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I~ LABOR AND CREATIVITY IN NEW YORK'S GLOBAL FASHION INDUSTRY CHRISTINA H. MOON - - ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN DESIGN STUDIES - - Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry This book tells the story of fashion workers engaged in the labor of design and the material making of New York fashion. Christina H. Moon offers an illuminating ethnography into the various sites and practices that make up fashion labor in sample rooms, design studios, runways, factories, and design schools of the New York fashion world. By exploring the work practices, social worlds, and aspirations of fashion workers, this book offers a unique look into the meaning of labor and creativity in 21st century global fashion. This book will be of interest to scholars in design studies, fashion history, and fashion labor. Christina H. Moon is Assistant Professor in Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History, Parsons School for Design at The New School. Cover credit: Photo of cut leather for shoe sample. Christina H. Moon, 2007. Routledge Research in Design Studies Routledge Research in Design Studies is a new series focusing on the study of design and its effects using analytical and practical methods of inquiry. Proposals for mono- graphs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Thinking Design Through Literature Susan Yelavich Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry Christina H. Moon Wayfinding, Consumption, and Air Terminal Design Menno Hubregtse Narrative Environments and Experience Design Space as a Medium of Communication Tricia Austin Contemporary Processes of Text Typeface Design Michael Harkins For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge- Research-in-Design-Studies/book-series/RRDS Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry Christina H. Moon First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Christina H. Moon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40395-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-40396-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Fashion Workers and the Labor of Design 1 1. Shoddy Seams: The Decline of the New York Garment Industry and Its Transformation Into New York Fashion 25 2. Back of House/Front of House: Creative Skills and “Effortless” Labor Among Samplemakers and Fashion Workers 53 3. The Deskilling of Design: Technology, Education, and the Routinization of Fashion’s Engineers 93 4. Designing Diaspora: The Racialization of Labor, the Rebranding of Korea, and the Movement of Fashion Designers Between Seoul and New York 123 5. Fast-Fashion Families: Family Ties and Fast-Fashion Production in the Los Angeles Jobber Market 162 6. Epilogue: Made in China 201 Bibliography 208 Index 229 Figures 1.1 The Garment District in Manhattan, West 25th Street 28 1.2 The daughters of garment workers 33 2.1 The Fashion Calendar created by Ruth Finlay 53 2.2 New York Fashion Week fashion show catalog 61 2.3 Patternmaking tools 63 2.4 Sample fabrics with sleeve 67 2.5 Jean coin pocket 70 3.1 Course notes on the dress form 97 3.2 New York fashion school course catalog 102 4.1 Newspaper clipping of Korean fashion designers featured in New York–based Korean Daily 124 4.2 Parsons Fashion Design LookBook 2006 131 4.3 Magazine clipping of Korean fashion design student in New York City 146 5.1 California mood board 165 5.2 Workplace desk 194 6.1 Shoe leather at factory in China 201 Acknowledgements This book is the collective labor and creativity of so many people I’ve had the good fortune to come across as a scholar. My research would not have been possible without the interviewees, informants, and industry workers who participated in this study, and who generously offered their time, knowledge, experience, and worldviews on the global fashion industry. It should be noted that some interviewees are named, some with changed names, and others remain anonymous for confidentiality. I thank you all for making me a part of your everyday working worlds and for sharing the practices, values, and stories of your global fashion world. I would like to thank several organizations for funding the many different aspects of this book. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright Institute, Korea Foundation and Kauffman Foundation made possible language training, exploration and inquiry, and field research across sites in the U.S. and Asia. Since his book began first as a dissertation, I thank my committee David Graeber, Michael Denning, Mary Lui, and Kamari Clarke for encouraging me to transform this project into a book. For parts of the book’s writing stage, I thank the Social Science Research Council Transregional Junior Scholar Fellowship for funding my academic leave and giving me the much needed time to write—in particular Enseng Ho and Prasejit Duara for their intellectual inspiration and encouragement during our 2017 SSRC workshop. My university, The New School, has provided such enormous support and resources for the research