keep scrolling and you’ll find hibiscus prints, rum-cocktail palettes, raffia bags, and a whole retail economy built on the exact sensory package this region has been living in since before it was a marketing category. What you will not find, on any of those labels, is the word “Caribbean.”

We went looking for “tropicalcore,” because the internet insisted it was a real trend. It mostly isn’t. The term barely shows up in actual fashion press, mostly SEO blogs recycling each other. But that turned out to be the useful discovery, not a dead end. Because the aesthetic itself is very real, very lucrative, and very deliberately named after everywhere...EXCEPT HERE.

Everybody Gets a Credit Except Us

Fashion brands are not shy about naming a source culture when it suits them. Anthropologie’s collaboration line with Farm Rio is marketed, repeatedly and proudly, as a “Brazilian fashion house” with “Brazilian motifs.” Zara’s summer 2026 “Greek Edit” names the island of Hydra specifically, right there in the campaign copy. Brazil gets billed. Greece gets billed. The Caribbean gets the palm prints, the rum-and-coconut colour story, the “island” language and, near enough universally, silence on where any of it actually comes from. Bath & Body Works’ Summer 2026 “Coastal Dreaming” line leans on Miami, Hawaii and Rio by name.5 Malibu’s new “Malibu Pink” and its Dole tie-in sell “tropical taste” and a sweepstakes trip to Oʻahu. Malibu, a brand whose entire identity is built on Caribbean rum, declining to mention the Caribbean. Even H&M Home’s genuinely Caribbean partnership, a real collaboration with the Palm Heights hotel in Grand Cayman, gets framed in coverage around “golden sunsets,” not Caymanian culture, with the collection credited to a New York-based designer. Real sourcing, credit still routed elsewhere. That’s not theft, exactly. It’s something closer to an industry-wide habit of forgetting to ask who owns the vibe.

The Numbers Nobody’s Chasing

Here’s the part that should make every regional brand sit up: this is not a niche cultural grievance, it’s a market. Swimwear alone is roughly a $23–$24 billion global category, growing steadily. Estimates for “resort wear” swing wildly, anywhere from $1.5 billion to nearly $26 billion, depending which research firm you ask, a discrepancy so wide it tells you something important on its own: nobody has bothered to measure this category properly, which usually means nobody’s defending their share of it either. Etsy’s own sellers reported fruit-charm necklace searches up roughly 500% and raffia bag searches “more than quadrupled” in one recent season, filed cheerfully under “Island Luxe.” The demand for this aesthetic is not cooling off. It’s just being fully monetized by everyone except the region it came from.

Proof It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

This isn’t a hopeless case but it’s an unclaimed one, and there are already receipts proving the claim is winnable. Grace Wales Bonner, a British designer of Jamaican heritage, partnered with Adidas Originals on a collection Adidas’ own press materials describe as “inspired by the designer’s own Jamaican heritage”, no euphemism, no vague “island” language, the actual word Jamaican, printed and promoted globally. Edvin Thompson’s label Theophilio builds its entire house identity around Jamaican flag colours, and had its biggest pop-culture moment when Ice Spice wore it during a surprise Taylor Swift Eras Tour performance, a viral fashion moment tied explicitly, unmissably, to Jamaica Both prove the same thing: when Caribbean creators insist on the name, the industry is perfectly capable of saying it. The problem isn’t that the world can’t credit us. It’s that, so far, almost nobody’s made them.

Three moves while the vibe is still hot:

1. Name it before someone else’s marketing department does. Every regional brand selling anything remotely tropical should be saying “Caribbean” in the copy loudly, specifically, by island where possible. Don’t leave the naming rights on the table.

2. Chase the swimwear and resort-wear dollars, not just the tourist dollar. A $23-billion-plus global category currently sourcing “the vibe” from everywhere but here is a wide-open lane for an actual Caribbean-made product line to walk into.

3. Back the Wales Bonners and Theophilios coming up behind them. Regional designers like Jamaica’s Bridget Sandals and Saint Lucia’s Shanice Francis are already pushing in this direction. The region’s brands and buyers backing them loudly is how “emerging” becomes “arrived.”

The world has clearly decided it wants what we’ve got the prints, the palette, the whole sun-warmed mood. Credit is the one thing on that shopping list nobody’s rung up yet. Time we make them pay it.

Sources

1. ‘Coconut Girl’ Is On TikTok’s Summer Fashion Moodboard — Nylon

2. ‘Coconut Girl Aesthetic’ Is TikTok’s Latest Throwback Trend — WWD/Sourcing Journal

3. ‘Island Girl Beauty’ Is the Next Best Thing to a Tropical Paradise Escape — Who What Wear

4. ‘Vacationcore’ Lets You Dress Like You’ve Escaped to Europe — Fashionista

5. Bath & Body Works Summer 2026 collection press release

6. Malibu Takes Tropical Flavor To The Next Level — PR Newswire

7. H&M Home’s New Collab (Palm Heights, Grand Cayman) — Dengarden

8. Anthropologie x Farm Rio Collection — SheKnows

9. Zara Summer 2026 ‘Greek Edit’ — The Fashionisto

10. Swimwear Market industry analysis — Grand View Research

11. Swimwear Market report — Fortune Business Insights