In Praise of One Woman’s Love Affair With Fashion - The New York Times |
- In Praise of One Woman’s Love Affair With Fashion - The New York Times
- Can Recycled Rags Fix Fashion’s Waste Problem? - The New York Times
- 100-Year-Old Spelman Alumna Broke Boundaries As An Accomplished Fashion Designer | 90.1 FM WABE - WABE 90.1 FM
| In Praise of One Woman’s Love Affair With Fashion - The New York Times Posted: 20 Dec 2019 03:07 PM PST  When fashion enters the hallowed halls of an art institution, as a rule, it begins to fall victim to museumitis: the need to justify its presence in the temple of high culture by focusing almost entirely on its craft or conception. This is understandable, but the result can often seem a bit arid; clothes, after all, were made for people, and it is people that animate them. To separate the life of a garment from actual life can also sap it of emotion, and meaning. Which is why viewing "In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection," currently at the Anna Wintour Costume Center of the Metropolitan Museum of Art until May 17, is such a pleasure. Anyone expecting a series of historical looks from the usual suspects might think again. Featuring 80 pieces (clothing and accessories) from what the museum calls "one of the greatest private collections of 20th-century fashion," most of which are from an extraordinary 165-piece bequest by Ms. Schreier to the Met for its 150th anniversary, the exhibition is, more than anything else, the reflection of one woman's love affair with fashion. Not that Ms. Schreier, who grew up in Detroit, actually wore any of these clothes. But she adored them from the time she was 4 years old, and began flipping through the magazines at Russeks, the Detroit department store patronized by the great auto moguls' wives, where her father ran the fur salon. Amused by the sight of a little girl obsessed with sparkly dresses, they took to sending her their castoff couture, and that became the kernel of a collection that now includes over 15,000 pieces. That collection, and the part on view at the Met, contains all the major names, but what defines it more than anything else is Ms. Schreier's own appreciation for pretty things. The pieces on display in two rooms stretch from the turn of the century through the 1950s and on to today, with a Campbell's Soup Can dress from 1966-67 and some winking trompe l'oeil 1980s Chloé (plus two gorgeous 1970s Zandra Rhodes). But hidden away between the Balenciagas and the Chanels, the Diors and the Adrians, are treasures by little-known or even unknown designers that are a delight to discover. The Madeleine & Madeleine evening gown, circa 1923, greets guests at the entrance to the show, for example, with its Egyptian-inspired scarab embroidery. And the 1913 Maison Margaine-Lacroix Art Nouveau satin gown, encrusted in jet, that glimmers with sequins. Three origin-unknown flapper dresses from the 1920s, beaded to within an inch of their glittering seams, matched only in their lavish surprise by three elaborately printed velvets of the same era — two capes and a column — by Maria Monaci Gallenga, so plush you can practically stroke the weft with your eyes. It is these less famous names whose impact lingers, in part because they are so unexpected. And if Ms. Schreier hadn't had that initial gut punch of desire for them, trumping pedigree, they might never have made it into her sartorial miscellany, and they wouldn't now be part of the Met — or our own imaginations. In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection Through May 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.  |
| Can Recycled Rags Fix Fashion’s Waste Problem? - The New York Times Posted: 21 Dec 2019 03:00 AM PST  Tucked away in the bowels of the Brooklyn Army Terminal is a 4,000-square-foot warehouse filled from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with garbage bags. They contain castoffs from New York's fashion studios: mock-up pockets ripped from sample jeans, swatches in next season's paisley print. There is denim here in every wash, spandex in every hue. Dig through one bag and it is possible to find a little rug of carmine-colored fur and yards of gray pinstripe wool suiting. In another, embroidered patches from GapKids and spools of ribbon in velvet and lace. Nearly 6,000 pounds of textile scraps arrive each week to be inspected, sorted and recycled by five staffers and many more volunteers at FabScrap, the nonprofit behind this operation. Since 2016, it has helped New York's fashion studios recycle their design-room discards — the mutilated garments, dead-stock rolls and swatches that designers use to pick materials and assess prototypes. So far, the organization has collected close to half a million pounds of fabric from the design studios of large retailers like Express, J. Crew and Marc Jacobs and independent clothiers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Their discards have been shredded and recycled into stuffing and insulation or resold to fashion students, educators and artists. "So much waste gets created in the design process," said Jessica Schreiber, the executive director of FabScrap. "But it's the tip of the iceberg." As climate change has accelerated, corporations of all kinds have become increasingly preoccupied with their