Walking the talk in sustainable fashion.

Last week, the Alabama Chanin team, along with our friends Lisa and Jimmy, took to the organic cotton field  we share with the team from Billy Reid. With rubber boots, loppers, and gloves in hand, we were there helping our organic cotton bolls survive after a long summer of drought and heat followed by excessive rain and weed growth.

We walked the rows, hoed, chopped, and pulled until the sun and heat forced us out of the field. Hard to imagine the days in Alabama heat where people were not allowed out of the field. Makes me think about how things were, how things are, and how things will be.
Nine of us barely made a dent in the work that needs to be done. As we documented the day with black and white images, it looked so romantic and felt like a moment from a Willa Cather novel. But the reality behind the black and white is a sordid, ugly history. I can’t pretend that I didn’t think about those that did this work because they had no choice. But I live TODAY and I WANT to grow organic cotton in the state of Alabama TODAY.

Chapter 1 in the Alabama Stitch Book is about the history of cotton in our community and it was my goal to embrace that history with open arms, understanding the ugly past while hopeful for a more beautiful future. The beauty of the outdoors, the detailed shots of our cotton bolls make me proud. This is not glamorous work; it is hard work, and for some people, it once was the difference between life or death – without which, their families may have starved. My family worked cotton, grew small plots of cotton, and lived next to people who made their entire livelihood from this white fiber.

In an age where technology and convenience rule, our trip to the field served as a great reminder of the importance of creating things that last, leaving a legacy for families and communities, alongside our environment.
This community has a strong heritage in farming fields – by machine, by hand, by any means necessary. Images of the “Old South” come to mind as I re-read that sentence, but as I have come to learn, those stylized movie images didn’t reflect the reality of the south.

In the real “Old South,” my family and their neighbors were busy “scraping out a living.” My mother’s father worked a “good job” at the Tennessee Valley Authority AND farmed. My father’s father built houses AND farmed AND raised cattle.

As our group made its way through this beautiful new cotton field, many parts of that heritage came up in conversation. Stories, personal accounts of our parents and grandparents growing up in the fields and working with bloodied hands were shared as we, ourselves, walked rows of weed-ridden cotton. This work, these stories are a part of our souls; they are also part of our company.
At Alabama Chanin, we strive to connect the past with the present. Our company is based on age-old techniques; history is woven into every garment we create. It’s important that we understand the significance found in “modern old-fashioned” ways of doing things, from sewing to farming.

By putting ourselves in the cotton field, we found a deeper understanding of the entire manufacturing process, from planting to production. Sustainability begins with the soil in which we plant those tiny cotton seeds and continues through the dying process of our garments.
Lisa tells us that the local farmers thought we were crazy for planting organic cotton. They think we are especially crazy for working the field by hand. What they didn’t see in the beginning is that IF this works (and it appears that it will), when this works, we will be one of the first to grow organic cotton in the state of Alabama. It’s not about succeeding or failing, it’s about learning, trying, connecting, and believing. Lisa says that a few of the farmers are talking about putting in 100 acres next year to try that “organic” for themselves. Now that is success.

xoNatalie

Natalie Chanin is owner and designer of the American couture line Alabama Chanin and author of three books including Alabama Stitch Book  (2008), Alabama Studio Style (2010) and the upcoming Alabama Studio Sewing + Design which comes out spring 2012. Look for her bi-weekly column, Material Witness here and follow her on Facebook and her own blog at Alabama Chanin.

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Fashion, craft, and design communities find Mecca in Manhattan.

Tuesday night something amazing happened in New York City. More than one hundred people gathered at the Standard in East Village, a luxury hipster hotel on Cooper Square, and joined together for a sing-along and finger-knitting. Really. It happened. I was there. Everyone looked elated, from the handsome 20-something guy across from me (who I initially assumed was a supermodel but is actually an up-and-coming fashion designer), to the chic magazine editors and design company executives who were sipping wine before they settled into the low black couches.

Everyone who was lucky enough to secure entry into this unique event seemed transported by the simple act of transforming a length of cotton jersey cord into a knitted necklace, by taking an old folk song, riffing on a few verses, and making something new.

Singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash led the sing-along. Natalie Chanin, founder and creative director of the fashion and lifestyle company Alabama Chanin, led the knitalong. The occasion was MAKESHIFT: Shifting Thoughts on Design, Fashion, Craft, and DIY, a panel discussion kicking off a week of MAKESHIFT events organized by Chanin. Also speaking were Cathy Bailey, owner and designer of Heath Ceramics, Maria Cornejo, designer for Zero+Maria Cornejo, and Jessamyn Hatcher, a professor of fashion studies and the humanities at New York University. Moderating was Andrew Wagner, a DIY columnist for the New York Times and the editorial director of Krrb.

(From L-R): Andrew Wagner, Natalie Chanin, Cathy Bailey, Rosanne Cash, Jessamyn Hatcher and Maria Cornejo

“It’s like a small Pandora’s box opening,” Chanin says of the evening in which the main topic of conversation was the joy and value of making. “Making is as an integral part of all creative, design, and fashion industries. A conversation has been started and we hope it will continue.”

Cathy Bailey of Heath Ceramics recalled the tour she took of the company’s factory back in 2003, before she and her husband bought it. “Nothing was outsourced, everything was produced there. I think that’s what gave it that energy, that hum. There was such focus.” Bailey had, until then, been working as an industrial designer, but “Design wasn’t enough for me,” she says. “Something is missing when you’re only designing, when you’re not making.”

Maria Cornejo concurred. After leaving the fashion business, in 1998 she decided to open a store called Zero, where she and her team gradually started making things. “We put a rack of clothes at the front of the store; if people reacted to them, we made more, she recalled. “I miss those days when it was so hands-on.”

I personally grew up in a home where the handmade was revered and I edit craft books for a living – in fact, I edited all three of Chanin’s books: Alabama Stitch Book, Alabama Studio Style, and Alabama Studio Sewing + Design, the one that just came out and inspired the initial plans for MAKESHIFT 2012. So, given my background and day job, getting together to finger-knit is not as novel to me as it is to a lot of people. Honoring the maker is what I try to do every day. And it’s what Chanin does in her books – in which she shares instructions for the traditional techniques with which her clothing and homewares are made. “We make fashion,” Chanin explained on Tuesday night. “And we teach people how to make fashion.”

Rosanne Cash, who is an avid knitter and recently began hand-stitching Alabama Chanin clothing, told us: “All I want to do is follow Natalie around whatever she does.”

Chanin’s mission for MAKESHIFT is to break down some of the walls that exist between the fashion, craft, and design communities in order to find a meeting place so that “every maker, as well as the designs, products, and lives they touch, will be enriched.”

If the openness of everyone’s faces as they formed their necklaces on Tuesday night is any indication, the walls are coming down.

To learn more about the remaining MAKESHIFT 2012 events, go here.

Melanie Falick is the publishing director of STC Craft / Melanie Falick Books, an imprint of Stewart, Tabori & Chang and Abrams. She is the author of numerous knitting books and the former editor-in-chief of Interweave Knits magazine.

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How a road trip through the rural South created deeper connections.

With spring rituals now officially underway, there is no debating that we are eager to shed the last winter layers for the fresh green shoots of the new season. Every day life is also alarmingly unsettling with recent natural and political events hanging heavy in the atmosphere. It is at times like these that we need to feel the soil beneath our feet as we reach out to help others in the rebuilding process. Feeling grounded goes hand in hand with an ability to effectively observe our surroundings in order to cultivate genuine solutions and deeper connection.

No one understands the spirit of authentic presence better than designer Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin and her hard-working team of Alabama-based fashion talent. This last weekend of March was the annual Doo-Nanny festival in rural Seale, Alabama, and in the spirit of bootleg craft spliced with regional outsider art, this Southern-style Burning Man gathering might just be the tonic that many of us are thirsting for.

