Total Luxury Spa’s Open Door Policy

So perhaps it’s no surprise that the same open door policy from his childhood has extended to his own business—a mini-empire which includes Commonwealth Projects, his creative agency that advises museums, fashion brands, and artists on projects like exhibitions, branding, and events, the pop-up juice company Tropics LA, and Total Luxury Spa, a clothing brand he founded in 2014 with Hassan Rahim that slyly riffs on wellness, community, and authenticity. These businesses are headquartered in South Los Angeles, a neighborhood with strong ties to the Black and Latinx communities. Over time DeSure built bonds with local kids who had artistic inclinations—many from the nearby skate park—and they would drop in, his office an echo of his childhood.

“I felt like there was a disconnect from the world that was around me, and the work that I was doing,” he said when we spoke on FaceTime, his face half-hidden under a black Kangol hat. “I’ve always struggled with that a little bit.” So, in an effort to close that gap, he started producing zines and selling them at book fairs, an attempt to help foster the creative spirit of young locals and promote their work. Later he began hosting meditation sessions in the office. “People thought we were insane for doing it,” he said. “But it turned a certain light on in my heart. I was probably going through some personal things at the time and I needed human connection more than anything else. From there, things sort of blossomed.”

The blossom he’s referring to includes Tropics L.A. and Total Luxury Spa, but he could also be referring to the ways in which his world blooms outward into various local institutions like the Underground Museum and the Umoja Center. Or the way that, in lieu of influencers, DeSure taps his network of artist friends like the tattooist Dr. Woo or the musician Kelsey Lu, or community elders who exert meaningful influence and push for positive change in their neighborhood. In DeSure’s approach to work—and life—boundaries are opaque, if they exist at all. Friends, collaborators, personal, professional, business, pleasure: they’re all around him.

The connective thread is community. “With any of these things I want them to be big,” he said. “Not in the sense of, like, money-big, but global.” He thinks that empathy is a distinctly human attribute, so why not embrace that in all aspects of our lives, even the commercial ones? “We can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes,” he says. “If we’re given that thing, why not use it?”

A mix of streetwear, skate aesthetics and some concert merch sprinkled on top, TLS is known for its sly graphic designs that dabble in mystical semiotics—messaging that plays with the current mania for metaphysical salves to society’s ills, as opposed to, say, a functioning democratic process. Slogans printed on t-shirts and hoodies spell out phrases such as “Sound Nutrition,” “Earth Embassy,” “Thermal Baths,” and “Radical Nests”—hinting at sound baths, hot springs, and energy healing. It’s a reclamation of self-care culture, a reorientation of “wellness” from those outside its typical purview, like minorities, young people, or men (or all three).

“In the beginning it was just about creating, our friends, and giving a platform to people,” Rahim remembers. “As we got further into it, the core values definitely grew stronger.” Rahim, who started at Commonwealth Projects as a graphic designer, remembers that his first meeting with DeSure started at a local bar and ended with karaoke (he sang a song by Mase and Puff Daddy).

Rahim has helped build out the visual language of Total Luxury Spa, imagery that’s striking and slightly enigmatic. A self-described “absorber,” he never knows when inspiration may strike—he will often shelf designs for years before revisiting them. For example, he remembers seeing Sun Ra Arkestra play at a Brooklyn venue and being surprised at the dearth of “young, hip people.” It led him to imagine them playing a concert at the L.A. Coliseum and what the bootleg merchandise would look like. Layer in his love of vintage t-shirts, and you have the Sun Ra long sleeve T-shirt, the first part of the brand’s “bootleg” series, which could be read as a playful examination on authenticity—or just a cool shirt.

The brand’s quirks don’t end at the design. Unlike most milquetoast brand product copy, Total Luxury Spa’s is an oddball delight. “Did you know that Los Angeles is home to landmarks of transcendentalism?” one reads. “True story. Meet us at midnight and we'll lead you to the river, the river will lead you to the source, and at the source we will communally bathe, soaking in a warm universal embrace.”

All the clothing, in some ways, is a way to sneak in public-spiritedness under the guise of covetable apparel. Take the “Crenshaw Wellness” sweatshirt (currently sold out) that features a map of pressure points on the sole of the foot. The graphic hints at Eastern medicine, while the slogan Crenshaw Wellness is a way to connect self-care to minority communities that have mostly been excluded from such practices. Most importantly, 100% of the proceeds from the sweatshirt’s sale went to The Umoja Center, which runs programs to resist gentrification and promote community wealth building in the historically Black neighborhood of Leimert Park.

