Yahoo Lifestyle One day, three designers and a New York garment industry in decline
NEW YORK - Just after 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday in January, Naomi Mishkin arrived at Faye Sample, the small-batch factory in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, where garments for her line, Naomi Nomi, were being assembled.
Four women sat at sewing machines, fabric whirring beneath their hands. Nearby, a small team operated industrial steamers that hung from the ceiling. In a corner, a woman sewed buttons by hand.
Mishkin was waiting for the proprietors, Faye Yan and Simon Yan, to finish a meeting with another customer. In the meantime, she ambled the perimeter of the factory floor greeting workers.
The room was filled with light, from both fluorescent bulbs hanging from the high ceiling and tall windows running the length of the wall.
“People are like, ‘Is your factory really rough?’ And I’m like, ‘They have a better view than we have,” Mishkin said with a laugh.
To her point, the scene at Faye Sample did appear to be remarkably sunny, especially for an industry that has been in sharp decline for more than 10 years.
According to a study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the New York fashion industry employs 50,000 fewer people today than it did in 2014. It’s a far cry from its heyday in the 1910s, when the garment industry accounted for 46 percent of the industrial workforce in New York City, according to the 1962 book “The Promised City,” by Moses Rischin. Today, just 6 percent of the city’s jobs are in fashion.
Naomi Nomi (pronounced “Nomi Nomi”) sells sweatshirts that bear the slogan “Designed in Brooklyn. Sewn in Queens.” Manufacturing in New York is a point of pride for Mishkin. But it’s also a practicality. “If I lived in Italy, I’d make in Italy.” she said. “If I lived in China, I’d make in China.”
There are several quirks to Naomi Nomi that make domestic production feasible. The business is nearly 95 percent direct-to-consumer, and each piece is made to order. Mishkin doesn’t fulfill big wholesale orders and doesn’t keep finished inventory in stock. She honors exchanges but doesn’t do returns. It all keeps her storage costs low.
Small-batch manufacturing means that cheaper foreign labor is out of the question. “It would be completely impossible to make those numbers overseas and then ship them back,” Mishkin said. “The timing doesn’t make sense.”
Her clientele - a cohort Mishkin describes as “millennials and their mentors” - have become accustomed to spending a bit more time and money for her designs. It’s out of step with the manic pace of fast fashion and e-commerce, but it seems to be working.
Mishkin said that her sales have nearly doubled every year since she began in 2018, and she is able to maintain a profit margin of 65 percent. She likes to say that if a customer buys one of her shirts, statistically they come back for 2.68 more.
Mishkin is also fond of shouting out the names of the people who manufacture her wares. She gushes over Gabe and Gabi, who make up Naomi Nomi’s two-person in-house production team. There are also Jesse and Jonah, two men in the Garment District who inherited their button business from their fathers, who were best friends. Naomi Nomi also uses buttons from a factory in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, owned by Terry, who bought his inventory from Sherry, who died a few years ago.
“The garment center is very familial,” Mishkin said. That applies to the people she works with and her literal heritage. “I come from a deep schmatta Lower East Side Jewish family,” she said. “Immigrants make clothes in America. That’s what they did at the turn of the century.”
She gestured to the workers operating the sewing machines. “My grandmother was one of these women,” Mishkin said. “My great-grandmother was one of these women.”
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How did we get to a place where the very fact of a designer manufacturing in New York City is a novelty? Fewer than 100 years ago, New York’s Garment District had the highest concentration of garment workers in the world. Today, the neighborhood has shop windows advertising going-out-of-business sales.
At the end of the 19th century, pogroms in Europe brought Jewish immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side, where they began fabricating textiles, sometimes from their tenement apartments. The hot conditions of these rooms is where the term “sweatshop” came from.
The garment industry boomed, operating with little oversight or regulation. That began to change in 1911, when 146 garment workers died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, catalyzing calls for reform and emboldening the U.S. labor movement.
In 1916, new zoning laws in the city made it harder to make clothes out of the tenements of the Lower East Side. Garmentos sought bigger manufacturing facilities, dedicated spaces for showrooms and closer proximity to the stores selling their clothes. They found it in a square of Manhattan running from 34th Street to 42nd Street and between Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue. Stores opened, selling fabrics and furs, notions and trims, industrial equipment and repair services. The neighborhood once known as “The Tenderloin” had become “The Garment District.”
During the 1950s, the district employed an estimated 323,669 garment workers. Today, that estimation is closer to 3,994.
By the early 1990s, domestic manufacturing had been in steady decline for decades. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement functionally pushed it off a cliff. NAFTA gutted policies that restricted trade among Canada, the United States and Mexico, making it easier for clothing companies to use much cheaper labor in Mexican factories.
There was still an industry of unionized workers making clothes in the Garment District. But it became exponentially more difficult to compete with offshore workers.
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Carolina Herrera is one of the major fashion brands that remains in the neighborhood. At noon on that Thursday, the company’s creative director, Wes Gordon, was milling around the Herrera atelier, checking in on the team readying samples for the brand’s runway show on Feb. 10.
Two employees in white coats were attending to a gray pin-striped jumpsuit on a mannequin. In another room, a patternmaker had just begun the process of adapting a sketch of a dress with an oversize rosette silhouette that Gordon had delivered that morning.
