A New Closet!

Hiya! Thanks for stopping by, but I’ve moved…please find me at www.closettour.com.
See you there!

Garment District Incubators

Now that I’m settled down from Sweden, a story this morning from the Wall Street Journal’s Ralph Gardner Jr. fanned the fire under my buns to get back to my reporting in the Garment District. I’m glad he put designer Bibhu Mohapatra in the lede, or he might have lost me with his paragraph-long flashback of watching supermodels strip backstage in the ’80s. Gardner (who professed being foreign to fashion) said the word incubator made him picture “a climate-controlled box,” and many involved with the CFDA’s glossy-floored corridor of 12 glass-walled studios on 38th Street seem take issue with the name. Even a mailman in the elevator there told me, “it sounds like a place for growing aliens.”

A Bibhu Mohapatra gown at his F/W 2010 show in February

These designers may be, um, growing, but they’re well on their way to being established names in the fashion world. Bibhu has been one of my favorite ones to watch. In the months since reviewing his  Fall 2010 show (pictured above), I’ve spent some time with the designer and his staff, as they moved from their studios uptown to their new space in the Garment District.

The Designer in his former Upper West Side studio, March

At work in the new space, April

As Bibhu and his hall-mates have been settling into their new workspace on 38th Street, I’ve been settling into mine on 40th, which was also referred to as “the incubator,” before being rechristened The Center for Journalistic Innovation. From here, I’ll keep reporting on the Garment District, and amass material for a project to address the garment industry’s relationship with our city. Stay tuned this summer. Both in fashion and in media, it’s going to be an exciting run-up to Fashion Week in September.

A Moment with the New York Times

A Moment in Time, the NYT Lens Blog’s interactive compilation of photos from around the globe, all taken at the same time, is genius and beautiful. It’s touching, funny and revealing to see the different objects, people and, well, moments, that readers contributed. They vary widely. A camel rests in Qatar. A dad takes his new son to church in Texas. I absolutely love this shot of an Ecuadorian woman in arresting orange.

When I finally left behind a Moment in Time, I found my way to this little interactive feature in the Style section: photos of readers’ favorite vintage finds that accompanied Sarah Maslin Nir’s piece, “Prospecting in Manhattan’s Richest Vintage Veins.” (For my own take on the topic, see here.)

A Screenshot of the NY Times’ “Vintage Finds from Around the World”

It’s less grandiose than a Moment in Time, of course, but no less revealing to scroll through readers’ vintage favorites. I’d be smiling too, if I were wearing this striped dress in the sun. But I especially loved the shot below, with the little glimpse of what I imagine to be the photographer’s dresser, captured among her photographs.

A little moment all its own.

What to Wear…When You’re Nervous?

It will probably surprise exactly no one to learn that I deal with anxiety over an event by planning my outfit. (Remember the first day of school?) Suffice to say, then, that I’ve been wondering what to wear tonight for weeks. In a couple hours at The New York Times, I’m going to stand up in front of a crowd that includes faculty and friends from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, as well as journalists like Barbara Walters and Charlie Rose (so apt at public speaking!!), and accept an award from the Dean of the school. I’m so excited for the honor, but after mining my closet and tormenting my friends all weekend, I still haven’t landed on an outfit.

I’m about to hop in the shower, where an assortment of dresses, jackets, skirts and shrugs hang, waiting for the wrinkles to fall out in the steam. (Now that Julie and Lina’s opening film revealed this strange setting, there’s no point in hiding it.)

The Dean might be happy to know I’ve taken a few minutes from this turmoil to work on my speech. Essentially, I’ll talk about CUNY being a place that gave me the confidence to stick with the material I believe in, and the tools to repackage it for the worldwide web. (See: Sweden.Closettour.) I’m hoping for an outfit that can remind me of the same. A solid piece, maybe made modern by an accessory or two, that still lets the story shine through. 

Hit the showers!

An Introduction: Sweden.Closettour

As some of you may already know, I’ve spent the last few weeks working on Sweden.Closettour, a new site about sustainability and style, inspired by four days of reporting in Stockholm. It’s an alpha version of the sort of stories I plan to produce in the future–like a little swatch of material, presented in a slightly different format than you’ll find here at the blog. Like all the stories and posts from Closettour, its purpose is to put the “wonder” in wondering what to wear.

