CAREER NARRATIVE

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Career Narrative

Julian Prince Dash

When I was young, my mother asked me, "If I told you I was a different ethnicity, would that change who you are or what you like?" I did not understand her then. I understand her now. She was asking who has the authority to define me: inheritance, public opinion, circumstance, or me. My career has become my answer. The stories we inherit matter, but they are not final. I am ultimately responsible for determining who I am and what I make of what I have been given. I can factually say my mother being an artist, raised me as an artist: in the heart and mind. She also always said u cant teach art and that if you asked her to paint a banana it would be a purple triangle with spots. 

I was born in Yokosuka, Japan, and raised in new york south carolina, boston, los anaglese san diego and a few more places and ended up in san francisco at 16… without a clear sense of my roots or where home led. My early life included housing instability, time in a shelter, and continuation school. I started my first small business at eight, and by sixth grade I wanted to create a clothing brand. For years I felt lost. I now understand home more broadly: people are connected, and the work of building community can turn dislocation into responsibility. Being called a founder after years of feeling without direction carries a meaning no title alone can explain.

I do not want hardship to be the most interesting fact about me. I am tired of the familiar story that a difficult life must become a permanent struggle before it can become meaningful. My upbringing gave me a purpose: to help ensure that another young person does not have to experience the same isolation or lack of opportunity. That purpose does not require me to romanticize what happened. It requires me to build something useful from it.

From 2003 to 2008, I studied at San Francisco State University across art, child development, apparel design and merchandising, business, design, and social entrepreneurship. In 2007, I completed Cotton Incorporated's Denim and Cotton program. I ultimately left the university to pursue the dream that became my career. On October 13, 2006, I completed my first pair of jeans. I learned by taking jeans apart, studying their architecture, and rebuilding them. No book or help just my inner voice and that was a promise to myself. That process taught me a principle I still live by: no one begins by knowing exactly what to do. Mastery is built through attention, repetition, correction, and the willingness to continue.

I founded Holy Stitch! in 2008 and developed fluency in patternmaking, cutting, industrial machinery, fit, finishing, customization, and repair. Denim became more than a product. Its been a medium to which i have gainsed skills, access, employemts and impact. I used it across one-of-one garments, workwear, installations, public activations, teaching, and social practice. I have worked in real deal factories for big brands and small companies of all spectrums and industries.

In San Francisco's Mid-Market neighborhood, beginning with storefront opportunities connected to the Luggage Store Gallery in 2011 and 2012, the public could see who made the work and whose labor usually disappeared behind the finished object. Rather than just painting the window i asked to do a live installation of sewing and teaching. 15 years later im activating the same neigboorhood but in a larger scale. 

The practice eventually reached larger audiences through work with 36 Chambers/Wu-Tang, GAP, Levi's, Adidas, Old Navy, KQED, and the Exploratorium. San Francisco Magazine named me Designer of the Year in 2017. District 6 recognized me as its Official Denim Clothier in 2024, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce honored Holy Stitch! Factory Fellowship as a Community Champion in 2025. These recognitions confirmed that work built outside a conventional institutional path could hold artistic, technical, and civic value.

After years of watching organizations describe impact without always building meaningful access, I decided my business had to evolve into its full purpose. I registered Holy Stitch! Factory Fellowship as a nonprofit in 2023, completing the filings myself. I chose what I wanted the work, and my own role within it, to become. In 2024, we opened a permanent Mid-Market space combining a factory, tailor shop, sewing school, showroom, retail floor, and community workspace. The work was never only about clothing. It was about narrative, impact, and what a community could carry forward. I came to believe that sustainability begins in people. Knowledge, confidence, and the ability to make and repair are renewable resources.

I am now growing cotton in San Francisco, the city most closely identified with the birth of the riveted blue jean. That small crop is material, history, and question. Cotton helped build the United States through enslaved labor; canvas and denim clothed workers; jeans moved from blue-collar uniform into rebellion, fashion, and nearly universal dress. I am interested in the contested folklore of quilts as coded routes to freedom, not as settled history, but as evidence of our desire to believe cloth can carry information and direction. A Common Thread Through Blue and White Collars: Denim as an American Language and Medium of Freedom asks what a new freedom language made through cloth could communicate now.

I have reached a strange point in my career. The work is growing faster than my ability to contain it, yet I still encounter a ceiling around access, time, and institutional networks. I often feel that I must work three times as hard to prove what the work already demonstrates. For the first time, I recently considered stepping away. Then, on September 10, 2026, a young man entered the shop, showed me his work, and asked for guidance. I sat him down, shared what I knew, and gave him a seam ripper. He thanked me because others had not given him that opportunity. A seam ripper is a modest tool, but it gives a maker permission to undo a mistake and begin again. His journey started there.

That encounter reminded me why I work through words, art, clothing, music, and sewing. Each can help a person author a different story about who they are and what they can become. This Fellowship would allow me to move beyond the limits of my own time and resources and concentrate twenty years of lived and technical knowledge into a cohesive body of fine art. I have built the practice, the tools, and the community. I am ready to make the work at the scale its meaning requires.

MOST SIGNIFICANT WORKS

1. Holy Stitch! at 1059 Market: Living Denim Factory and Community Studio, 2024–present
   Long-term social-practice work integrating a functioning factory, tailor shop, sewing school, showroom, retail space, public installations, and workforce development in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood. Holy Stitch! Factory Fellowship received 501(c)(3) status in 2023, providing the institutional structure for the work. Publicly opened May 16, 2024. Selected recognition includes Official Denim Clothier of San Francisco District 6, 2024, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Community Champion Award, 2025.

2. Gap × Holy Stitch! Hoodie House at Outside Lands, 2025
   Participatory public art and apparel-customization installation presented with Gap at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco. Festival attendees transformed hoodies through embroidery, painting, abrasion, patches, studs, pearls, and other interventions alongside Holy Stitch! interns and apprentices.

3. Mid-Market Live Sewing Installations, 2011–2012
   Site-responsive installations presented through storefront opportunities connected to the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. The works transformed vacant storefronts into visible sewing studios and classrooms, placing garment labor, teaching, and public interaction directly behind the glass.

4. 501(c)(3) Jean, 2026
   A San Francisco-made denim work connecting garment construction, nonprofit practice, education, and workforce development. Produced at 1059 Market with youth, interns, and apprentices participating in the process, the jean treats manufacturing knowledge and human development as inseparable parts of the finished object.

5. 36 Chambers/Wu-Tang Works: Kung Fu Patch Bag and Asian Art Museum Customization Chamber, 2017
   A series of collaborative works with 36 Chambers, including twenty-five individually hand-sewn Kung Fu Patch Bags and jacket work developed in connection with the Asian Art Museum. Presented at the museum on September 21, 2017, the Customization Chamber invited the public to transform garments through patches, sewing, and other interventions during the 36 Chambers collection launch.

6. Denim Rose Installation Series, 2024–present
   An evolving sculptural series transforming reclaimed denim into large-scale floral forms. The work moves denim beyond clothing and uses cutting, layering, stitching, repetition, and material reuse as a sculptural language.

7. Museum and Cultural Institution Public Practice, various dates
   An ongoing body of public-facing work presented through major San Francisco cultural institutions. Projects include an artist talk at the Museum of the African Diaspora; a workshop and studio program with The Contemporary Jewish Museum; the Interactive Cut and Sew Workshop at the de Young museum in 2019; the exhibition of custom jackets at SFMOMA; and uniform design, production, and embroidery for the Exploratorium in 2026. Together, these projects position clothing construction as a form of public art, education, cultural exchange, and institutional collaboration.