After a rough patch, business in NYC’s Garment District is starting to pick up.

For decades, fashion mavens and budding designers have flocked to the quadrant between 34th and 42nd Streets, hedged in by 5th and 9th Avenues. Here, in New York City’s Garment District, fabric can be purchased, patterns made, pieces sewn, trimming added, and dreams realized, all in the space of a few blocks. Designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Oscar de la Renta have all made the Garment District their home at a point in their careers, and countless others got their start in the neighborhood. At one time, the Garment District was the global hub of textile manufacturing. But not anymore.

“The only thing that has not changed is the location,” says Anthony Lilore, owner of RESTORE Clothing and a founder of the Save the Garment Center movement. “The physical appearance has gone from streets packed with garment racks and push carts, to some racks, some push carts, and some rickshaws with tourists.”

Indeed, over the past fifty years, the Garment District has seen a steady decline in business, owing primarily to overseas outsourcing, mostly to China. When that picked up in the early 1990s, family-owned companies in business for generations were forced to shut their doors, and designers, burdened by the higher rents and rising costs of working in midtown Manhattan, moved elsewhere. Most of those who have survived the downturn and recession say they’re hanging on by a hair.

“At this point, it’s a labor of love,” says Maria Lipari-Bertone, whose family has run Quality Patterns, which specializes in grading and marking, for more than forty years. “This is our bread and butter. Many of us came from overseas, and we made our lives in the Garment District.”

But there are signs of revitalization. At New York’s first City Source Expo, held January 10 at the Fashion Institute of Technology, more than fifty producers, suppliers, and pattern makers turned out to field questions and take orders from attendees interested in local production. Several vendors said that they’re starting to see an uptick in sales, mostly due to China’s rising “minimums” for new orders, a weak dollar, and higher shipping costs. Lipari-Bertone says that many new designers can no longer afford to work in China, so they’re starting to inquire into local production again.

Plus, in recent years groups like Save the Garment Center, Made in Midtown, and the Garment Industry Development Corporation have surfaced to advocate for Garment District preservation and serve as a resource for designers interested in manufacturing there. Backed by New York fashion industry vets like Nanette Lepore, Anna Sui, Jason Wu, and Yeohlee Teng, these groups emphasize the district’s historical, creative, and economic value to the city of Manhattan.

Made in Midtown says:

Ultimately, this story is about much more than fashion. It’s about one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan that has not yet been remade by recent waves of new development. It’s about jobs and immigrant workers. It’s about the decisions city officials make to support certain kinds of businesses.

And for designers interested in sustainability, a one-stop-shop like the Garment District means a more compact production process, which eliminates the costs, both financial and environmental, of working with subcontractors in different parts of the world.

“The quality of craftsmanship and the concentration of schools, designers, sample rooms, showrooms, production, and stores make the Garment Center the only one of its kind anywhere,” says Lilore.

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In part three of Dumbing Down American Design, we talk with Han Lee, owner of Fine Line Production, a company that does everything from pattern making  to grading and hang tags. We also speak with Nancie Chan of Tyler Production, a cutting and sewing floor. Both companies are located in New York City’s historic Garment District.

We revisit the driving question: Has our quest for convenience and rock bottom prices forever altered fashion and is American design becoming a thing of the past?

A week ago today, I was in New York City with Part 2 guest, designer Anthony Lilore. Anthony was nice enough to take time out of his schedule to take me around New York City’s Garment District.

Our first stop is with Han Lee, owner of Fine Line Production. Han sits down to talk and the conversation quickly veers from what he does for clients to who his clients are. Lee currently works with about 30 designers who help sustain his company. If they are succeeding, so is he.

“[I work with] the smaller designers,” he says. “The designers who want to be part of their design process, who can’t afford to manufacture overseas.”

I ask if perhaps smaller designers are more authentically connected to what they’re selling. He smiles and nods.

I throw out a comment for reaction: that (rumor has it) the bigger designers don’t even design much of their own collections. They simply pick a design and ship it to their manufacturing facility overseas where the facility offers a few more designs based on the original. The final design is picked and quickly put into production.

“True,” he says.

Second stop: Nancie Chan of Tyler Production, a cutting and sewing floor, also in the Garment District.

She’s a little perplexed as to why I would want to be there. There’s something to be said about working various jobs in the fashion industry, and never getting to see behind the scenes. This is what my trip is all about. As a buyer, rep, writer and marketer for sustainable designers over the past five years, I’ve always wanted to step inside a room like this.

It holds no glamour; it’s a space filled with hardworking women who are simply passionate about what they are doing. I ask Nancie if she works with larger or indie designers more frequently.

“The smaller ones,” she says, adding that some she works with come from unlikely fields. “Like finance,” she says.

I ask her if she means the designer cmarchuska; her face lights up. Yes, that’s the one.

I own a few cmarchuska pieces and love that I now know exactly where the pieces were made. Chan has no problem saying on the record that her most problematic clients are the bigger designers who never pay or are detached from their labels and the decisions made about them. She cites at least two designers who owe her $100,000.