I first started writing about the work of Alabama Chanin in March of 2008 and more than three years later this homegrown American label seems timelier than ever. As a bright testament to slow fashion resolve, the appliqué appeal of Chanin’s hand-embroidered garments, rural chic home collection, and community-based crafting workshops continue to thrive because of the staying power of organic materials and local talent.

The Doo-Nanny’s temporary weekend campground is a spin-off of this concept with an art-music-crafting event which takes place on Butch Anthony’s rural compound in Seale. Having made a road trip through the region this past Sunday, I can vouch for the fact that folks had arrived in droves to celebrate the spirit of Natalie and Butch and the unfussy aesthetic that they both have helped to cultivate. The cast-off and the abandoned gain new life in their uniquely recycled creations, and the opportunity to wrangle the impossible into the possible is contagious.

Anthony practices what he colloquially refers to as ‘intertwangleism.’ His outsider-like art, ad-hoc bicycle sculptures (as well as sparkly chandeliers with bleached cow bones), and even his natural twang, defy the conventions of urban design polish and self-conscious design-speak.

Museum of Wonder in Seale, Alabama

I was struck while driving the back roads of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia by the deep chasm that exists between the pure local aesthetic and the “fast fashion fix” of the highway and the shopping malls along its flanks. The Doo-Nanny cannot be accessed via a quick turn off on the interstate, and consequently runs counter to modern life and what we have come to expect as part of our entertainment and fashion consumption.

Not everyone at the Doo-Nanny is an artist per se, but for one weekend anyone might freely demonstrate just how clever she or he can be with discarded doodads and pickled ideas from the domestic sphere. Southern couture has a lot to teach us not only about slowing down but also taking stock in what we typically deem to be irreparable. This includes our communities and local businesses. After six months in Europe, it is apparent to me that poverty is on the rise in America, and folks are scratching the soil (and the highway pavement outside of McDonald’s), to piece together scraps of meaning in order to stave off personal humiliation. Natalie Chanin often speaks of “loving one’s thread,” and perhaps it is time for us to acknowledge that our collective thread is frayed, not only because of a weak economy but because of our inability to take stock and invest in the junk out back and the laborers whom we have thrown out like a bucket of rain water.

What amazed me about getting to and from the Doo-Nanny was not the energy of the gathering, which is surely worth the road trip, but the eye-opening sights and truck stop voices that you are privy to along the way. One of the most poignant images for me was an elderly woman in a shopping mall café who was obviously installed there for the entire day with her satchels full of possessions, medications and pills laid out on a table, recycled tea bags, and a huge crocheted blanket that she was working on obsessively as if to preserve her sanity.

The scene made me feel elitist for scrutinizing things like sustainable fabrics and fashion, as I was completely paralyzed to even mutter a word to a woman who obviously loved fiber as much as I do. The difference between the two of us was nonexistent in this moment of loving one’s thread. She was authentic, proud, and probably even someone’s mother. But as an American citizen, I was shocked at her overall predicament and had to look away. How might we mend these torn moments and injustices that seem to be silently slipping away? I can only think about fashion in the context of the “other” now, and what some one else might be toiling over or enduring in an effort to simply stay afloat and maintain a thread of dignity in the face of displacement.

lead image: Alabama Chanin; Robert Rausch for The New York Times; City Profile/Seale

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I’m driving from Bayou La Batr down to Gulf Shores, the Miami Beach of southern Alabama. It’s August; tourist season should be in full swing but I see no traffic. The high rise condos, quiet on the beach, stand in stark contrast to the natural landscape. Many of these structures are half-finished and given the economic devastation caused by the spill here, I’d wager some are in the “never to be finished” category. I knew nostalgic stories of a friend’s beach dreams had here; she has served as my text messaging Virgil as I’ve explored the region and this unrelenting hell the people have endured. Part of me is glad she’s not here to see what I’ve seen; it’s better to let her keep her good memories of this place.

Over the radio, NPR is reporting that Alabama will sue BP for an undisclosed amount. It’s the first such statewide lawsuit filed. Governor Riley wants to keep it out of the courts and settle, but Alabama’s attorney general has different ideas and they hint at a political conflict. Like everything happening in the region, confusion and fear reigns, and good policy and science – unlike the oil – is not dispersing.

