When I ask Julia Sue Dotson what they are afraid of, there’s a lengthy pause and then the reply: “Uncertainty… that all the systems you thought you could believe in are just Wizard of Oz, a little man behind a curtain.”
A recent graduate of the fashion MA at Central Saint Martins, Julia is gender non-conforming, a reality that extends into all aspects of their life and work. We meet to discuss their graduate collection, six looks handcrafted from an eclectic mix of reclaimed materials including napkins, tablecloths and paper bags spliced together to create clothes that transcend time, gender and received sustainability tropes, that is dedicated to their great-aunt Clara, who – in the words of Julia’s genealogist cousin Mitch – was a “gender bender” in 1960s Alabama. Many of Julia’s peers protest aggressively against the injustices and toxic legacy gifted to them. This one is a gentler soul, preferring to use their work to mend, heal and amuse rather than polarise.
Tell me a bit about your upbringing.
I was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. If y’all ever go, I used to be a tour guide – the education system there is very adamant about teaching local history, so I can give you the bish and the bosh.
What was it like growing up there?
Well for me it was quite good, I got to go to a public arts middle and high school, and creativity was really at the forefront of learning – not quite Steiner but it was just so chill. You could just leave class and it would be fine, everybody was weirdly OK with it.
And are you from a big family?
My mom was married twice before my dad and I have three half siblings, who are more like aunties really. My mother is wonderful, but she is a very camp woman, for lack of a better description. She is very stylish and has always had an interest in clothing, she’s a creative woman. My grandma is the one who taught me to sew. She was a home economics major in the 1960s in Alabama, so that’s where all the homemaker upbringing came from. I used to make my own clothes from when I was young. When I started at CSM I was like, “What the fuck? no one knows how to make anything.”
Talk to me about the inspiration for the collection.
It started with a focus on what people feel like in clothes, more than how they look. Then I started to explore scent and the relationship between scent and nostalgia and started making old-school perfumes.
So how did that come together with the more historical family inspiration?
It was just a random chat I had with my cousin Mitch. He’s an amateur novelist and genealogist and keeps all our family records. He was saying he had a cousin called Clara who was a “gender bender”. Once I was back in the UK, I emailed Mitch and asked him to send all the imagery of Clara, and we had a really beautiful exchange. My family is pretty conservative, and Mitch is definitely part of that, but he was interested in understanding what the gender binary means. I guess that conversation embodied what I try to do creatively, make these big, seemingly scary topics available to people who need to understand, not to the people who are already in the boat.
I love it when people make a protest with clothing, but it can be so confrontational. And yes you need confrontation for things to happen, but not all the time.
What I get from the clothes is that they bring these very politicised and often divisive conversations around gender and other issues back to a very human relatable scale.
I love it when people make a protest with clothing, I’m so glad that we’re able to do it, but it can be so confrontational. And yes you need confrontation for things to happen, but not all the time. For me it’s always a balance of trying to be kind and understanding, but also quite punchy.
You speak about repairing the damage in the materials as a metaphor for repairing the damage between people, and you could even extend that to repairing the damage from and in the fashion industry.
There is so much textile waste that you can make clothes from and that act of repair is a tiny bandage on a massive problem but it’s still a signal.
And what did you want to bring into the collection from your exploration of Clara’s experience?
Judging from the pictures, she had a limited wardrobe, but she always had a men’s white shirt on, and her clothes looked like they mattered to her. I wanted to communicate that sense of care and maintenance in my collection. Having said that, the materials I’ve used, like the paper, are about recognising that clothing isn’t supposed to be preserved, it is supposed to change with time and with wear.
Where do you see your work sitting within the current fashion system?
It feels weird right now. Fashion is fucking horrible, but it is also a beautiful way of storytelling. I’ve never really felt like I fit in, so in terms of queer dressing, the collection is not quite butch enough – there are still skirts, in that binary way. There’s too much colour, and that’s not quite masc enough. It’s granola-crunchy-lesbian, but equally it has this boyish undertone. Also, the way sustainability is expressed in fashion feels very limited, it’s either very sleek and new, or it’s very hippy and there’s not much in between. I’m torn between wanting to make things that are approachable and making something luxurious which is inevitably super expensive, because the price reflects the time that went into it. I want to put the value of labour into luxury. I really like the idea of making fashion more participatory, so people can have a role in the hand work and the value of the clothes. Paco Rabanne used to have these assembly kits for the coin dresses, and they were half the price. Why is there not more of this? It would be amazing if you can make a demi-couture piece yourself.
What scares you?
At the moment it’s uncertainty. I guess having all of these systems that you thought you could rely on or you believe in that don’t even have a structure to them, there’s nothing underneath, very Wizard of Oz. That’s maybe why I integrated the Piggly Wiggly and the John Deere print into the collection, these brands that are so intrinsic to my upbringing but that in many ways just use nostalgia as a way of upholding white Christian values.
More positively, what do you love?
I’m very in love right now and I love food, two very generic things, but I forget what a big part of the day those two things take up.
Clothes and accessories throughout from Julia Sue Dotson’s
Central Saint Martins graduate collection, For Clara.
Casting: Roxane Dia. Models: Tomique Gibson and Jules at Milk. Hair: Roxane Attard. Make-up: Athena Paginton. Set design: Phoebe Shakespeare. Photography assistants: Oliver Matich and Ed Phillips. Styling assistant: Colleen Finnerty. Set assistant: Alice Colfox. Production: The Curated with Giorgio Tsintoukidis, Katie Holmes and Phoebe Asker. Thanks to Artem Project, Anne-Gael Senic and Dominik Slowik.