Erin Dixon wonders what to wear at the Scandinavia House

It all began, as you’ll see in the video below, when an invitation arrived from the Swedish Institute, to meet the curators and designers behind EcoChic, a new exhibit opening this week at New York’s Scandinavia House. 

The subject of sustainability, in the worlds of fashion and journalism alike these days, wears a cloak of mystery. Sweden.Closettour is an experiment in discovering sustainable models in both fields. For the time being, my work is funded by a grant for entrepreneurial journalism from the McCormick Foundation–and this trip had a little help from the Swedes. (See “The Trip” for details). 

Kajsa Guterstam kept us caffeinated and on course in Stockholm

Along the way, I talked with fashion designers and physicists, farmers and factory managers, all of whom shared excellent insight. But the truest one came from Mathilda Tham, a brainy beauty who teaches design in Stockholm and London.

“You can’t be sustainable or holistic on your own,” she said, at the end of our meeting in March. “You’ve got to do it with other people.”

Julie Miller and Lina Plioplyte stick my face on the map

I’ve joked these past few weeks, working long hours on a website about sustainable fashion, that my lifestyle has become less sustainable, and decidedly less fashionable. But, as Mathilda foreshadowed, the project wouldn’t have been possible at all without other people pitching in.

Michael Lanzano shoots fruit and candy for the H&M story

Everyone whose name appears on that About page had a vital hand in getting the website up, and some of them were perfect strangers a few weeks ago. In the end, Grace Koerber helped weave it all together beautifully for the web (if I do say so myself), and the whole project would probably still be an elegant poster-board if Indrani Datta hadn’t helped whip it into shape.

Indrani Datta erases Sweden.Closettour’s to-do list

So, I’ve learned a lot about sustainability (and style), much of which you’ll find on Sweden.Closettour. I hope you find the clothes and characters there as compelling as I did, and that you’ll collaborate too, by sharing criticisms, questions and ideas on the comments page.  

Thanks for your contributions so far. I hope this is just the beginning of the conversation that can sustain itself for a long time to come.

 

An Invitation to…

SWEDEN.CLOSETTOUR.COM!

The next chapter from Closettour, an interactive journey in search of sustainable style in Stockholm!

The Broken Fashion Calendar

They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. And the fashion industry has a problem: The calendar is broken.

Grace Coddington admitted it in March. Julie Gilhart alluded to it in April. And Plum Sykes investigated further in this month’s Vogue, with commiseration from designers like Matthew Williamson and Tomas Maier.

Even when I worked in fashion, I struggled to understand the reasoning behind a system that kept designers “creating” at a relentless rate, so stores could fill their racks with winter sweaters come July, and bikinis shortly after Christmas.

I was trying to make sense of this at the end of last year, and called for backup. Enter Tomoko Ogura, who oversees the buyers of Barney’s Co-op, and Michelle Goad, a merchandiser for Marc Jacobs. When we had lunch the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the young women were recovering from buying and selling, respectively, the Pre-Fall 2010 collections. But on a personal level, Michelle was in the market for a new winter coat. She had stopped by Barney’s with high hopes, but all the good ones were gone in her size.

That’s because the wool and cashmere coats had been out since July, when the average temperature in New York hovers around 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tomoko said she understood her friend’s plight.

“No matter how much they want a winter coat,” she said of her customers, “they are not going to buy it three months ahead of time.”

But, because Barney’s follows the fashion industry’s general calendar, the designers Tomoko buys from ship her wool coats in July and swimsuits in January. She said she tries to give her customers a reasonable reprieve between the holidays and swimsuit season by pushing those designers to ship swimwear just a few weeks later. But in order for this to be effective, she said, designers would have to ship to all their stores later, not just Barney’s. Otherwise, a Diane von Furstenberg bikini may be in the window at Saks weeks before it hits Barney’s, and no one likes to appear behind the ball.

It’s like an arms race, with tropical printed triangle bikinis as weapons.

