I want to look like this. I want to dress her. I used to wear arm bracelets like that. Hope (Mazzy Star vocalist, and a solo artist in her own right) is a huge inspiration for my band and has a new record coming out with her current project, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, a collaboration with My Bloody Valentine’s drummer. Sigh.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a flock of sheep until my first visit to the English countryside a few years ago. A hillside was dotted with little black things. “Ooh, look,” I said to my British friend, “sheep! Look at all those sheep!”

“No wait,” I said after thinking a minute, “they’re cows! Wow, cows!”

“Um, wait… no, I think they’re sheep!”

That friend, Andie, who has yet to let me live it down, got me a sheep breeds poster as a Christmas gift.

While we urbanites usually think about organic farming in terms of crops, it turns out animals themselves are also subjected to pesticides. Because it grows and regrows, wool is an inherently sustainable material—if the land is managed sensibly and cleanly. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, it isn’t.

To control fleas and mites, sheep are sprayed with pesticides—14,000 pounds of them in the U.S. in 2000—and those chemicals affect humans and surrounding soil and water, too. According to the Organic Trade Association, “sheep dip,” as it’s called, is not only moderately toxic and a suspected endocrine disruptor (like parabens, the likely culprit for the recent rash of hermaphrodite fish and underdeveloped sex organs in baby boys), it has a long track record of causing nerve damage in workers exposed to it—with side effects including reduced bone formation, anxiety, and depression. Oh, and there’s probably some residue on your winter scarf.

And then there are the antibiotics in sheep feed—which travel from animal waste to drinking water.

I’m not trying to scare you, but this is why I picked organic merino wool for the Love Dress, which I love.

We’re getting ready to start shipping the fall collection to stores in a few days, and that means working on the hang tags that accompany each garment. Because you can only fit so much on one tag, the provenance of the fabrics themselves to the blog.

Did you know that even ‘domestic’ fabrics are likely to use raw materials from elsewhere? The Canadian t-shirt jersey uses organic cotton from Turkey, while  the sheep shorn for organic wool seem mostly to live in China.

I didn’t know this at first. Now that I do, I have major carbon guilt. Alas, I’m not going to stop making clothes, and organic is better than not, and it’s a global economy (we’ve gone over this before), but it’s something to think about, anyway.

As soon as I can figure out why images aren’t loading, we’ll go through the stories behind the styles, one by one!

…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.

I went fabric-hunting today and fell in love with the most beautiful Japanese knit. Style-wise, it was very Bodkin. It has a traffic-stoppingly exaggerated texture, it’s cuddly and looks really cool, and it’s reversible. The catch? It’s 8 percent recycled cotton and…92 percent conventional cotton.

I never look at most “regular” fabrics for this reason. Organic, recycled, and otherwise environmentally preferable fabrics make up a fraction of the offerings, but then again, that makes deciding a lot easier.

I’ve let this one go, but I wonder what readers think. Would you roll your eyes at a shirt that bothers to announce its 8 percent recycled content? What if it was coming from a ’sustainable’ line? Does that even matter as much as the design when it comes to whether or not you’d actually buy it?

And while we’re on the subject, would you feel better about organic cotton grown in Turkey and woven in Japan before being shipped to New York, or conventional cotton grown and woven (and leaving traces of pesticides) in the Southern U.S.?