SkidRow Fashion Week is the fledgling streetwear brand aiming to help people transition out of homelessness in L.A., one T-shirt at a time.
The brainchild of Warner Music recording artist and cultural provocateur David Sabastian and skate industry vet Rich Marshall, SkidRow Fashion Week operates out of a corner print shop on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. On any given day, a handful of freelance workers who live in nearby Skid Row earn money screen printing socks, T-shirts and hoodies with motivational slogans, crosses, Black cherubs and other graphics that bring to mind Yeezy, Fiorucci and Sister Corita Kent.
“The last thing the world needs is another song or T-shirt, so I figured if we started a fashion business, it had to be around impact,” said Sabastian of the start-up, which has ambitions to follow in the mold of successful L.A. social enterprise Homeboy Industries. “When I grew up in Torrance, there was a large homeless community under the 110 freeway near my house and I developed friendships there,” he added. “But too often, the homeless are forgotten. They have been saying they are cleaning up Skid Row for years, but the larger problem is rehabilitation and opportunity. That’s the ethos of this, you buy more clothes, you help more people because the clothes are manufactured by people in the community.”
