“I'm trying to infiltrate your wardrobe for real”

At any Washington Spirit game, there will always be a sea of fans decked out in the soccer team’s iconic “Spirit green” and vibrant yellow swag. If you look closely, though, you’ll notice many of them wearing merch that is just a little cooler than your average fan fit: multicolored knit polo jerseys, retro track jackets, and oversized knit vests that you can imagine someone wearing not just on game day, but on a night with friends. 

That’s the point for Dominique “Domo” Wells, founder of apparel and design company Dead Dirt, and the creative wizard behind these pieces. Based in Los Angeles, she’s a D.C.-area native who embeds her hometown’s culture into her work. 

“I want you to pick [my clothes] out of your closet on a given day because you're going somewhere and you want to look cute,” said Wells. “I'm trying to infiltrate your wardrobe for real.”

Wells' relationship with fashion is shaped significantly by her upbringing. She grew up between Prince George’s County and Northeast D.C. at a time when go-go was everywhere, creating a "party atmosphere" where music and fashion converged. (When asked her age, Wells said, “Grown.") “My generation's experience with [go-go] was very different because we were much more immersed in it” than Gen-Z is, said Wells. “Go-go was in your high school; you had 50 million bands, and so the trickle-down effect of that was much bigger.”

Her understanding of D.C. style is also hyperlocal, she said. Growing up, you could tell exactly what neighborhood someone came from based on their clothes: Uptown kids had polos, Northeast kids wore Nike boots, and so on. Her relationship to D.C. fashion is “definitely specific to where I grew up in the city, but also how I witness other people from where we’re from,” she said.

Influenced by the District’s fashion culture, Wells always wanted to be a designer, but didn’t initially see it as a career possibility. Instead she found a day job and DJ'd on the side at the now-defunct bar Big Chief in Ivy City. Over the years, she took on more high-profile gigs, often as part of GIRLAAA, a Black women-centric creative consulting agency she co-founded. She curated a go-go series at the Kennedy Center in 2020, and once even DJ’d for former President Barack Obama. In 2021, she was hired as the music and culture editor for Spotify’s Frequency, an initiative amplifying Black artists. 

“I think all that experience was helpful in bringing me back to what I ultimately am doing now,” Wells said. But the road wasn’t smooth, and she faced repeated rejection from design jobs and programs as she tried to break in. “I kind of had to build my own bridge into the world of design,” she said. 

The bridge she constructed in 2023 was Dead Dirt: a design company that allowed her to explore and showcase her ideas. In the spring of that year, she released a collection of workwear garments embroidered with flowers at D.C.-based boutique Somewhere. WNBA champion Natasha Cloud wore a pair of pants from the collection to a Mystics game, introducing Wells’ designs to the world of women’s sports.

Around a year after Dead Dirt was founded, the Washington Spirit approached Wells about designing a one-off merch collection. But she didn’t feel like a one-time gig would allow her designs to connect sufficiently. “If you're trying to appeal to an audience that doesn't know you, you don't just show up once and expect that to stick,” she said. In the end, she became Washington Spirit’s first creative director and has since designed multiple collections for the team. 

Sports wasn’t a big part of Wells’ life, but that didn’t affect her ability to design for Spirit. At the root of it, she was creating something for D.C. — and she knew her hometown well. “That’s what was inspiring to me: to be able to deliver something that was meant to be a relationship with my city, and hopefully some people could see themselves reflected in it,” said Wells. 

Now her work is spreading across women's sports: Last fall, Dead Dirt signed a multi-year licensing deal with the National Women's Soccer League, and this year it dropped knit jersey polos for all the teams. Designing for over a dozen teams is a challenge, Wells admits, but she doesn’t worry too much about how her work is received. “I send it out into the ether, and I hope that it works,” she said. “And then I go back into my bubble and I do it again.” 

Wells knows that not everyone outside the city has heard of go-go or understands the DMV cultural references in her work — in fact, that’s part of what drives her. “What emboldens me about D.C. culture is … it doesn't get the credit that is due,” she said. And while she’s left her hometown, she takes D.C. everywhere she goes: “It shows up when I show up.”