Interwoven Stories: What Our Favorite Clothes Say About Us
Back in 2021, I still very much wanted to be a fashion designer. I had started embroidering since it was a quiet hobby I could do during lockdown. I had also started a sustainable fashion design and business certificate course. Over the six or seven months that I took each class, I slowly built up the idea for Pochoir.NYC: a company that teaches people to value the labor of those that came before by upcycling their own clothes using embroidery.
I know how much work goes into even the most basic T-shirt thanks to my days as an intern running to and from different factories in New York City’s Garment District. I understood how many people were involved with planting, processing, milling, dyeing, and treating the fabric that goes in our clothes. In the factories I saw people who were considered “unskilled” cutting piles of fabric into sleeves, garment fronts, and backs with the utmost precision, people hunched over sewing machines expertly crafting garments under enormous time pressure, and other people who stood in front of industrial irons all day pressing and preparing clothes for shipment. So when I took the sustainability course I was horrified by the statistic that most Americans buy 53 items of clothes a year [link opens in new window] and only wear about half of what’s in their closets at any given time. Most garments are only worn seven times [link opens in new window] before they’re tossed away. (Thanks to Monica Hetfield for sharing that article with me!) Maybe I was stressed out about finding the right fabric for my boss or buying buttons in time or something but my white collar concerns were nothing compared to the hard work factory workers put in to actually make the product. I wanted to found a company that respected and celebrated people’s labor.
I also vowed to buy as much clothing as possible secondhand to preserve and celebrate all of this hard work. Yet, every once in a while, I do want to buy something new. I decided to pop into Uniqlo (which, with more than 50 product drops a year [link opens in new window], is considered a fast fashion brand despite the genteel marketing) to see if they still had the J.W. Anderson collaboration in–I had fallen in love with a sage green tunic I saw in an ad. I wasn’t planning to buy anything but, luckily for me and unfortunately for my wallet, the last little bits of the collection were still in the store, about to vanish into the underworld of unsold garments that usually get trashed and burned.
The Tunic
I had the cash but surely it would have been wiser to save it until I got a job. Yet how could I say no to the flat felled seams [link opens in new window] on the side of the tunic–seriously, who does that for shirts anymore?—the top stitching details along the armhole, the generous fit, and the machine-made blanket stitch hem [link opens in new window] on the sleeves? These are the laborious details that have made the work of Jonathan Anderson, head designer of his namesake brand and the Spanish luxury house Loewe, so desirable, so precious. Even in a mass-produced garment for Uniqlo there were still some touches that celebrated the craft of making clothes. I bought one in white and one in sage. The sage tunic is pictured below.
Image description: Cecilia Zeichner wearing a green J.W. Anderson/Uniqlo tunic hand embroidered with one of her Pochoir.NYC designs. The tunic has a pointed collar, a pleat at the front,, and a billowy fit. Ceci has red hair and green eyes. She is sitting in a wooden bench in a garden surrounded by green potted plants.
The Stain
A few weeks later, I was in New Hampshire on vacation with my family and a family friend who always has ideas for new businesses. At the moment, she was on a kick of buying clothes from thrift stores and hand painting them. Since I was also in the early stages of an upcycling startup I was hoping we could do some work together. We went on a field trip to a local thrift store and came away with quite a few fun pieces and a lot of inspiration. A day later, I was embroidering at the table, wearing my sage tunic, and she was getting ready to paint. She was gesticulating wildly and knocked over a bottle of red fabric paint all over the glass table, running down onto the deck… and splattering very visibly on my tunic. It was ruined.
Flash forward to the spring of 2022, when the top was still sitting on my mending pile. I was working in a very stressful job at a high fashion company. Things constantly changed at that job, some projects were canceled while some on the back burner suddenly became the absolute most important task my department had to do until it was dropped again just as suddenly. Similar to a worker in a garment factory, I was asked to produce perfection under an ever increasing workload and tighter deadlines. The main difference was that only my mind, not my body, was worn out. I quit in the fall of 2023 after suffering anxiety-related health issues. I spent this past year recovering, designing and creating embroidery kits, and, once I was ready, I knew it was time to return to my paint-stained top.