I walk with our videographer in front of a resort where a few random tourists are occupying the beach. It’s an area where sand has been trucked in to cover the oil. Cabanas and lounge chairs rest on top. The scene is one of post apocalypse in paradise. Just a month ago, there were puddles of oil on this beach.

We ask the cabana boy for a shovel and begin to dig. We dig three feet down to the water line, and stratified throughout is oil. Tarballs. We knew they were here: the wind over the beach smells like an auto parts store. We’re not sure if the water is safe or not, and the signage doesn’t help much: all it says is that the water has been affected by oil and if you come into contact with it, it will not be good. But still, a few children are body surfing as their parents lounge in the sun. The videographer, John Waller, normally a stoic presence, can’t believe what he’s seeing. “What mother would – I can’t believe – I mean seriously!”

Just beyond the beachgoers, there is yet another Incident Command Unit. As we approach, walking the beach where the resorts stop, the tarballs grow by degrees in number. Closing in, we count 12 men working. They have a contraption that resembles a screen door and they are sifting sand for oil, then bagging it in plastic bags to be hauled away. Asking the men where it goes, they don’t have an answer. The ubiquitous “theys” that occupy hierarchy here “take care of it.”

This is far and away the most absurd thing I’ve seen in a three-state tour of oil-affected areas. Imagine sifting millions of cubic feet of sand with a f#@&ing screen door. This is humanity reduced to helplessness. This is pissing in the wind.

Turtle Babies

The Gulf Shores is home to Loggerneck and (less commonly), Kemps Ridley turtle nests. The incubation for turtles is 55-70 days, and their mystical geo-location system (the faculty by which the females navigate back to the place of their nesting to lay eggs of their own) is online by 40 days. Typically, there are around 50 nests a year in the area.

We’re here to meet Mike Reynolds, Turtle Czar, who oversees a volunteer program called Share The Beach that ensures that turtle nests are left undisturbed by humans. But because of the BP oil spill, Reynolds is organizing turtle egg relocation to Cape Canaveral, Florida (after the turtles’ geolocation device has developed), to be hatched in the open Atlantic. Reynolds is concerned about the effect of oil and dispersants in the water on the youngsters and doesn’t believe it’s safe for the Loggernecks to swim in the open gulf. Besides, with what oil remains in the open, ambient water, there could be an issue with the patches of Sargassum, a surface floating weed where hatchlings find food and shelter from predators as they develop. If the Sargassum patches are tainted, it’s bad news for turtles. And given the devastation already wreaked on the population by the spill, Reynolds isn’t taking any chances.

Not 300 feet away, people are swimming in the water while people like Reynolds are relocating turtles for fear of their health. I ask him about this point. He responds with a hint of irony, “Well, I guess, humans aren’t as endangered as turtles are.”

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It’s hard not to come across Natalie Chanin’s name in the sustainable design world. Founder of American couture line Alabama Chanin, the designer is noted for her clothing as much as home décor designs and entrepreneurial joie de vivre.

Huge fans, us.

Blame it on her pioneering ways as a designer and CEO of a sustainable American design house. From her home in Florence, Alabama, Chanin works with local artisans to hand quilt, stitch and sew garments into award-winning designs. As a finalist for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion (in 2005), and as a finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2009, Chanin continues to make the world know she’s here to leave her mark in the world of sustainability.

Now, with her second, recently released book Alabama Studio Style, Chanin gives us more ideas to bring forth from the pages of her carefully curated world.

(You can try winning your own copy of her book by leaving a comment here by noon on March 22, 2010.)

I caught up with Natalie over the weekend and she was kind enough to answer some questions.

What drives inspiration for you?

I believe that we all find inspiration in our lives each and every moment of every single day.  I once based an entire collection on a scrap of paper that I found lying on a street corner. Inspiration is all around when we open our eyes. I tend to have the opposite problem – sometimes it is hard to turn the distraction of inspiration off and to focus on what is before me.

