Visceral Threads is an on-going project that consists in creating garments sourced from my expressive interpretation of locations and cultures. Physically exploring different locations of LA county and encountering their local habitants to create garments as a reflection of my depiction of the location based on what I interpreted from viscerally depicting the habitants.
Compton is the second city of the project. I started the exploration by visiting the iconic Martin Luther King Jr memorial at the Compton Courthouse, where I was shocked by the presence of a cowboy crossing the street on a horse, where I learned about the Compton Cowboys and its rich presence in the history of Compton. I continued to observe the people wandering and walking around the city. A lot of people seemed rushed and on the go, I perceived a lot of dynamic movement, work had to get done, and a family to come home to. A lot of natural people enjoy life and its joy without the presence of the phone, riding bikes, hanging out outside corner stores, walking to get food, or just chatting on a bench. It reminded me how life in the 90's could have felt like, or how much the 90s influenced the behavior of the people living in the present. It made me realize how people's behavior is derived from past history, culture, lifestyle, and trends to come back to. The people in the Compton scene seemed to have preserved from drastically moving forward, an established culture that has drastically derived from the asserted dominance of the Cowboy presence in Compton in the 80s to the influential street rap & hip hop scenery that ruled the 90s & early 2000s.
This is the reason why I wanted to create a double-layered fleece sweatshirt that shows both the cowboy's and hip-hop identities of Compton along its recent history.
I decided to use a heavy-weight fleece fabric for the sweatshirt as the 90's rap scene is known for heavy and oversized wear, which contributes to the back and front design graphic that features the Chicago White Sox logo and LA Kings, referents in 90's hip hop emblems, cornering around graphics of the people I observed in Compton, as a way to better reflect their identities and presence in. Compton 1/1.
The front of the sweatshirt features a graphic of the vandalized mural of JFK with a spray-painted statement: "Justice 4 All Heroes", which reflects on the political voice that revolved around Compton and its infamous music scene in the 90's.
The text and LA King's emblem are laser engraved into the fabric, which enables ripping over time, allowing the display of the second layer of the sweatshirt 'hiding' underneath, which is a screen-printed design of the Compton Cowboys. I wanted to reflect on the movement of time from the Cowboy's dominated 80s to the rap-dominated 90's by using the style of Palimpsests, where the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain, just like the re-pasting of music event posters on top of each other on public walls. This is also achieved by the 'peeling' effect of the seam edges revealing the 'hidden' layer underneath.
Both shoulder and side seams are sealed with laser-engraved black denim used to mimic the construction of a throat latch on a horse's harness
PROCESS