“What about the smaller designers?”

“They always pay on time,” she says.

There are two scenarios I want you to imagine. In one, I see these connected, independent designers who pay on time ruling American design. They have convinced you that paying a little more is worth it because their clothes are real and inspired and sustainably manufactured, all in the U.S.A. They’ve rubbed off on the mainstream designers and the majority is now producing with a conscience – and with personal inspiration. Our clothing has a story.

American manufacturing facilities in major cities are working together to source and invest in clean facilities, educating the steadfast seasoned employees in new ways where fit, fashion and functionality work together. Our fashion technology is innovative and we have become dynamic in our approach. Because you believe in these smaller designers, they are thriving financially instead of waitressing by day and designing by night.

They enrich design by offering you choices of their own creation, not the pick-one-of-three-designs-you-like scenario that comes out looking like, well, everything else.
You feel unique in your clothes and dressing is a fun part of your day.

But in scenario two, larger designers rule American design. Their made-from-afar designs are being shipped to their holding warehouses where they are shipped to boutiques. Designers are nothing more than a good marketing campaign. They are no longer designs. We all dress virtually the same.

And in some dystopian Logan’s Run-like nightmare where we’re brainwashed that the consumption of our resources are best managed by killing everyone who reaches the age of 30 instead of just being conscious of what we consume, we no longer care what we wear, all designers get phased out and large corporations like Wal-Mart clothe us (and feed, and supply us with everything we need to survive).

Image: it’s life

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In part two of Dumbing Down American Design, we talk with Anthony Lilore, co-designer for sustainable design label RESTORE and a board member for New York City’s Save The Garment Center. We revisit the driving question: Has our quest for convenience and rock bottom prices forever altered fashion and is American design becoming a thing of the past?

Let’s talk carbon footprints, supporting American eco-designers who want to keep things in the U.S. and seasoned industry professionals whose techniques we simply can’t afford to lose.

Lilore spoke with us from a designer’s perspective but also more personally, as an individual working to preserve the Garment Center, New York City’s industrial fashion glory and a cultural icon that could become more than a historical footnote.

“Pull the garment work out of China, they’ll collapse, pull it from India, collapse, pull it from Mexico, them too. See a pattern here?” Lilore says, adding that the garment industry in the 1960’s was the largest single employer in NYC except for the government.

“Garments and garment work and workers are economic engines,” says Lilore. “Fashion is the fuel.”

The decline of the Garment Center is being encouraged by local real estate owners. Without enough workers in the Garment Center, the zoning will have to be changed, meaning higher rents from new tenants, not in the industry. Preservation of the District, located in what many consider the soul of Manhattan’s mid-town, means little in the face of the almighty dollar.

“In the 60’s, everything in the U.S. was made or passed through the Garment Center, there were unions and really, hundreds of thousands of people working in the Garment Center,” says Lilore.

The designers are as much to blame for the decline.

To satisfy their own financially flush version of the American dream, designers got greedy and realized that manufacturing overseas was increasingly cheaper.

“At first, it wasn’t a big deal, maybe somebody would lose a job, maybe two but over the past 30 years, that greed has caused only 3-5 percent of American manufacturing to be happening in New York City,” says Lilore.

In the meantime, with less actual manufacturing occurring in the Garment District, NYC landlords continue working to re-zone and to ghettoize the area by putting Garment professionals in one building and charging more to force them out. So far, this effort has been met with a fight. Groups like Save the Garment Center, the CFDA and the Design Trust for Public Space are now spearheading a conscious campaign against the city landlords to show why the Garment Center is an integral part of New York City’s economy, cultural identity and sense of place.

If this doesn’t work, existing pattern and sample makers, trim and design houses will be forced to pay more, which in this already tight design economy, makes it virtually impossible to survive. Add to this equation Americans’ addiction to deals and a disconnect from the true costs involved in the clothes they wear and the result is the perfect formula for extinction.

Still, we haven’t completely lost our edge, and there are encouraging signs for American design.

“It’s an interesting thing that China is actually making it easier to compete lately because the carrot of [Western-style] democracy has been placed before them,” says Lilore. “They like the American lifestyle where we do make more money so they’re putting their prices higher. This makes them less attractive to designers trying to make more for less.”

For those rare designers willing to invest in American design and manufacture, Lilore says they now have to sit back and quietly ask themselves, “Why the hell do I want to do this?”

“When I go talk to young designers now, I tell them, the idea of being a designer has to be as important to you as breathing. If you’re not prepared to be poor, if you’re not prepared to be a nobody, if you’re not prepared to make a difference then don’t f*cking do it.”

For Lilore, being an American designer is worth the exhaustion, financial strain and production headaches.

“I deal with all this and still want to do it all in the Garment Center because I want to keep design in this country,” Lilore says. “New York City is the fashion capital of the U.S., if not the world, and as a brand it is on par with Coca-Cola. By not protecting the brand, by not saving the Garment District, we are not saving the fuel that runs one of the economic engines of the fashion capital of the world.”

Video and image: Design Trust For Public Space

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