sustainability cred. Four-fifths of consumers feel strongly that companies should implement programs to improve the environment, according to a recent Nielsen study. Image  Clothing companies in particular have faced pressure to change, from politicians, protesters at fashion shows and shoppers of all ages who want to reduce their carbon footprints. The fashion industry is often erroneously cited as the second-most polluting business in the world, but overproduction, chemical use, carbon emissions and waste are certainly issues it contends with. Ms. Schreiber understood early the angst that waste was causing designers. In 2014, she was overseeing the Department of Sanitation's refashionNYC program, which collects old clothing and textiles at farmers' markets and in participating apartment buildings. She received a string of similar calls from brands including J. Crew, Eileen Fisher, Express, Mara Hoffman and Marc Jacobs. The companies were sitting on piles of seasonal prints and swatches that couldn't be donated but shouldn't be thrown out. "It really hit a nerve with people," Ms. Schreiber said. Half of the designers had resorted to hoarding scraps under their desks as they tried — and failed — to find places to give them away. "There was a lot of guilt," she said, and no clear path. Spinning a Sustainable YarnFor a designer, cutting down on waste isn't as simple as recycling a few bags of fabric every week. It requires overhauling the brand's business model: forgoing seasonal collections; eschewing — or being rejected by — traditional retailers that accept only large orders and standard packaging; selling directly to consumers; and getting design teams to think about the sustainability and supply chain of each material and garment. Dana Davis, the vice president of sustainability at Mara Hoffman and an early FabScrap adopter, remembered feeling anxious about how the company could better deal with waste. "It just felt burdensome," she said. But after a conversation with Ms. Hoffman, the designer, it became clear to them that change was necessary. The company began shipping swimwear in compostable bags and made long-term commitments to the materials it purchased. To cut excess inventory, the brand moved away from the fashion cycle and the industry norm of placing orders on projection. There are still challenges — like making sure consumers and retailers actually compost the bags — but other brands are getting on board with changes at the design, manufacturing and distributional levels. It's hard to pinpoint how much waste is created before a garment even reaches the consumer. Factory waste is not tracked by outside agencies. Supply chains are now so complex and reliant on remote contractors and subcontractors that the companies can't account for all the materials. Even if a brand wanted to find out how much fabric waste it created, "it would be very difficult for them to research that, because different factories might have different processes," said Timo Rinassen, an assistant professor of sustainability at Parsons School of Design. Wendy Waugh, the senior vice president of sustainability at Theory and a FabScrap client, knew that determining the brand's total waste would be a challenge. The company works with many different fibers, which are sourced from all over the world. The company's "Good Wool," for instances, comes from a farm in Tasmania, and is scoured, spun and dyed at a mill in Italy before it is warehoused and sold around the world. After a fiber is harvested and spun, it is sent to a factory where it is cut, dyed and trimmed. Reverse Resources, a software company that works with major apparel factories in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, found that 20 percent of the fabric used in the cut-make-trim phase is ultimately thrown out. Linda Greer, the founder of the Clean by Design program and a former toxicologist at the N.R.D.C., has advised many garment and dyeing factories in China. She said that brands frequently reject fabrics because they don't match the desired shade exactly. "I've seen so many 'weeping piles' of miscolored fabric," Ms. Greer said. "Sometimes they can touch it up. And sometimes they throw it away." Once a garment is complete, it can present another problem: excess inventory. In some cases those garments are incinerated, which prevents them from being resold at a discount, Mr. Rinassen said. Last year, Burberry burned $37 million of clothing and cosmetics to maintain "brand value." The previous year, H&M came under scrutiny after it was reported to have incinerated 60 tons of unsold merchandise. Stephanie Benedetto founded Queen of Raw, an online marketplace for dead-stock fabrics and a FabScrap partner, after seeing how much manufactured material was sitting in warehouses ($120 billion worth, by her estimate). At that volume, she said, waste isn't just environmentally irresponsible — it's "a C.F.O. issue." Apparently, also, a marketing issue. Fashion companies have been quick to invest in environmentally friendly marketing. There have been capsule collections derived from natural fibers like orange pulp (Salvatore Ferragamo), pineapple leaves (H&M), grape skin (& Other Stories) and mushrooms (Stella McCartney), and a wide selection of recycled polyester made from fishing nets (Burberry) and beach-strewn plastic bottles (Adidas). These usually amount to little more than P.R. gambits and short-term fixes. Samantha MacBride, an assistant professor at Baruch College and a former waste management professional, said that the ideas big brands implement often reflect a lack of understanding about waste management. The way to minimize trash, she said, isn't by devising a green marketing strategy or using new technological fixes. "The key is to produce less," she said. Sorting Through ScrapsStanding on the FabScrap floor, it is impossible not to feel overwhelmed by the enormous pile of trash. Ms. Schreiber noted that the bags in the facility were "almost irrelevant in the scheme of what is probably generated." None of the overstocked garments languishing in company warehouses are here. Nor are the huge quantities of fabric that are tossed from the factory floor. Beneath the heap, seven volunteers slowly and manually sorted by material every scrap that came in. They inspected and removed labels and rubbed the fabric between their fingers. It could not have been further from the mechanized processes at a recycling plant, which employ feats of engineering — eddy currents, magnets and near-infrared scanners — to identify and categorize various types of metals, plastic and paper. There is no technology in use that can detect the differences between, say, spandex and wool. "The infrastructure is lacking," Ms. Schreiber said. "Like the fact that the sorting still all happens by hand is bonkers." The recycling processes are similarly decades behind. Today, there are a number of companies, like Evrnu and WornAgain, that are just beginning to recycle fibers, a process that involves shredding and dissolving the fibers into a pulp that can be respun into a new fabric. Ms. Schreiber said that if clothing scraps were treated "as a waste-commodity stream, not a nonprofit-managed material, we would be further along in the tech." In the back corner of the warehouse is one of FabScrap's two shops, where it sells many of the larger pieces its employees and volunteers find among the scraps. On any given day, some fashion students stop by, shopping and drawing inspiration from the ends of dead-stock rolls that are cheaper here than at fabric stores in the city. Jasmine Velazquez, a fashion student at F.I.T., studied some green leather that she wanted to use for an upcoming assignment. "I'd rather buy leather from here than support the industry like that. Sustainability should be more important to me because I am a student," she said. In June, FabScrap opened a second shop, on a block in the garment district teeming with secondhand shops, and just a stone's throw from F.I.T. Camille Tagle, the director of reuse and partnership at FabScrap and a former evening wear designer at Pamella Roland, pointed out some of the special fabrics that filled the shelves. There were rolls of baby blue suede and white cotton with geometric fil coupé accents. Above the shelves were nearly full cones of thread in colors that evoked a Pantone guide. "If it doesn't match by a fraction of a shade, it's out," she said. One piece in particular, a shawl's length of pink crinkle chiffon with sequined flowers, caught her eye. Each flower had at least three or four colors arranged in a different pattern. "It takes a lot of time," Ms. Tagle said. "A designer had to communicate all of those details to the mill." A steady traffic of students and hobbyists came in to peruse the shelves and scour the scrap bins. Olivia Koval, who is pursuing an M.F.A. in textiles at Parsons, left the shop with a tote bag full of mutilated jeans and denim scraps. She planned to overdye and felt them together to make a larger fabric. "For people to feel inspired by something that was headed for the trash is really important for me," Ms. Tagle said. Since opening six months ago, the Chelsea store has served 4,800 customers. Next year, FabScrap plans to set up operations on the West Coast. In spite of what she has built, Ms. Schreiber is measured about FabScrap's success. "This is such a small group of self-selecting companies, and this is a very niche part of their waste stream," she said. "That's what's so frustrating."  |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2019 12:46 PM PST This September, Spelman College held a celebration to honor the life and accomplishments of 100-year-old Ann Jewel Moore. For more than 20 years, Moore created custom designs with her own fashion company, Ann Moore Couturier, and her work was featured in a 1953 issue of Vogue magazine. However, Moore's love of fashion goes back even further, as she explained in a recent interview with "Closer Look" senior producer, and fellow Spelman alumna, Candace Wheeler. The early years In 1922, Moore was just 3 years old when she and her family moved to Georgia from Daytona Beach, Florida. During the late 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. faced the Great Depression and — like much of the nation — Moore and her family dealt with tough times. "When the Great Depression was spiraling out, it was a struggle to survive," Moore told Wheeler while sitting in the lobby of her senior facility. "There was a lot of camaraderie that came out of that because people banded together and used their combined resources to help one another."
