Niilartey De Osu walks into his studio and toward his tools. He's soon holding a pair of cutting shears in one hand and a dish filled with clothing pins in the other. He pauses a moment to visually measure the drab skirt and jacket he will soon transform, and moves in to make the first cut.
Steven Dewall
Shown in his Western Avenue showroom, De Osu can’t sew a stitch, nor does he sketch his eccentric designs.
Steven Dewall
De Osu’s shop has attracted its share of sidewalk oglers.
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"You look like the person at the party that nobody wants to talk to," he jokes to Richael Manisha Karter, the woman wearing the garments. It's De Osu at his most comfortable, creating while gently teasing his muse: five feet 11 inches of ethnically ambiguous former model who grows more naked with every snip.
The converted art gallery De Osu is designing in serves as studio, showroom, and base of operations for Neodandi—the name not only of De Osu's fashion line, but of a movement he hopes will spur a fashion renaissance in a town famous for its no-frills sensibility.
De Osu—44, handsome, short—stands eye to clavicle with a stiff-backed Karter in front of double full-length mirrors. The cutting continues, and wedges of fabric begin to pile at her feet. His goal for this afternoon is to create a woman's jacket from the charcoal-grey two-piece ensemble one of his assistants secured from a local thrift store. As he describes it, it will fit as if it were just about to slip off the body. And as with many of De Osu's designs, the end product will be a bit revealing.
Hung dramatically from a maze of pipes in the Neodandi showroom are men's and women's garments of various materials and types. There's a slight military-uniform influence, as if he were designing for some post-apocalyptic officer who doesn't mind texture and has little concern for consistent zipper placement. None of the designs, however, could exactly be described as understated. A prerequisite for becoming one of De Osu's customers— Neodandis, as he calls them—would seem to be a lack of timidity.
De Osu looks every bit the stereotypical fashion eccentric in his own uniform: artfully ripped black trousers (which he designed himself), a flowing white button-down with unfastened French cuffs, and a turban. Nearby is Neodandi's resident seamster, Lance Phromnopavong, also wearing a turban. Shortly after he began working at Neodandi, Phromnopavong told De Osu the story of his turban: A young girl gave it to him while he was waiting for a bus in Bangkok. Soft-spoken, lanky, and dressed in a flowing red suit coat, he's worn it nearly every day since.
The two move in semi-tandem, with De Osu cutting here and fastening there as Phromnopavong hands him pins. In the parlance of the fashion design community, the technique is called deconstructing. It's what De Osu specializes in: taking materials from different sources and tearing them down to build them back into something else. Unlike many designers, he doesn't sketch his work beforehand; rather, he intuits the design. Like an improv comedian, he works without a net.
After a few minutes, the jacket starts to take shape. De Osu cuts another length of fabric from the skirt, then pauses a moment to wax metaphysical. The son of Ghanaian immigrants, De Osu speaks in an accent that is not quite African, just vaguely foreign. Fashion design, he explains, is about "energy that we can't see but that we can synch with, energy that can turn two things that are mundane and bring them together to turn them into something beautiful. We can't see it, but it exists."
The fitting continues, as does the lecture. "Neo," he says, shortening the name of his line, "is a perpetual state of birth. It's the thing that never is because as soon as it comes out, it's no longer what it was."
In 2004, after struggling for years on the borders of Seattle's arts scene, De Osu began to design apparel with material begged from local wedding shops. Six years later, he's one of just a handful of local couture designers who have managed to gain a level of notoriety—though in his case, infamy is also an applicable term.
De Osu takes one last look before Karter heads to the back rooms to change back into her own clothes. From the first pinning to the last, the entire process took around 45 minutes. Afterward, she passes the jacket on to be "dissected and perfected" by the seamsters—one of whom will quit two weeks after Christmas, citing the repeated tardiness of her scheduled pay.
She's not the only employee who's quit Neodandi in frustration. Since he began designing, De Osu, who cannot sew a stitch, has been disgruntling the people he's commissioned to do it for him. One former staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity says, "It's like he's a cult leader. He has people buy into the idea that Neodandi is not just a fashion line, but that it's this grand way of life—and then he doesn't pay them on time." It's not uncommon for Neodandi's staff to put in 80 hours per week, she adds. Those who aren't willing to do that, she continues, don't last long.