Image from Juergen H. Dam

And some of those designers deliver new styles as many as twelve times per year. Each of these deliveries falls into one of four seasons: Pre-Fall, Fall, Resort, and Spring. Michelle drew me a dizzying spreadsheet-like calendar, outlining when those “seasonal” collections are actually on the stores’ floors, which has absolutely no correlation with silly factors like the weather. Also on the calendar, is the ever-important markdown—putting items on sale to make room for new merchandise.

But if Michelle Goad, a Marc Jacobs merchandiser who can hand-draw this absurdist calendar from memory, can’t get it together to pick out her winter coat at summer’s end, who on earth can? (Apparently, Plum Sykes can, but let’s agree she’s an outlier.)

Tomoko’s colleague Julie Gilhart–Barney’s Fashion Director and industry bellwether–told Style.com the seasonal system has been abused. “Whatever we can do to slow it down,” she said, “I’m all for.”

Grace Coddington, Vogue’s Creative Director, sounded pretty fed up  when I saw her speak in March. “We’re trying to speed up all those poor designers so that they have fifteen collections a year,” she said. “And it’s stupid. I mean, how many dresses can you wear? And it makes them do it not so well, or they have a breakdown, or as just very very sadly happened, Alexander McQueen killed himself. And that’s part of that hysteria that breaks my heart.”

If that’s not a wake-up call, I’m not sure what is.

It seems some sort of armistice is in order, but what will it take, for designers and retailers to make a systemic change? And what would that look like? At Barney’s, it looks like more limited-edition pieces with interesting stories–think recycled, hand-made, one-of-a-kind. Remember my favorite winter scarf?

Inoue Brothers Scarves

Tomoko was the one who stocked Barney’s shelves with the Bolivian woven shawls. In fact, after seeing one wrapped around her neck that afternoon, I was driven to distraction with the memory of its rainbow-plaid panes. I called the Barney’s Co-op on Madison Avenue to ask if there were any left.

“No,” a young man told me. “That’s all we’re getting in terms of cold weather merchandise.” The next arrivals would be for Spring 2010. Meanwhile, outside, the first snowflakes of the season had just begun to fall.

So what can we do? Hazel Clark, a dean at Parsons, has explored the idea of slowing down the race, and resetting the fashion calendar to look more like a circle than a straight road.

“A cyclical approach would be to think of fashion and clothes ‘moving around’ a cycle,” she wrote in an email. “This could simply be bringing out clothes from the wardrobe to meet seasonal changes in weather e.g. last year’s warm winter coat – or cyclical ideas like re-making, sharing.”

I love those ideas, but I’m not sure the industry is ready for a fashion calendar that’s quite so revolutionary.

So here’s my proposal. How about a compact, whereby a powerful institution like the CFDA, or even Barney’s, gathers a group of designers in need of a break, and arranges for each of them to take a season off in organized rotation? Barney’s could guarantee to buy their remaining seasonal collections, and the designers’ participation in the program would get them–and fashion’s fast-forwarded production calendar–some good press. It’s sort of like our government paying farmers not to plant corn. Maybe a retreat for recovery and inspiration could even be part of the arrangement, compliments of Donna Karan’s Pure Peru.

And when we’re done doing that, we could do the same thing for journalists.

This Doesn’t Bode Well For Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, 2008

From the Associated Press:

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
Associated Press Writer

BEIRUT (AP) — A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair

No word yet on whether women’s fashion is to blame for the eruption in Iceland.

Fashion Crisis: Please Help Tomorrow (Saturday)!

Finding a prom date is hard enough, but at least we can do something to help out with the dresses. I just got an email from Pamela Brown, and it seems Operation Fairy Dust, the prom dress giveaway in Brooklyn, still needs volunteers for the afternoon shift tomorrow from 2:00-6:30. Please email her at pam.brown@wgirls.org if you can help–she’ll add you to the volunteer list and send you more information.

Let me know if you’ll be there so I can say hi as after I wrap up the morning shift! Honestly, I don’t really know what could be more fun than this. Sprinkle some fairy dust, and help someone not have a traumatic prom.

The Web We Weave

Last night at the Loomstate party, I told someone I was a journalist.