I was reading an article where a writer said, “Foreseeing that the elevated cost of a couture garment could potentially isolate customers, Chanin produced her first book, Alabama Stitch Book, which made her techniques, instructions and patterns available to the public.” Are these books an outreach to those women who can’t afford to buy your clothing?

In one way, yes, but the answer to this is more complex and traverses a bit of ground.

The only complaint we have ever received as a company is about the cost of our garments. Everything that we make is completely made by hand and within about an hour-and-a-half radius from my studio in Florence, Alabama. So, not only is it made in America but hand-built – each and every stitch, seam and embellishment (and these embellishments can be very rich and detailed).

At the same time, early in my journey I realized that sewing traditions (and I would go so far as to say survival traditions – everything around food, clothing and shelter) were dying in my community – and communities all over. Very soon after coming home to begin my work with hand sewing, it became clear that it was important to begin to collect stories and techniques about these traditions and to work towards not only incorporating them in my work but using my work as a means towards cultural preservation.

Furthermore, I had just moved home from Europe where – at the time – there was a much greater respect for recycling, taking care of your environment, quality of food and quality of life. I was very surprised to come home to Alabama and find that our food and environmental systems were substantially remiss in looking at the details of our community and our relationship as a community to the greater world.

However, the most important revelation was the realization that making something with my own two hands added substantially to the value of that object in my life.  It had been so long since I had made – and taken care of – the objects that filled my life. In essence, I re-learned that making brings added meaning.

All of these complex factors combined made me embrace this notion of open-sourcing and supported the idea to write the first book (Alabama Stitch Book).

As you mention, our garments are hand-sewn in America and are very expensive. In fact, many of our garments wind up in museums and private collections. If people cannot afford to purchase our garments, we offer our best-selling patterns in our books so they can make the garments themselves – or pay someone in their own communities to make them. We openly sell the fabrics and the supplies to make those garments – the same resources that we use for our collections. And if a client wants to shorten the steps, we offer DIY
Kits that simplify the process.

This philosophy is unheard of in the global fashion industry.

I am proud that Alabama Chanin has chosen to take this route. And honestly, it was a very difficult (and scary) decision to make and was not met with positive feedback from my industry colleagues.

What is interesting is that after the publication of the two books and embracing this open-source philosophy, many people finally understood why our garments are worth so much. In the end, I am very happy to have trusted my instincts and have made that decision. Of course, since that time (6 years ago) the notion of open-sourcing has become very important and I am proud that Alabama Chanin is a part of that.

Did your mother craft with you?

There was always a project at both of my grandmother’s tables and one in the basket to come next. Both of my grandmothers raised three girls and I know from hearing it that they “sewed every dress those girls ever wore.” The next generation – my mother and aunts – did some crafting and sewing back then but are really much more respectful of these traditions today. That time – the 60s and 70s – was really the beginning of consumerism in America. I remember my mother talking about how she did not want to wear a “homemade” dress to school. She and her sisters saved their money from picking cotton in the summer or working at the 5 & Dime so that they had the money for a “store bought dress” to wear to school.

Your involvement with the Bureau of Friends involves modern day sewing circles with people not usually found doing that. These meetings are hugely successful. What is it that crafting does for our psyche and ability to communicate?

I mentioned above that my most important revelation was the realization that making something with my own two hands added substantially to the value of that object in my life.  The concept that “making brings added meaning” is at the core of these meetings with the Bureau of Friends. It is uncanny how deep and rich conversation becomes when men and women sit around a table together and “make” in unison.

What’s different in this book from Alabama Stitch Book?

Alabama Studio Style is a development from Alabama Stitch Book. When I look at the two books together, I can see the process of “growing up.” And while the books are thought of as individual books, they are also companions.  The inclusion of more recipes excites me and I love how these recipes mix and mingle with the way-of-life aspect of the book.

There’s a current trend of going back to things being done properly. Do you feel like your book is a small portal into reconnecting with what we wear or adorn our homes with?

This has certainly been an underlying theme in my work since the beginning. If you sense that in the books, then I am happy and feel proud.

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