Gordon’s office is just one flight above the atelier. That proximity can lead to serendipity. Gordon proudly pointed to a tulle dress with beads. The beads, he said, were a late-stage addition, after he was inspired by the holes left in the gown where a dressmaker had pinned the fabric.
“The beauty of doing samples here and doing domestic production is that you have that ability to monitor constantly,” Gordon said.
For much of the 20th century, the Garment District was mostly producing clothes for house labels sold at department stores. New York designers worked in obscurity. Much of their job involved directly copying designs from Paris.
Carolina Herrera was founded in 1980, part of the wave of late-20th-century American designers that built New York’s reputation as a capital of fashion design, not just fashion production.
Ironically, as New York brands such as Anne Klein, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta were rising, New York manufacturing was falling.
American companies began to slowly shift to offshore production after the passage of John F. Kennedy’s Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which opened the door to foreign manufacturers. By 1985, only 70 percent of the garments sold by American brands were manufactured in the United States.
Today, Carolina Herrera’s production is divided among facilities in the Garment District as well as factories in Italy and China, which Gordon said they exclusively use in knitwear manufacturing.
“I don’t think it’s about one being better than the other,” Gordon said of the factories he works with. “I think each factory just has their own hand and their own talent.”
Was Gordon concerned about President Donald Trump’s plan to impose huge tariffs on Chinese imports? “We kind of take things as they come,” Gordon said. He acknowledged that there could be an industry-wide price adjustment on some Chinese-made goods but said that the company was working hard to stay a step ahead.
“We’re very strategic and always hedge things by having a portfolio of factories we work with, so we don’t have all our proverbial eggs in one basket,” he said.
As of writing, Carolina Herrera said that it hadn’t adjusted any of its overseas partnerships. A representative for the company wrote in an email, “Our guiding principle continues to be creating the best quality product for our customers, and finding the best production partners to do so.”
Mishkin had already begun the process of moving away from Chinese silk suppliers before Trump announced Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods. “If I’m uncertain whether or not what’s in effect today will hold by Friday, there’s no way I can subject my supply chain to that instability,” Mishkin wrote in an email.
“Given the rapid and constant change in policy messaging, I don’t see us going back anytime soon,” she added. “Smooth production relies on timing, and timing relies on stability.”
But it’s unlikely that tariffs on China would result in an immediate shift to domestic manufacturing. In the case of Carolina Herrera, the decision to produce its knitwear in China was based on a variety of factors, including equipment availability, labor costs, shipping timelines and product quality, all weighed carefully against price and profit margin. Finding a suitable replacement for Chinese goods and production would be no easy task.
Still, Carolina Herrera is far less reliant on Chinese labor than some other companies. There are many American fashion brands that would probably shutter their businesses rather than try to find new supply chains.
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Batsheva Hay, the designer and creator of the label Batsheva, started renting her studio on 38th street in 2016. “I’ve been doing this for eight years, and when I started, everyone in the Garment District was talking about how it’s not like it used to be, right?” Hay said. “And now it’s really, like, skeletal.”
Hay’s career has been a crash course in the rag trade. She was pushed into the fashion business after one of her homemade dresses caught the eye of an executive at the e-commerce site Matches, who placed an order for 600 units.
To fulfill the order, she asked friends for introductions in the Garment District. She was unaccustomed to the rituals of negotiating with factories. “They need the work, and you need the good price, and that’s a whole dance,” she said.
A few years later, Barneys stiffed her on a large wholesale order, which prompted her to set up a website to sell the remaining stock. It was her entrée to the direct-to-consumer market.
Today, both Matches and Barneys are out of business. Batsheva soldiers on, but it keeps getting harder. “The prices of everything have gone up,” Hay said. “Fabric is more expensive. The costs have doubled for me, really.”
She had dabbled in overseas manufacturing, but even before concerns about a new trade war, it wasn’t a good fit. “I’ve sampled some things in China,” she said. “The shipping has always been expensive no matter what.”
Besides, working locally is better for her creative process. “The more removed that you are from the production, the less you get to play,” she said.
Leaving her studio to visit a nearby sample room, Hay pointed to a coffee shop that had recently closed.
“He’d been there forever,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s such a sign. He just doesn’t have customers anymore.”
It’s a depressing time to work in the Garment District, but there are still things that spark joy. Hay’s eyes lit up when she described Nancy Gordon, a charismatic longtime employee at the store Steinlauf & Stoller whom she calls “the grommet queen.”
“I wanted to ask her to walk in my last show, but I was too starstruck,” Hay said.
And Hay adores Alena Sun, the samplemaker she has worked with for years. At Sun’s sample room, stacks of fabric and garments are piled high.
Sun had been at this location since 2001. Her uncle had owned a different sample house since 1997. She has five employees, most of them related to her. “We all work together because everything we handle ourself,” she said. “We don’t have somebody to handle different things.”
It was 6:30, and Sun was getting ready to begin her 90-minute commute home to Queens. “I came early, so I’m leaving early,” Sun said.
“Alena never takes enough time off,” Hay said before picking up a sample that Sun had recently finished.
Hay ran her hand over an exaggerated ruffle, nodding approvingly. Sun also nodded. Hay said that she and Sun often speak in shorthand. In this case, it seemed as if they were communicating wordlessly. “It’s a seamless interaction,” Hay said.
Sun agreed. “It’s a good relationship,” she said. “She trusts us, we trust her.”
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Additional research by Andrew Van Dam.
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