Image: The Lady and the Sailor, a USA-made fashion brand
My favorite time of year from age five to eighteen was the week or so right before school started back, where my mom would gather me and my siblings up and take us to a department store to select a few new outfits for the change of seasons. There was some sort of magic to being able to put on a new outfit and in the process a new skin-a new take on life. In middle school, I was the skater girl who wore the same Vans and baggy top practically every day for a year straight. I had a crush on the preppy guy with green hair who carried around a skateboard, so you can imagine it was only natural. My high school years involved a brief spat of heavy indulgence in loads of pleather and sparkles when babysitting money became my new best friend. Really, i'm sure my parents were thrilled that I'd become so excellent at showing off my body, and at color-coordinating my electric blue pants to my eye makeup. Then later in high school and on to college, I declared a moderation to preppy, sporting Seven jeans, long-sleeved polo shirts and a touch of Tommy Hilfiger. By the time college truly hit, I decided I needed to work at the mall, if only to cut my rabid spending in half thanks to an employee discount.
My love for fashion has at many times spiraled a bit out of control. I've used it as an escape-masking pain, confusion, and even lack of confidence in beautiful clothing: fitted leggings with a cropped sweater, just-roughed up enough jeans paired with a button down and fedora, snug tee and "I don't care" skater shoes. If you've ever seen The Devil Wears Prada, then you know just how powerful a drug a well-styled outfit can be, whether worn or coveted.
Meanwhile, there's something about my love of a well-cut jacket and flattering pant that stems from something good, something of who I was made to be and how I was made to live. My father has spent his entire career working in manufacturing: from the time I was born until I was seven he worked at a company called Milliken, from age 7 to 12 he worked for Hanes running a t-shirt factory, and from roughly the time I was 12 to 25 he worked for a company that makes strange fabric coverings for things like hotel rooms, high end cars, and protective linings. Today, my dad helps run manufacturing for a company that designs devices for the medical industry. So, in a sense, material goods are a bit in my DNA. My dad has the mind for running things that involve production and subsequently my own mind runs a bit like a loosely-oiled machine that quickly organizes things by pattern, sorts them into new arrangements, and then changes the equation by bringing in a new variable. Like any good designer, i'm always on the hunt for something new and always looking for new ways to assemble and transform things. But to what end?
Brought up in the throes of outsourcing, my path has been varied and at times riddled with confusion. Dad gets laid off because the plant is closing down and the company is outsourcing all manufacturing overseas? Really? Will we move to Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia? It was fatiguing. For all of us.
Around ten years ago, I began to wonder if maybe my fashion passion was wound a little too tightly, or if at the very least it needed its own refashioning. At the time, I was studying international politics and policy, wanting like any young student to change the world. One day, a professor in my international relations class showed a documentary that highlighted the dark side of garment manufacturing-the side that involved child laborers making our clothes and spending their evenings sleeping under rags, the side that meant that chemicals used to make my wardrobe pop ended up in a creek in someone else's backyard, the side that involved kids and families digging through trash heaps looking for food. It was awakening. And it changed me.
Subsequently, I went on a bit of a rampage. Anyone who has known me long enough knows that there have been many. I vowed to stop buying new manufactured goods and only shop second hand. That lasted, eh, a few months...but only because I couldn't find a way to reconcile my love of integrating beautiful things into my life with the realities of where those things came from.
About the same time, I began to read about the effects of Western globalization on the rest of the world, one developing country at a time. Much of the focus of my latter years of study was on Asia, taking a particularly close look at the Chinese economy and how its not-yet-progressive political system crippled young laborers' ability to fight for fair wages, clean working conditions, or a decent place to live. After reading Nicholas Kristoff's compendium of riddling stories, China Wakes, I decided it was time to see the other side. During 2005 I traveled to China for six weeks, spending five weeks in one of its inner-country industrial centers, and then another week and a half in Beijing. I talked to students whose lives looked very different from mine, whose parents didn't put them through college, and whose futures were a few shades dimmer than what I considered remotely bright. And yet, they were happy. Their lives were simpler. They spent their time and resources focusing on one another-time relaxing over a bowl of soup and tofu, taking the bus downtown for a walk in the park, walking inordinate amounts to get to something interesting. Sure, they shopped, but their pocketbooks only allowed them to have a few key items that they worked and reworked every day and wore out until they couldn't be worn any longer.
My time in China baffled me. I saw the "other side" and yet they weren't as bad off as I had imagined, or maybe they were just a lot happier with less. Somehow, the students that I met taught me to be content with less and to find what was really driving my quest for new and better.
Fast forward a few years. I began to read about people like Yvon Chouinard, his remarkable story of building Chouinard Equipment and later Patagonia, and his long-term zeal for making a better way of producing, and making a different way of consuming material goods. I still recall a passage in his Let My People Go Surfing where he unpacked his team's "aha moment" when they learned that the equipment they were making was destroying the places they loved-the picks they were designing were wearing down the surfaces that people climbed, rock by rock, crevice by crevice. My experience of fashion, and really the material order more generally, has been a bit like that of Chouinard and Patagonia, where i've come to realize that the notion of making an impression or expressing identity through clothes wasn't a bad thing but rather that the way i'd gone about it was flawed. I didn't need to buy new clothes every few weeks to feel good about myself. And I didn't need to constantly have new things to make my outfits feel fresh, or refined. So, I began buying well-made and tailored items that could last many seasons, if not a lifetime. I swore off brands like Forever21, whose tops don't last more than a few nights and whose seams brag nothing but a puckered waistline. And I began reading the tags, everywhere I went, whatever I purchased. Mostly, that led me to buy a lot less and to learn that I could live on a lot less and still be happy.
About two years ago, after many many sleepness nights of wondering how to reconcile that "beauty in my life" desire with my just-as-strong desire to do good even in the places I could not see, I began another quest: a quest for the resurgence of American made, a quest to know where my clothing was coming from. I began making lists of all of the companies who were close to home and made products that I loved and could feel good about wearing. I didn't buy many of them, but I learned. And I learned to ask questions: to ask where the fabric was sourced from, to ask where a product itself was made, to ask about the designers and their intentions for their companies, and most of all to ask myself what it was that I wanted to do with my love of fashion in light of the fashion industry's atrocious underbelly. I began to realize that I could enjoy the making of a product, and all of its different touchpoints, just as much as the product itself. Fashion became process, not product, and in the process my aim shifted from material gain and personal expression to understanding and otherness. Today, my love for fashion is much more about stories than it is about clothes-its about the stories of the people who make my clothes, why they design and what keeps them going, and where the profits from my purchases are making an impact. It involves a different way of dressing but it looks downstream. Fashion has the ability to paint a picture of progress, but only if we look at the story beyond the seen, only if we take the time to understand what makes a well-made item great. I'm excited to see where this new journey will take me, and who i'll meet along the way.
Three USA-Made brands to check out:
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