Those early years were formative, and Moore remembered being impressed by the daughter of a family friend who showed off her sewing skills. "Her parents decided to send her to a special school. And, in this school, one of the things she was taught [was] how to sew by hand and make doll clothes," Moore said. "I saw all of these gorgeous doll clothes she had made by hand, and I wanted to learn to sew like that. And, that was my earliest inspiration to get into fashion." Moore's grandmother was her first sewing teacher. She learned on an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine operated by foot pedals. Years later, Moore carried those early lessons to Spelman College, where she majored in economics. Later, she attended fashion design school in New York and, eventually, Paris.  "That was very interesting when I first enrolled in the classroom with an instructor who could not speak English," Moore recalled with a laugh. "But, he made his hands talk." The language barrier wasn't the only difference Moore overcame. She also learned a new design technique called "draping garments." "I couldn't understand: how in the world can you drape with paper? In America, I've been used to draping with muslin. I said, well, one thing about it, you can't stretch paper on the bias. What are you going to do if you're going to try to drape up something that is on the bias with a piece of paper? But they felt in France that was a waste – too expensive to have fabric like muslin," Moore said. After Paris, Moore returned to the United States and settled down in Detroit. There, she opened her own fashion design company, Ann Moore Couturier. Moore's business was across the street from Motown, where she created custom designs for her clients. "My philosophy was each individual has a fashion persona, and I'm trying to find out what that is and help you enhance that — you're going to come with some kind of fashion experience. Then, I'm going to listen to this and study you and see how much of that I seem to agree with or see in you," Moore said. "Then, if I can make some recommendations or some improvements here and there so that this basic wardrobe is not something that's going to have a time limit to it." A lasting legacy One of Moore's favorite designs was the UbiquiSix — a six-piece garment that could transition a woman from day to evening. Today, this design hangs at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead. On a tour of the facility, Jessica Vanlanduyt, vice president of Guest Experiences at the Atlanta History Center, explained the versatility of the piece.
"It's this kind of daytime-to-nighttime, and so, you've got these six pieces, and you can go from the office to out to dinner out to a party. And so, you've got this wonderful, beautiful jacket and little kind of neckpiece with it. There's a skirt and pant option and this beautiful kind of brocade. And it's all in this kind of deep green. And so, really, you just take all of the pieces with you, and you can kind of mix and match throughout the day." Moore did not only break boundaries with her designs. Her time in the fashion industry spanned 20 years when it was incredibly difficult to excel as a woman and a woman of color. "The fact that she is living in a time where she leaves Atlanta because of the lack of opportunities here for a young, African American woman. She goes to Detroit, is incredibly successful. …The influence that she had, and the place that she's occupying in Detroit with Motown being, I believe, right across the street," Vanlanduyt said. "So this kind of cultural phenomenon that's happening, and for her to kind of be involved in that and for us to see the collections we get to look at the idea and the fun of the 1960s and 70s and what she's doing." Gail O'Neill, an Atlanta-based journalist, television host, style editor and model, agreed that Moore's accomplishments were groundbreaking. "Let's not even talk about her doing that 50 years ago, for a woman to do that today would be an astounding feat," O'Neill said. "…For a young girl from Georgia to who had never left the country before to decide that she's going to travel internationally…that she would aspire to do things on such a grand scale is worthy of praise and acclaim."
Moore said the 100th birthday celebration at Spelman College affirmed her career choices. "The birthday celebration seemed to, I feel, gave me more validation of who I am," she said. "There have been times where I had thought I took the wrong career; maybe put so much time and all of my energy in that because I ran into so many blocks and obstacles." Although Moore is now retired, she still has opinions of her own when it comes to current trends. "I disagree with these tights women wear in the streets — they belong in the gym that's where they started, and that's where they should stay," Moore said. "To me, I say, are women that desperate? Nothing left for imagination? I wholeheartedly disagree with that fashion." Moore also said, however, when it comes to fashion, it's OK to be unique. "Well, I think that clothes should be more personalized and don't become slave to what's the trend or the fashion is if it's not you," Moore said. "Be in control of your own fashion." "Closer Look" producer Grace Walker contributed to this post.  |
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