A system and method are disclosed whereby the look and feel of the OS/2 operating system is added to the Swing application program interface (API), in an enhanced version of the API, referred to herein as AWTSwing. A further disclosure is the creation of a thread-relative setLookAndFeel method, which only accepts calls from a particular thread to adopt a prescribed look and feel. This makes it possible for an application to have a look and feel distinct from that of the platform, or of other concurrently executing applications. This capability is not present in the conventional version of the Swing API, which treats look and feel settings as global.