Julia Dotson
Fashion BA Hons
Central Saint Martins UAL
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textiles for Fashion / Apparel / Sustainable Fashion/Textiles
My location: London, United Kingdom
Julia Dotson
First Name: Julia
Last Name: Dotson
University / College: Central Saint Martins UAL
Course / Program: Fashion BA Hons
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textiles for Fashion / Apparel / Sustainable Fashion/Textiles
My Location: London, United Kingdom
About
Using materials found in 20th century American informed domestic spaces, I recontextualize the archetype of heteronormative spaces in a queer coded context. I correlate queer and color theory via textile specific approach as an antithesis to an patriarchal, hierarchical and chromaphobic approach to modernist design. I aim to do by using humor as a means of protest. Drawing inspiration from Derek Jarman, Gees Bend, and the Black Mountain College, I take inspiration from hobby crafts as a means of a pass time and take them out of their cultural framework. Exhibiting that such handicrafts have as much validity as a conceptual artist with formal education, the hierarchy of concept over labor can be dissolved. Those behind the labor are seen as humans, not machines. By using found and second hand textiles like brown paper bags, table cloths, and worn out t-shirts, I metaphorically and physically mend the mistakes of the past in order to make an inclusive future. Taking artforms, and the communities formed from them, that have been historically separated and bring them together. And through so aim to use making as a form of resistant healing to a flawed system of labor and gender roles.
Inspired by her life-long affection for making and crafting, Julia S. Dotson's Queer Nostalgia is an antidote to the disconnect between the maker and the wearer. The designer’s debut collection at once mediates American mid-century lesbian land movement, 1970’s crafts and spiritualism as an important source of the movement’s philosophy and artists such as Bridget Riley and Ellsworth Kelly. Dotson’s exploration of a queer community living off the land and using up what they’re surrounded with is executed through a series of five looks, with each garment iterated in shades of hand-dyed colours referencing Ithell Colquhoun’s 1977 automatic series of tarot cards. Heavily inspired by workwear archetypes picked up from the movement’s photographic archive, the collection is conceived with a sense of ease and practicality imbued in each garment; intended to be worn by everyone regardless their gender and kept and cherished for more than a mere season. The idea of human touch is stimulated further through the use of both materials and techniques accessible from one’s home - from smocked aprons and patchwork coats made from Dotson's grandmother old bridge tablecloths and napkins to hand-made aluminium buttons and crochet socks; with two looks accompanied by bespoke straw bulbous headpieces, created in collaboration with milliner Noel Stewart. It is through carefully hand-stitching the holes and dyeing over the stains of these family heirlooms, Dotson aims to not only transform the seemingly unusable and no longer longed for, but also mends the transgender-exclusionary connotations the 1970’s lesbian land movement has over the past years become a synonym of.
Competitions
