VideoThe city that never sleeps.

There’s no place quite like New York City.

The Manhattan Project HD1080P from Cameron Michael on Vimeo.

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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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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.

The post In New York City’s Garment District, Signs of a Comeback appeared first on EcoSalon.

Matthew Modine employs what my 99-year-old grandma would call “mamaloshen,” a Yiddish term for common sense. In his new, award-winning, mini-documentary Jesus was a Commie, Modine puts this logical thinking to work presenting a visually compelling and thought-provoking 15-minute short documentary. The film intends to put a sensible spin on the traditional idea and interpretation of Jesus Christ, and what were perhaps Christ’s own communist practices and philosophies.

“When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom’ is a quote attributed to Confucius,” says Modine to EcoSalon in an exclusive interview.

“Liberal is one of those words that has been pushed into a political context. The root of the word is liber, meaning free, something we Americans believe we have a special dominion over. The word liberal has been transformed to mean, by conservatives and Republicans to mean communist, weak, homosexual, immoral, and just un-American. Jesus, depending on how you personally feel about him, is another word, or idea, belief, or ism that has been hijacked for political purpose. If you take the stories of Jesus and look at them without evangelical glasses, you see a man that questioned and challenged the conditions of life in his time. And it can be argued, and has been by a lot of incredible people, that Jesus was a Utopian Communist,” adds Modine.

Modine describes himself as a spiritual person who leans liberal with his thinking.

“We all want a bit more for ourselves and our families. Monastic life – living as nuns and priests, is rather communistic – and they make it work. But, I don’t want to live like a priest. I enjoy the liberal and progressive western way of life. I also understand that with these freedoms come responsibility, not just to other people but to all forms of life that I share this earth with,” he says.

Mixing in archival live action footage, the first scenes are of the Berlin Wall falling, followed by images of Gorbachev – both quintessential images of America’s idea of communism. Modine has got a good point to make and draws the audience in gently to hear it: “Last night I began reading about the fall of communism; the more I read, the less I believed it fell because it didn’t make sense or didn’t work. It was something simpler. It seems the most logical reason communism failed was because of greed. I’d say rock and roll being broadcast on Radio Free Europe had as much to do with the Berlin Wall coming down as Ronald Reagan demanding it so.”

That’s certainly a notion we’re not exactly taught in the American school system.

“In the early 1980’s, I met and spoke with people from East Berlin before the wall came down,” Modine explains.

“I was at the Berlin Film Festival and had the opportunity to cross Check Point Charlie and enter into East Berlin. It was from meeting Russian soldiers that I realized the lies and propaganda about Russian people that I had been taught. Like many Americans, I was taught to believe that this Evil Empire was prepared to take over the world and destroy life as we knew it. After actually seeing it and being there, I saw that these people were no different than my brothers and sisters at home. They shared the same fears and desires, and many of the same likes and dislikes as people at home.

Radio Free Europe was the tool that was educating the Eastern German and Russian soldiers I met about life in the west. Radio Free Europe had no borders. The music of the 1960s floated wirelessly, without borders, across the Iron Curtain and influenced a generation of people to want a change in their country. The Utopian Communism didn’t exist or work. The songs of protest, the songs of loving, the songs of rebellion that define 60s music opened the minds of those listening to it and it transformed their expectations of living. Ronald Reagan and the Cold War, and the Arms Race, coincided with this new generation of young people that were about to transform their homeland. The change in the Soviet Union happened from within. Not because of Ronald telling Russia to ‘take down the wall.’”

There are plenty of less liberal thinking critics who will check out early after the testimonies and references Modine pulls in linking Jesus to communism an contributing rock and roll as part of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As crazy as it might seem, the film points out that Jesus and his posse were all dictionary definition communists hitting the streets like traveling salesmen to sell their goods. Then, they’d return and bring the money they’d earned back to be shared in common with others. Based on Jesus’ kind actions Modine points out, his followers never got to thrive and being in the minority in the midst of a confused and greedy government, only pushed them into exile.

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist,” Modine quotes, Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara from the book Peace Behind Bars: A Peacemaking Priest’s Journal from Jail.

While the combination of both “communism” and “Jesus” used at the same time most certainly create intense reaction by much of America, ultimately, Modine plays it safe and doesn’t turn his commentary into anything aggressive or offensive. His film has great timing to coincide with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together movement growing across the United States and around the world.