Rahim puts it this way: “I’ve seen people do charity shirts and it becomes too political, or a promotional fundraiser item … which they are. I try to blur that boundary. If it's a sick shirt that anyone would buy, then they’re gonna buy it and not even know they’re helping out.”

The day we spoke, DeSure was sitting in his office, alone, and behind him black shelves stuffed tidily with books. The walls, in crisp contrast, were whitewashed brick. One could almost feel the absence of people in the airy warehouse-like space. It was mid-September and, in California, apocalyptic skies—a result of unprecedented wildfires charring the state—had mellowed into a spectral haze, an eerie, gauzy texture.

Today, commercial products with some goodwill message splashed across it can easily be looked at with a cynical eye, but DeSure’s operation has always been so embedded within its community. Anyone could see the connection is authentic. “We’re creating funding and resources for certain causes and also creating—and driving—a message. [The clothing] almost acts as billboards,” DeSure said. He likes that some people know the brand’s backstory and wear it wanting to represent the community, whereas others just buy it because it looks cool. “All of those things are beautiful hybrids of what we’re doing,” he said.“I think there's this calling to be the person we needed when we were younger,” said the photographer Daniel Regan, who photographed the brand’s lookbook and campaign last year. “What you are seeing now is just a fully actualized evolution of that…and one that happens to make t-shirts now.”

Regan first met DeSure at a book fair around seven or eight years ago. “I remember we kind of sized each other up, as if we were guarding something that wasn’t there,” he remembers. He met Rahim when they both interned together at a magazine. Today, he’s part of the TLS family. Last year Regan took his spare and reverential aesthetic and applied it to the brand’s seasonal campaign. He used friends—like Lu, the artist Martine Syms, and the creative director Sanam Sindhi, among others—as models, capturing his subjects in their own homes. Regan is able to imbue the mundane, in-between moments of life with a complex interiority—these off-hand are freighted with meaning. As a result, the Total Luxury Spa photos possess a directness and stark intimacy more portraiture than promotional.“Daniel and Hassan are more like family, so it’s very different than working with anyone else,” Regan said. “There’s a respect and trust that is unspoken. I know they are including me because they trust me with helping to accurately tell not only their story, but also the [stories of the] artists we photographed. It becomes so much more personal; there is no hidden agenda.”

By telling the stories of these friends, Regan notes that DeSure and Rahim are also telling the story of the city they love. “I feel like the idea, as an image, of Los Angeles has been misconstrued by outsiders,” Regan said. “It’s not their fault, but we happen to know better—Hassan, Daniel and I are born and bred here. This is our home and, for us, everything we do is cemented by that ... it’s just part of our makeup.”

Not to say that this is all some free love experiment. Money has to be made. Sometimes, DeSure says, the big profit client work feeds the smaller, community-based ventures, or all attention must be given to a Commonwealth Projects proposal while Total Luxury Spa gets put on the back-burner. It’s an approach that DeSure describes as fluid. “I’ve been in the hole quite a bit and other times I’m making decent money,” he said. “Things fluctuate. And I’m very OK with that.”

Fluidity, flow, adaptability: these are the underlying currents of the Total Luxury Spa, so it’s not so surprising that the latest collection is titled Liquid State. A celebration of water’s ever-changing properties, DeSure is also using it to spearhead a discussion about how industrialization and capitalism have contributed to the erosion of our natural resources. TLS partnered with Friends of the Los Angeles River and the famed L.A. historian Mike Davis to create community programming around the collection’s release, things like river clean-up sessions and fundraising projects. Additionally, DeSure worked with a company that recycles factory floor leftovers to create new materials.

Lately he’s been thinking about the ways he can take the connection that community provides, and grow its impact. Community, by nature, is small—it’s who’s outside your door. But running a clothing brand in the age of social media is all about big messages being blared out to as many people as possible. Can he balance these two extremes?

“I went out to dinner with a buddy of mine last night and he said, ‘How big can you get if you’re the only one making these connections? If it's your community, how do you affect the rest of the world?’ And, I don’t know, I hope people emulate it and copy it in their own space.”

If everyone across the globe did it, wouldn’t that, somehow, turn a community into a global movement? “Yeah,” he said, turning it over in his head. “Maybe that’s the thing.”

Max Berlinger is a freelancer writer based in Los Angeles. He writes about the intersection of fashion, technology and culture. His work has been featured in the New York Times, GQ, Los Angeles Times, and others. He is writing this bio in the third person and feels silly about it. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter.