The story of Pauzewear didn’t begin with clothing. It began in 1995 with a pair of turntables and a mixing style that earned the name DJ Pause.
When I first started DJing, I came up with the name DJ Pause, partly from the way I mixed records. While blending into an incoming tune, I would briefly knock the crossfader back to the outgoing record, hit stop on the turntable to create a sharp pause effect, and then cut straight back into the new track. It created a distinctive sound and became part of my style behind the decks.
Around the same time I was also drawing graffiti, and there was one small problem, the letter S in “Pause”. I could never quite get it to look right. Eventually I replaced it with a Z, and from that point on the name became DJ Pauze.
The name stayed with me as the music journey continued to evolve. In 2005 I began moving away from playing in clubs and started focusing more on radio. Around that time, while setting up a MySpace page under the DJ Pauze name, another DJ contacted me claiming I had taken his name and MySpace handle. I had never even heard of him. I had been playing jungle music in the UK while he was part of the techno scene in North America, but it did make me rethink my performance name.
As radio became the main focus, I adopted the name Gav Pauze. It came from my first name Gavin, shortened and combined with my DJ name. It felt like a natural step forward, keeping the Pauze identity while reflecting the shift from DJ booths to broadcasting.
That identity carried forward into 2009 when I created an archive for the Unique Reggae Mix Show. The archive needed a home online, and the name came very naturally:
Pauzeradio.
It was simply Pauze… and the radio shows.
Over time the Pauze name became something bigger than just DJing. Music was still at the centre of everything, but creativity began to stretch into other areas as well. In 2017 I became a published poet with the release of my book Pauze For Thought. By that point the Pauze name had grown into a small creative ecosystem of music, radio, writing and ideas all connected through one identity.
As the years passed, new creative ideas continued to develop. I started to gravitate away from radio and DJing as a whole. Visual concepts, design ideas and conversations around clothing slowly started to take shape in the background. It wasn’t something that happened overnight, but more a gradual evolution as different creative paths began pointing in the same direction.
When the time came early in 2025 to separate the clothing side of things from Pauzeradio and allow it to grow in its own direction, the name Pauzewear felt like the natural next step. You can read more about how Pauzewear developed in Our Story.
Pauzeradio remains rooted in reggae, roots and dub culture, preserving and celebrating the music that inspired the radio shows in the first place. Pauzewear, however, opens the door to something broader, a creative space where different musical influences, visual ideas and artistic directions can come together.
Each Pauzewear piece reflects the same independent spirit that has followed the Pauze name since the mid-1990s: creativity shaped by music, ideas that evolve over time, conscious decision making, and a belief that things are often better when they are built carefully rather than rushed.
Pauzewear is simply the latest chapter in a journey that started with a pair of turntables, a mixing style, and a name that slowly grew into something much bigger than originally imagined.
