This Sustainable Fashion Brand Is Inspired By A Responsibility To Enlighten His Kinfolk Of Their Sovereign Blackness & Heal From Pervasive Enslavement Of The Mind & Body

Every so often we connect with a designer that truly embodies the luxury, history and creative ingenuity of Afro-Indigenous sustainable style. Jamaican born designer, Damian Joel (known as DJ), is the epitome of sustainable innovation by honoring Diaspora legacy through preloved pieces that are intricately re-crafted with intention. His collection unapologetically INTRO X DJ articulates liberation, life and love!

So excited to share this interview:

How do you define sustainability?

Sustainability is a mindset that honours the self as being interconnected with others and the land we inhabit. This indigenous mindset is not self-serving, exploitative and doesn’t glorify excess, rather it ensures balance, equity, and regeneration.

When and why did you become a designer?

Designing has long been part of my existence out of necessity. As we say in Jamaica [my home country]: “tun yuh han, mek fashion”, which loosely translates to being resourceful and improvising to survive. My mother used her sewing skills to keep me clothed, and I inherited those skills and started at a very young age to alter and repair my clothes to extend their lifespan. After years of tiptoeing around fashion due to being raised in a heteronormative society, I moved to New York in 2014 to explore my range as a designer. I landed my first job as a Costume Designer for the Black Spectrum Theatre Company in Queens, where most of my work was rooted in working with a shoestring costume budget, thrifting garments, repurposing the pieces to bring characters to life for historical and fictional Black stories. The fashion industry had too many barriers to entry for me. As a refugee, I wasn’t able to afford attending a fashion design college, nor an unpaid internship, and following a meeting with a leading luxury brand the body of work I presented in my portfolio was deemed “primitive” and out of touch with the trends of mainstream fashion. The most imperceptible barrier however was my Blackness. In 2019, I decided to carve my own path and started a clothing line that was grounded in everything that was intrinsically part of my existence and seemed to be an antithesis to the fashion industry—with a focus on individuality not trends, cantering Black stories and realities, with my practice of taking old garments and reconstructing them to make them new, as a self-taught designer.

How do you contextualize this idea of sustainability within the realm of your Blackness?

As a Black man the idea of sustainability is inextricable to my existence. It’s stitched into my DNA by way of my ancestors. I often laugh at the sudden “awakening”, hijacking, and glamorization of the idea by my white counterparts. What’s even more problematic is the tone of judgement that accompanies their disproportionately amplified voices. As someone who embodies Blackness, I understand the nuances of the disconnect between our inherently sustainable nature and our desire for luxury or luxury adjacency as a means of liberation. Therefore within the context of my Blackness and sustainability lies a larger ongoing conversation about the impacts of enslavement and systemic oppression by way of colonial capitalism.

What inspires your brand?

INTRO x DJ is inspired by my divine sense of responsibility to enlighten my kinfolk of their sovereign Blackness, their ancestral history, healing from pervasive enslavement of the mind and body, and a need to conjugate a new Black future that doesn’t fight for access, but rather builds and protects our own much like our ancestors did before enslavement. The name INTRO is synonymous with the idea of taking ownership of our narratives, pulling reference from the past, to set the tone for the way forward. The ethos of the brand is carried through in my design practice of sourcing preloved garments, and redesigning or renewing them for a new stage of their existence. It is a continuous practice of honouring the old, learning, and healing. It goes far beyond aesthetic value, as each garment tells its own unique story and results in a form of visual history.

You have taught restorative fashion design in prior years - share the vibe of that experience!

I’ve partnered with the KIPP Middle School’s after school program as an Activity Specialist in Fashion Design in 2017. The student population is primarily BIPOC students (particularly African-American and Afro-Caribbean). One of the greatest challenges for me was engaging them with a new way of thinking of fashion as a language form. My mission was to expand their understanding of fashion beyond pop culture and root them in the concept of using fashion as a means of discovering their individual identities. I’m of the belief that the more connected we are with self, the less we’ll be cajoled by the capitalist allure of trends. My students were very receptive, especially to field trips that we took to the Museum at FIT and Refinery29 headquarters where they were challenged to capture recognizable moments of individual style and discuss them in our next session. All of their design challenges pulled from practices in sustainability: repurposing preloved garments, using scraps of fabric to design efficiently, repair techniques, and most importantly honouring Mother Nature as the first great designer. The most telling summation of the experience came from one of my students who at the end of the semester said in a note to me, “When I first came to class I didn’t even know how to sew…and now I can say that I made an outfit inspired by the element of fire.”

Where do you hope to see the future of fashion / sustainable fashion as we climb out of a global pandemic and adjust to heightened awareness of our racial pandemic?

I honestly hope to see a shift from the hegemonic brands and publications in Western fashion, and a heightened curiosity for and support of independent small fashion brands. I hope for an awakening to our “essence” and for us [Black people] to liberate ourselves from the validation we seek by being “en vogue” in white-led media companies whose business model doesn’t have Black equity woven into their mission/vision statements or organizational structure. Is it too radical to ask that we continuously celebrate the work of our Black family in the here and now, instead of when they’ve “made it” thus reinforcing the power structure occupied by the white supremacist delusion? Asking for a friend. On the note of sustainability: once we reconnect with our roots (our truth) it will reshape how we experience and interact with fashion. We will understand that reconstruction, repair, and preservation of our garb is in fact very Black, and thus genius.