Kela Roberts

Twen­ty-two, bub­bly, bright, and fran­ti­cal­ly fash­ion­able. Je­nesse Montablo is the wit and dri­ve be­hind Vi­va La Di­va pop-up, the hottest trend­ing thrift event in the coun­try, one that she has been co­or­di­nat­ing for the last year and a half. Un­der her care­ful eye, Vi­va La Di­va has pushed thrift­ing in Trinidad to­wards be­com­ing an en­tire ex­pe­ri­ence, mov­ing away from its less glam­orous ori­gins as a poor man’s means of shop­ping.

Montablo her­self is some­what of an out­lier with­in the Trinida­di­an cul­tur­al frame­work. The daugh­ter of first-gen­er­a­tion Fil­ipino im­mi­grants to Trinidad, her child­hood in the Philip­pines was marked by an ear­ly re­la­tion­ship with sec­ond-hand cloth­ing.

Montablo ex­plained that she was ashamed of thrift­ing as she of­ten watched her friends af­ford brand-name items while she searched for some­thing light­ly used, some­thing vin­tage, but not quite as sta­tus-marked.

“My moth­er al­ways told me that though it was less ex­pen­sive, I was get­ting some­thing more unique, some­thing in­di­vid­ual.” Though she did not un­der­stand at the time, her moth­er was giv­ing her a strong base for un­der­stand­ing the time­less­ness that clothes can pos­sess and the val­ue in see­ing be­yond the new­ness of a tag in­to the ac­tu­al ver­sa­til­i­ty of cloth­ing.

Through thrift­ing and vin­tage shop­ping, Montablo found her “pas­sion for fash­ion.” By un­in­ten­tion­al­ly re­ject­ing the fresh-off-the-rack shop­ping mod­el, she built a sense of fash­ion root­ed in a keen sense of self-ex­pres­sion.

Af­ter mov­ing to Trinidad and fur­ther de­vel­op­ing her sense of style, she start­ed her own brand, Off Kuts, where she made en­tire­ly new pieces of cloth­ing from dis­card­ed scraps of fab­ric and cloth­ing.

“Peo­ple didn’t get it at first; they were con­fused,” she stat­ed, elab­o­rat­ing that Tri­nis could not, at the time, see the point of buy­ing clothes that she re­worked. Still, the con­fu­sion sur­round­ing her ideas for fash­ion nev­er de­terred her. Af­ter a brief hia­tus, she re­turned to Off Kuts and shift­ed to­wards a more in­ten­tion­al cre­ative process, us­ing dis­card­ed fab­rics in­stead of full pieces of cloth­ing and fo­cus­ing on ex­per­i­ment­ing with new styles. Grungy, bold, and even a lit­tle weird, her cloth­ing stands out in the Trinida­di­an fash­ion space, usu­al­ly crowd­ed with flo­rals and trop­i­cal batik prints.

The birth of Vi­va La Di­va

Vi­va La Di­va it­self start­ed as an in­for­mal idea. Thrift­ing has been cir­cu­lat­ing on­line in a post-COVID world racked with in­fla­tion, as young, fash­ion-con­scious peo­ple try to shop with­out break­ing the bank. Montablo her­self, who had been sell­ing her clothes on­line since 2024, fig­ured she could start her own pop-up thrift shop. In 2025, she start­ed in­for­mal­ly at first, just ask­ing her friends if they had any clothes they would like to sell. “A lot of my friends agreed, they be­lieved in me and this idea,” she stat­ed.

Up­on re­al­is­ing that the idea had the po­ten­tial to grow, they moved to a phys­i­cal lo­ca­tion for a pop-up shop at the Burg, a low-key vin­tage shop in Wood­brook. Vi­va La Di­va start­ed to take on a flea mar­ket char­ac­ter­is­tic, and the over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive re­sponse pushed Montablo to ex­pand, mov­ing the event to Tam­bran House, then Samaan Es­tate, both in Port of Spain.

It has now grown to around 60 ven­dors, each of them hand-picked by Montablo her­self. She does much of the work or­gan­is­ing the event on her own, from the vi­ral graph­ics that grab at­ten­tion on In­sta­gram to edit­ing reels and man­ag­ing the brand’s so­cial me­dia pres­ence. Montablo metic­u­lous­ly keeps her fin­ger on every pulse of her event.

Fo­cus­ing on ac­ces­si­ble pric­ing and an in­clu­sive en­vi­ron­ment, she cu­rates an ex­pe­ri­ence that makes peo­ple want to stay long af­ter they have bought what they want­ed. Cus­tomers can get clothes from as low as 5 TTD, hand-craft­ed wire jew­ellery, glit­ter tat­toos, vin­tage ac­ces­sories, and even cold craft-brewed teas and cof­fees, of­fer­ing re­fresh­ments while shop­ping takes place. The en­tire ex­pe­ri­ence is un­der­lined by a cu­rat­ed playlist and, more re­cent­ly, DJ sets.

At the thrift pop-ups, peo­ple dance, talk, com­pare finds, and come dressed as their truest selves. Montablo said she trusts her­self to up­hold this stan­dard of in­clu­siv­i­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty, and af­ford­abil­i­ty at all her pop-ups. For Montablo, her fu­ture and that of Vi­va La Di­va pop-up are ex­pan­sive.

“I try to be re­al­is­tic — I know fash­ion isn’t the most lu­cra­tive field on its own, so I’m ac­tu­al­ly cur­rent­ly in nurs­ing school,” she stat­ed, adding that fash­ion it­self will al­ways be a pas­sion.

With fash­ion pour­ing from her veins, Montablo shares her will­ing­ness to ex­press her­self through Vi­va La Di­va and plans to con­tin­ue it, hope­ful­ly tak­ing the thrift mar­ket to oth­er parts of the coun­try, east, south, and even To­ba­go.