“Who do you work for?” he asked.

“I’m independent,” I replied, which is funny, because in many ways, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, my stories are my own and I have no editor to answer to, but lately I get overwhelmed thinking about everyone pitching in to help me with the completion of a website about sustainable style, based on my recent trip to Sweden.

I’ll limit my example to yesterday alone. I’ve asked two of the Swedish designers I’m writing about for additional photographs for the site. One simply sent me a login to peruse her server as I pleased, and the other emailed me selected favorites, including the one below, of her colleague weaving wool in Scotland. I tend to have my Sweden emails in the morning, thanks to the time difference, and these were particularly lovely to wake up to.

But it was time to get down to business. One of my mounting challenges in writing about sustainability, as I’ve noted, is the tremendous task of defining the word. Recently, a Huffington Post reader called Denis Ethier alerted me on Twitter (I get it now!) that he had just left a comment under my article. Indeed, dear Denis had advised  me that in using the term “sustainable growth,” I had employed an oxymoron, and directed me to Dr. Albert Bartlett’s Laws of Sustainability.

Dr. Bartlett, who holds a PhD in Nuclear Physics from Harvard, has been writing and lecturing about sustainability for forty years, and I found his papers to be at once helpful and harrowing.

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” Dr. Bartlett once famously said, “is our inability to understand the exponential function.” (That’s the green one.) I was experiencing an inability to understand a great number of things, but I was able to perceive an exponentially increasing portion of panic. So I did what any perplexed fashion enthusiast would do, and directly contacted a nuclear physicist. Within moments Dr. Bartlett replied to my email, with his home telephone number and a warning he knew nothing “about fashions.” We had an enlightening chat, which you’ll be able to read about once the Sweden site is done.

New Source: Dr. Al Bartlett

By the time we said goodbye, Loomstate’s Earth Day party was about to begin. Commemorating Earth Day in a basement beneath midtown seemed a little counterintuitive until I walked into the sprawling room and saw Pemba Sherpa, one of my absolute favorite souls on this planet. Edun, my previous employer, was once housed in the same SoHo apartment as fashion brands Rogan and Loomstate. Things have since grown and separated a bit (exponentially? I’m not sure.), and Pemba remains the single employee all three labels share. This speaks to their intelligence, because any place blessed with Pemba’s presence on a daily basis will find their employees learning daily lessons about patient kindness from his example.

Old Friend: Pemba Sherpa (on my last day at Edun)

He used to be a guide in the Himalayas (now he treks between Edun, Rogan and Loomstate’s Tribeca offices, handling all things logistical), so Pemba’s appreciation for the planet comes from a uniquely elevated perspective. He knows I love stories from his native Nepal, and he recently returned, but this time his most exciting revelation was not about the mountains, but about an unplanned pregnancy in his community, which resulted in an unplanned adoption, and now Pemba is the proud papa of Arbin Tshering Dorjee Sherpa. I thought of Dr. Bartlett’s famous lecture on population growth, and how heartily he might approve of Pemba’s adoption strategy. It also occurred to me that if I’m ever reborn, Pemba’s family might be a good one to go for.

Just then, 40 drummers filed in, and took their seats at a mishmash of sets under a white pyramid in the center of the cavernous space. Cymbals began to shimmer. A pelican in slow-motion flight was projected onto the pyramid; and Pemba stood beside me, taking pictures. Before long, a strong reverberation took over the room, and it became nearly impossible to distinguish between the beats of the different drummers. Before they started playing Scott Hahn had introduced the program saying they intended to “shatter the illusion that we’re all separate.” Indeed.

When I got home, I checked my email, and found a message from a reader who had sent a question about organic concert tee shirts a few weeks ago. We’ve never met in person, but he asked if I had been at the Loomstate party, and then later on the L-train! He had recognized me from those seemingly gratuitous photos I post of myself, and even asked if I was free tonight, as he’s found himself with an extra ticket to the opera. I loved the idea of meeting up for the opera, but am previously engaged for a pow-wow with the Sweden site’s new designer/developer –a young lady called Grace, whose surname, incidentally, is derived from the German for one who weaves.