Green Mountain Energy

Did you know there are wind farms in upstate New York? Now, you can directly buy wind power. It doesn’t mean your particular apartment gets power sent straight from the farm (a grid is a grid), but it’s more direct than the “green” option your power company offers.

Read about it and sign up here— Green Mountain Energy is up and running in New York, Texas, and other states. If you live in NYC, it’s better sign up in person at the Fort Greene Flea on Saturdays (it keeps salespeople employed, and they make a donation to the market).

I periodically visit a multi-disciplinary holistic health practitioner (the amazing Katinka Locascio; New Yorkers, she will change your life, write in for contact info) who also grows and blends herbs. During our first session, she told me that my body was “asking for nettles,” and that taking them would help my oft-pain-addled lower back. Well, they did, and now it turns out the stinging herb (fast becoming a foodie favorite, too) can also be used to make clothes: it grows easily without pesticides, and its hollow fibers insulate beautifully.

Nettle fibers with bark...

...and cleaned up.

Wild nettles have actually been used for textiles since the dawn of recorded history, though they fell out of favor when industrial cotton production took off. (Although it’s been popular for tablecloths, and the German army in WWI used it for their uniforms during a cotton shortage.) Now that alternative textiles are taking off, it’s finding a new audience, and Bodkin’s Fall 2010 collection is going to include some Himalayan wild nettle-blend fabric! According to one supplier, 80,000 Nepalese are employed in harvesting and spinning nettle textiles. The stuff is richly textured and cool in an urban-Bedouin sort of way.

Nettle-blend fabric swatches

Time to have some of Katinka’s organic Vermont-grown nettle-gotu kola-goldenseal-echinacea “Katinkture” tea, also known as the Bodkin flu shot.

Domus is an Italian architecture and design magazine. My dad collected it in the 70s and I’ve saved a few copies. That woman is so cool that I don’t even know what else to say.

…I am having trouble uploading photos for my planned posts, but in the meantime, check out the new site! Thank you Michael Harper!

Cy Twombly's peonies, now at the Art Institute.

Read my diary of one fun day in Chicago on Refinery29 here.

After much deliberation, I decided to move the production of Bodkin’s A/W 2009 collection to Los Angeles. I realize this makes things a bit less ‘local’, to say the least, and as I read Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy I feel guilty and carbon-gluttonous abandoning a perfectly useful local manufacturing base (though never my beloved patternmaker Alicia—more about her in another post). So why L.A.? It is the absolute center of the U.S. garment industry, and only getting bigger–you can actually develop your own domestic organic fabrics here!–and the environment is much more hospitable and user-friendly for small designers (at least in my experience). After a two-week period in March where I couldn’t walk due to severe lower back pain from lugging rolls of fabric through ice storms in the garment district, I needed something less stressful. Carbon footprint-wise, the difference may be negligible: many of Bodkin’s stores are in the west, and many of the best organic fabrics are coming from Asia. Or milled here (in California or Colorado or Texas) from Chinese or Texan raw materials. And I’m there at least once a year anyway for personal reasons. Alas, environmental gray areas like this are impossible to avoid when you’re trying to keep a tiny business afloat. What are your thoughts?

I got nothing but good vibes from Gohar, the woman who is sewing much of the collection. She is from Armenia and has a shop in Burbank called Ann of Magnolia (slogan: “Where Women Are Still Special”) where she sells her own remarkably ornate wedding gowns, bridesmaid dresses, and separates. She even used to make Michael Jackson’s costumes! (She never met the Gloved One, but knew his assistants quite well.) She is pictured here with Matt, one of two talented, life-saving guys who are managing the production process locally. I deliberately framed their heads around the portrait of Jesus. Said Gohar: “He”—JC—”runs this place. I’m just the manager.”

When you think about midcentury modern architecture, your mental image was probably shot by Julius Shulman. The legendary photographer, who passed away last week at 98, translated modernism’s principles to the masses–as Neutra’s staff photographer and on his own, he captured idealized scenes of domesticity in otherwise otherworldly cantilevered glass structures, translating and preserving a specific, iconic vision of how technology and simplicity and could mean a fitter, happier, more productive American future.

I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with him in his Raphael Soriano-designed studio and house in the Hollywood Hills in 2006. My photographer friend Melanie had met him before and had a connection, so I simply rang him up and asked him if we could come by, then booked a flight. I just had to. The interview and photos were never published, but it was a defining moment for me–my father, who passed away in 2001, was an architect and devout modernist, and I guess I did it to somehow pay tribute to him.

