For Wear LACMA, dosa designed a 10-piece collection around the paintings Watts Towers I and Watts Towers with Kite by actress and artist Gloria Stuart. The clothing is made with digitally printed fabrics, patchwork techniques, leftover fabric scraps, and vintage beads.

 

On E 107th Street in Watts, Los Angeles, steel spires incongruously appear, soaring up into the sky. During the course of 33 years, from 1921 to 1954, Italian immigrant Simon Rodia singlehandedly built “Nuestro Pueblo” on the small triangular plot of land where he lived. Now called Watts Towers, the series of 17 interconnected towers was constructed entirely by hand without a predetermined design. For lack of money, Rodia had no help. He used simple tools: a bucket, a chisel, his two hands. His materials were discarded objects: tile shards, broken pottery, sea shells, glass bottles, soda cans, coat hangers, fragments of concrete. He used nearby railroad tracks as leverage to bend re-bar by hand. With no scaffold, he’d climb up his towers, the tallest measuring 99 ft, with a bucket and a couple tools to continue his work during his off hours.

 

“From my point of view as a designer, that’s an enormous commitment. I see what Rodia, a self-made artist, has done, and it gives me great purpose and a foundation from which to work. To give one’s self a limitation, to dedicate one’s life to working on one piece, to use only discarded materials, to work alone, to use only one’s hands and basic hand tools — can actually become an endless source of inspiration and creativity.” –Christina Kim