Written by REDDA Founder Tara De Silva
“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.” - The Little Prince
In the high desert of the Antelope Valley, time crawled and lunch was mythologized.
When I was a child, my grandmother lived with us and looked after my sisters and me while our parents worked. Once a sought-after seamstress in Sri Lanka, she now spent her afternoons hemming our Wet Seal super flares and sending prayers for her grandchildren to Lord Buddha (“May they be first in their classes,” “May they be first in their classes,” etc). And on those August days when the heat pinned everything to the ground and she couldn’t be bothered to cook — let alone prepare the kind of labor-intensive Sri Lankan meal that might cast her as the dutiful ethnic grandmother — she gave us something better: Chef Boyardee, served with the story of how pasta shells came to be.
A man, my grandmother said, lived in a cave. He had no money, but he had grains and tomatoes and the kind of hunger that makes you invent things. One day, a kind woman found him. She believed in his shells. They made something of it. There’s a statue of him in Washington, D.C., she told us.
I asked for the story often, but not because I believed her. With that many of Grandma’s prayers in circulation, one of them was bound to hit. I was first in my class in U.S. History. I was able to say, with well-earned confidence, that there was no monument to Chef Boyardee on the National Mall. What I couldn’t yet say, but nonetheless felt somewhere just beneath knowing: sometimes you survive the desert with canned food and a story that makes it feel like a gift.
At night, when the house was still except for the boom of the sound barrier breaking — a regular gift from the local Air Force base — I flipped between channels: Nick at Nite reruns, episodes of Fashion TV on VH1.
I watched Mary Tyler Moore throw her hat in the air like a promise.
I watched Todd Oldham send Shalom Harlow gliding down a runway in powder blue vinyl. It looked like the future, or at least an exit.
By day, the desert reasserted itself. At recess, the metal slides gleamed under the sun, too hot to sit on. The girls in my fourth-grade class had an ease with each other that felt like a language I hadn’t been taught. I retreated to the benches under the cover, where I sketched clothes and drew up lives and conversations that felt easier to wear than the ones on the playground.
What began as a feeling I couldn’t name became the pull of a thread: stories and escapes, stitched into the everyday.
For a while, I followed just one side of the thread. I became a screenwriter, trying to give other people the kinds of words I used to draw out in the shade.
REDDA is the other side. A world I started sketching before I knew what I was doing. Clothes as escape and return. I’m still learning new languages, only now, they’re design languages, and I’m learning them in the company of friends. The kind of friends who translate, explain, and sketch but never make you feel like you’re behind, but just becoming.
Together, we hope to offer you something beautiful for whatever desert you find yourself in—by design or otherwise.