Julius was gracious and funny, despite the fact that we’d interrupted him in the middle of a bowl of tomato soup, and totally self-deprecating about how he came into his line of work. He just stumbled into it–as I guess I have with making clothes. His warm demeanor and his insanely eye-pleasing and functional (but smallish and low-key) house have something in common: Good design can be smart, sensible, and intuitive; meticulously considered aesthetics can coincide with sensible science and a sense of humility and subtlety. It can make our lives easier and better-looking, and improve our world. Architecture has proven this; why not clothes? I guess that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.

I haven’t announced this blog to the world yet because I’ve been too busy to update every day. Hopefully now that I have a part-time employee, that will change! A redesign is coming in the next week or so, too, so stay tuned. I’ll be writing about my new production facilities in Los Angeles, why clothes cost what they do, and offering a sneak peek of some style inspirations for SS10.

Greetings–I’m just back from an amazing and much-needed week in Jamaica.

Reader Jill just responded to my post about cotton and wondered why, in fashion, the model of “convenience” is underpinned by systems of production that are anything but. Food, she pointed out, can easily be sourced locally or at least domestically; why not fashion? (In the news: Cynthia Rowley recently traveled to Washington to argue in favor of the fashion manufacturing base shifting back here!)

Yes, local and vertical and simple is ideal…but it’s easier said than done. In fashion, the feel and drape of fabric is everything to the shopper. No one (at least from what I’ve seen) will buy something just because it’s organic. And fashion is a global business in that someone in Paris or Tokyo might want to buy something I make, and why wouldn’t I want that? (Could I impose a 100-mile restriction on customers? What would you, readers, think?)

The thing about fashion is its globality; concepts such as chic and hi-lo bounce among influencers with a global mentality. I identify with the way Swedes and Parisians dress; in one way or another, I want what they’re having. The clothing production system, with its economy of scale, is also set up to favor larger brands, which get large by selling around the world.

On a scale like mine (I sell to 12 stores) all I can do is use fabric that’s available, unless I commission weavers, which I’ve done for the handloomed silk in the Dharma and Refraction dresses—the most expensive pieces I make. (People actually get angry about the price of clothing. But what you buy at Target is China, China, China.) Otherwise, I use what I can find. The sustainability-minded fabrics out there that meet my aesthetic standards are few. You can’t be guaranteed to produce something from deadstock. So I order everything from Patagonia’s scraps to domestic mills’ crepes made from wool of Chinese origin.

In food, a carrot looks and feels like a carrot, and a good, fresh carrot is likely to come from the farm in the next county. In fashion, South Carolina cotton muslin isn’t going to cut it for a shirtdress nearly as well as Japanese-milled organic (Texas) cotton with a crazy texture, and there’s no such thing as safety pins made in the Northeastern U.S. (or maybe I’m wrong?)

What I’d like to see are more mills in the U.S. that create fabrics with beautiful textures and details from domestic raw and recycled material. I’d love for something local and vertical—from agriculture to sewing, like an American Apparel with farms and without the creepy misogyny—to take root here, but I’d need millions of dollars and a bunch of people. (Who’s in?)

But also, the developing world needs work, and projects that empower and enrich people. My trip to Jamaica reminded me of that (tariff issues make it impossible for its commodities to compete).

As an appreciator of the bioregionalist philosophy, I often think about scrapping the way I currently do things and coming up with an entirely new business model. (That is, when I’m not lamenting the paradox of this altogether–so many talented designers, but do we really need all these new clothes?) I think about how tailors and dressmakers and mothers and grandmothers, not stores, used to be where wardrobes came from.

Could I start over selling made-to-order pieces on the Web with New York vintage clothing scraps, New York labor (which I’m already using), and a 100-mile limit on online orders? Maybe, but in the long term that wouldn’t be, for me or probably any independent designer, financially…sustainable.

Due to being, like, really really really busy–and a Luddite, and the owner of a thrown-out back–I have disappeared for a while. Now that things are calming down I will be updating the blog regularly, starting very soon! In the meantime, anyone curious to know more about what I do is invited to Le Poisson Rouge on Monday, March 23rd for the 6th Pecha Kucha NY, where I’ll be giving a slide presentation along with some other very talented and interesting people with whom I am kind of humbled to be grouped, such as Dickson Despommier of the Vertical Farm (whom I interviewed for the Washington Post a while back) and Jay Parkinson of Hello Health (an idea that makes me feel a little bit more optimistic about health care reform).

I have plenty to share about everything from recycled polyester to the decline of the Garment District to why clothes cost what they do. Stay tuned….

Oh, and check out the spring collection, now available at Steven Alan, I Heart, Bird, No. 6, Jumelle, and coming right up at all the others on the list.