“Occupy Wall Street doesn’t have a single voice, a leader,” Modine explains. “It is an extraordinary demonstration of civil liberty and democracy. I do think that if there were a bearded, barefoot man speaking about peace, liberty, love, and turning the tables of the Wall Street Money Changers over, he would be crucified by the news media. Mayor Bloomberg would demand his arrest. [Some media outlets] would call him hateful names and declare him a threat to capitalism,” says Modine.

When watching Jesus Was a Commie, the viewer realizes early that the movie is an extension of Modine’s own thoughtful and ongoing quest for answers to deep seated philosophical questions, and a ticket to opening conversation.

“I am troubled by the events taking place all over the world,” he says.

“The population [is] reaching 7 billion. Starvation exists globally. There’s a lack of drinkable water. Pollution threatens drinking water. The dangers of hydro-fracking. Nuclear waste. Environmental change. Dying coastlines. Over-fishing. Prescription drugs. There is so much confusion, blame and lack of responsibility in the world today. Finger pointing, murdering in the name, and justification for it, of a God.”

As we see even with the title Jesus Was a Commie, Modine likes words and the journey they can take us on. Challenging the meaning and the use of them is simply the American thing to do. Communism is merely a word – a word that Americans are overly-sensitive to. The conversations that the film will inspire after audiences view the film, in a way, are also an extension of his work.

The post New Matthew Modine Documentary: Jesus Was a Commie appeared first on EcoSalon.

We love you, New York.

EcoSalon is here for New York Fashion Week (NYFW), covering the latest looks from eco fashion designers. See our coverage so far on beloved independents like Gretchen Jones and John Patrick, and check back daily as we’re discovering new lines while we’re at it.

With NYFW in full swing, the streets are packed with style, and we’ll be bringing you exclusive news and pictures all weekend. To stay up to date on both the latest runway looks and street style, follow the tag NYFW here at EcoSalon. Tonight we’ll be checking out Ivana Helsinki’s show, then heading to the Yield Exhibit at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. Stay tuned, and hope to see you there!

Sundresses we love. Shorts: the same cannot always be said. The right pair of shorts on the right frame can be cute, chic and fashion forward. But then there are the pairs best left in the dark. (That’s not the only thing we’re seeing all over the place: what’s with everyone in New York smoking again? We even found ciggy butt litter at our event room last night!) In other words: Please, Anything But Shorts. There, we said it.

This weekend marks an event we will never forget: 9/11, a decade ago. In honor of one of the world’s greatest cities and the dynamic and resilient spirit of its people, we look back on one 9/11 survivor’s touching tale of healing from the trauma of that day.

Sailed Manhattan lately? It is an island, after all. Our volcano-hunting travel writer and NYC dweller Shira Levine does just that, and finds a new appreciation for her home, New York City.

The post Friday 5: We Heart NY Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

EcoSalon, the Textile Arts Center, the New York City Fair Trade Coalition and Of Rags present a sustainable spin on NYC’s big night out.

For three years, Fashion’s Night Out has united designers, party-goers, retailers and shoppers alike who want to ride the wave of fashion hysteria that is New York’s famed Fashion Week. We at EcoSalon believe that for some who want to be a part of the week and yet can’t gain access to shows, this night is their one stab.

And guess what, we’re happy to oblige.

Enter (Sustainable) Fashion’s Night Out, a unique collective at the Textile Arts Center in Manhattan co-sponsored by Of Rags and the New York City Fair Trade Coalition and featuring fair trade and sustainable designers and shops carefully curated to tempt the tastes of all. The collaborative event, co-sponsored by EcoSalon takes place on September 8th, from 6-10 p.m. at TAC’s new Manhattan location and will gather sustainable and mainstream style purveyors under one roof.

We’ve just enjoyed looking at the RSVP list to see who’s coming!

We’re also more than a bit excited to meet you too, so stop in and meet a bevy of EcoSalon writers and editors including: Sara Ost, EcoSalon’s founding Editor-in-Chief, Managing and Fashion Editor (that’s me!) Amy DuFault, K. Emily Bond our super-hero Shelter Editor, Beauty Columnist Kristen Arnett as well as a host of writers we know you’ve read at one time or another on EcoSalon (some under false names as well). You know who you are Lagosi.

Current designers on tap for (Sustainable) Fashion’s Night Out include (below) Feral Childe who we’ll unveil a special secret about tomorrow in a separate post.