What My Tunic Told Me
While I stitched over the largest stain, I thought about how this shirt was made and who touched it. My tunic isn’t just the story of a high caliber designer like J.W. Anderson creating something for a mass market store, though the growth of collaborations [link opens in new window] such as these have risen in parallel with the growth of fast fashion. This shirt was manufactured in China which became a manufacturing hub for American clothing [link opens in new window] in the 1970s. Successive trade acts, including 1994’s NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), removed high tariffs on imported clothing. Conveniently the countries with the lowest minimum wages also had very little union presence, so it was easy to save money, produce more clothes more cheaply than ever before, and ignore human rights abuses in the pursuit of importing more product. The cost of living is rising in China, thanks in no small part to the labor of garment workers, and now brands are trying to find ever cheaper countries to exploit. Large Chinese factories are even opening branches in smaller Asian countries, repeating the time honored tradition of fashion-driven economic imperialism [link opens in new window].
I also thought about how the tunic is made from linen, currently one of the most sustainable textiles out there. Anderson’s design team (because let’s get real, he probably never gave my tunic’s prototype more than a cursory glance) probably chose this material for its rustic qualities and for linen’s long history of being one of Europe’s most prized fabrics. Linen is derived from flax or hemp, hearty plants that grow easily and require far less water than cotton. They are also naturally pest repellant and beneficial to the soil in which they are farmed. Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that advocates for standards for responsible textile manufacturing, estimates that linen currently makes up 6% of the world’s textile market, a slice of the pie that’s grown since international trade organizations have allowed for the growth and export of hemp. France is the largest grower of flax while China and the US have come to dominate the hemp market. Given that my shirt was made in China, the linen probably came from there too. Most countries have banned hemp for the last century due to its conflation with marijuana plants and there has been virtually no investment in mechanizing harvesting or processing outside of China. Hemp harvesting is still the same as it was in the 1900s. Knowing the history of linen helped me understand that my simple tunic was woven with threads of the history of industrialization and agriculture, plus a nod to a more sustainable future.
Here’s a very condensed timeline of how my tunic was made: after hundreds of hours of backbreaking labor where rural farmers grew and harvested the hemp by hand and laid it out to dry, a truck would bring the cargo to a city where the plants were broken down and spun into yarn. Likely another facility in the same city took the raw fiber and wove it into fabric. Another supplier dyed the fabric, using water, chemicals, and electricity along the way. Within a month, the fabric would have arrived at a factory with which Uniqlo contracted to actually make the shirts. Samples would have been made, sent halfway across the world to the design offices, rejected for fit or quality issues, and then made up again. Finally, once the fabric and fit were approved, the factory would get to work making thousands of identical tunics, gunning to get the order done within a month or so. Once the shirts were made, they would be shipped by freight boat to the US, taking about three months to finally arrive at port. Trucks would take the finished tunics to a series of warehouses and then, eventually, to a store in New York City where, after months of being ignored by customers, my tunic found its way into my hands. How many people touched this shirt before I did? Who was having a good day, who was having a bad day? Who was focused on their work and proud, who was daydreaming about what they’d rather be doing? Who ever thought that their labor was valuable and important?
I find it poignant that once I had the opportunity to slow down I was able to hide the stain with my own handwork. I merely embellished the work of thousands of hands that came before me and saved that work from an untimely end that would have disrespected those hands. I founded Pochoir.NYC to respect all labor, from the sewing machine operator who strains their eyes and back for years bending over a machine to the retail worker standing on their feet all day long. When we treat clothes like trash instead of the living, breathing cultural documents that they are, we disrespect the incredible amount of time and hard work that went into those clothes.
We all work for our clothes, whether we’re earning money to buy or whether we’re sweating away in a field, a factory, or a warehouse. Let’s treat our clothes with the dignity and respect they deserve: don’t trash someone’s hard work: once it’s faded and old, repair it and make it your own. What is your favorite shirt made out of? Where was it made? What stories could it tell about the long journey from a field or a chemical plant into your hands?
This Labor Day, I want to celebrate the work of those who came before by opening my online store [link opens in new window] with a collection of upcycled clothes. I am also working on upcycling embroidery kits and online classes–stay tuned for more details!
Image Description: Photo oof several Southeast Asian women in brightly colored clothes sorting tags on a table at a garment factory. White text reads, "Thank you, garment workers! Happy Labor Day, Sept 2 2024"