Shabd

Of Rags

The Sock Hop

Wool and the Gang

Erin Considine jewelry

Ohm-Mongo

Tompkins Point Apparel

A.D.O. Clothing

Kaelyn Garcia knitwear

Afia

Love is Mighty footwear

Digs Scarfitecture Project

Digs

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The only thing I love more than design is food. It only seems natural that my heart flutters with pitters and patters when I stumble across a restaurant where the delicious design rivals the elegant menu. Tartinery is one such place; this clever little space, and source of French bistro food, is just one more reason to visit Manhattan.

I want to devour the industrial elements, the tables embellished with pragmatic typography, the texture of exposed brick, the soft powder of a chalk menu, and rough, raw wood. And, yes, that’s a living tree growing comfortably under high ceilings, flanked by reclaimed wood benches. It’s beautiful and savory, and we haven’t even touched on the menu (which is also, well, beautiful and savory).

Here’s an excerpt from the Tartinery website…

Tartinery is the modern version of the traditional French bistro. Its concept, inevitably, revolves around the Tartine, which can be described as a classic and gourmet open-faced sandwich served on a razor-thin slice of toasted bread. Of course, our feature bread is the well-renowed Poilane country bread from St Germain-des-Pres in Paris. We have taken a no fuss approach to French cuisine by going back to basics and letting the ingredients do the talking. The menu is simple, healthy and authentic. In addition, we also offer typical salads, seasonal soups (hot & chilled), homemade desserts, freshly squeezed juices and a unique selection of boutique and organic wines. The entire menu is chalk-written on the wall above the concrete bar. Chalk walls are also found in the restrooms, where customers can leave their own personal messages. The industrial decor is a tactful blend of New York classics and european soul. Raw and reclaimed materials form the roof of the restaurant and contribute to the retro contemporary feel.  We seek to promote a culture defined by “retro-innovation” – to capture the best of the past and merge it with the best of the modern. This notion symbolizes the perfect equilibrium between traditional catering and an innovative business model tailored to today’s consumer needs.

Tartinery has been added to my Manhattan to-do list (along with Interieurs). There is only one question left. What do I get my hands on first? The misty flour of Poilane country bread or the chalk residue from the message I will undoubtedly leave in the restroom?

(This scrumptious restaurant was discovered on Haute Design.  Images from the Tartinery website via Haute Design.)

The post Design Is on the Menu appeared first on EcoSalon.

In a tight economy, small businesses need to think outside the box just to exist, never mind to thrive.

So one might consider it pretty bold of Kate McGregor, owner and founder of (sustainable haven and four-year-old) Kaight in Manhattan to open a second location in Brooklyn. Others would say it’s a positive step in the right direction for sustainably minded boutiques worldwide, including the emerging designers that fill those spaces.

I caught up with her this week and asked a few questions about her shop’s evolving success. Here’s what she had to say:

Do you think naming your store Kaight has given the shop an opportunity for people other than those searching for sustainable designs to come in?

I definitely made a conscious effort to exclude any eco terms from the name of the store. I wanted the clothes and accessories to appeal to customers based on their quality, design and aesthetic. I don’t like the idea of promoting something only because it’s eco-conscious. I think it comes across as gimmicky.

What are some interesting ways you’ve been able to keep Kaight in the limelight?

I am very much aware that the traditional retail format is becoming outdated. I have launched several initiatives at the store and with designers to keep things fresh, and I’m always considering ways to make shopping at Kaight an experience rather than simply a commerce-driven event.

Kate McGregor, founder of Kaight holds a TimeOut NY accolade

Do you work with other designers/leaders in the NYC sustainable scene? Do you think that’s been part of your success

I do participate in a lot of events in the green community and work closely with many designers here.

Why the new shop in Brooklyn?

I’ve been considering a second location for awhile. I flirted with the idea of opening a store on the West Coast. The idea for the Brooklyn store developed during a random bike ride. It just clicked that this is where Kaight and I should be right now.

What’s your secret for success?

I think the biggest reason for my success is my physical presence in the store. Customers really like interacting with the businesses owner (me!) and I’m able to communicate my vision, as well as the stories of all of the products, better than anyone. I try to make each interaction with my customers as personal as possible and I think that’s why they keep coming back.

You can meet Kate at the Manhattan Kaight at her next event October 7th from 6-9 p.m. featuring Matt & Nat founder and creative director Inder Bedi as well as peruse the shop’s new fall line up.

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