and writing of this book. I thank the India China Institute and Spatial Politics of Work working group including Ashok Gurung, Grace Hou, Victoria Hat- tam, Mark Frazier, Laura Liu, Jonathan Bach, Brian McGrath, Rama Chorpash—in particular Vicky Hattam who led our collaborative research group and made time for me in the publication process. I thank the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought, in particular Hugh Raffles. I also thank the Fashion Praxis working group at Parsons School of Design including Otto Von Busch, Timo Rissanen, Pascale Gatzen, and Laura Sansone for our weekly lunches and inspired discussions. Thanks to the department of Anthropology at The New School for giving me the opportunity to present a chapter of this book to students and faculty. These research institutes and working groups are central to my understanding of the deep collaborations needed to connect design, material, and social worlds. I’d like to give my deep thanks and acknowledgement to those within my department, my colleagues in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons (ADHT). I thank my fashion studies colleagues including Hazel Clark, Heike Jenss, Francesca Granata, Rachel Lifter, Marilyn Cohen and Elizabeth Morano for the day viii Acknowledgements to day teamwork in our teaching of students, in the building our program which I am so proud of, and for the decade long friendships. Hazel Clark gave me my start at The New School and has provided me with such positive support and guidance throughout my career. I am grateful to Heike Jenss, who inspires me with her ambition and determination, giving me so many opportunities to expand my thinking as a scholar. I thank David Brody for his open mentorship and honesty. A number of research assis- tants helped me throughout the research and writing process—my deepest thanks to Elisa Taber, Rikki Byrd, Angela D’Souza, Sang Rhee Kim, Kalina Deng, Rami Saab, and Kathryn Mueller. I’d like to thank my wider community of fashion studies scholars—Thuy Linh Tu, Heijin Lee, Minh-Ha Pham, Denise Cruz, Tanisha Ford, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Eugenia Paulicelli, Monica Miller, Denise Green, Susan Kaiser, Carol Tulloch, Brent Luvaas, Annemarie Strassel, Todd Nicewonger, and especially Stephanie Sadre-Orafai who saw this project begin as a dissertation, who read chapters and provided always, such insightful comments and warm support. I belong to the academy because of you all, thank you. I thank the Routledge team including Isabella Vitti, Katie Armstrong, Padmavathy Srinivasan, Jac Nelson, and the anonymous external reviewers of the manuscript, for all the hard work in seeing the final outcome of this book. Many friends have supported me throughout all stages of research and writing, offering me coffee and meals, inspiration, beautiful styles, fun times, and good memo- ries. I thank Mary Ping, Eugenie Selway, Beverly Liang, Charles Kang—especially Mary who introduced me to everyone and helped me to get my first in, in the New York fashion industry, allowing me to see the ‘timeless and timely’ in design and life. Emily Duncan and Heather Purvis, my running salves to help with the writing, along with the Cold Spring Amiche; Carter and Jonathan Meniz, Julianne and Andy Ortega, Ken Chen and Youmna Chlala, Tamy Ben Tor and Miki Carmi, Andy Lampert, Zazie, and Melinda Shopsin for true comfort and friendship. Lauren Lancaster for our deep and daily friendship for over twenty years, whom I share most every thought with. Grace Lee for so much laughter and to Julia and the Lee Family for everything. Phyl- lis Krauser, who helped me find my voice and make myself visible as a writer and thinker—I am indebted to you. I am blessed to be a part of two incredible families—the Moon and Caccamise Families—who represent unending reserves of support. I thank my parents Young Ja and Jong Koo Moon (Lucy and John) for always inspiring me with their hard work, and with making so many sacrifices for my brother Ken and I to pursue creative and independent lives. Your stories continually inspire me. Thank you Ken and Mary for so many good meals and for your sibling love. I thank Pok Soon Ham, our great aunt whom I miss daily. To my in-laws Don and Rita, who have encouraged me throughout, with Don giving advice, reading lines and emails, and Rita who is always there to listen. To Chris, Ada, and Roman Caccamise. Thank you for filling my life with such clar- ity, quiet beauty, and poetry. Life is joy with you three. You are my trees. Introduction Fashion Workers and the Labor of Design Fashion is a fascinating amalgamation of design practices, technical skills, material and technological sources, and particular laboring individuals and communities who make our clothing. Pull on seams and discover all the different parts and varying ele- ments of your clothing as the actual spatial and geographic borders of the cities in which it was made. Fibers are grown in fields, picked and spun into thread, dyed and spooled, wrapped around a bobbin on a sewing machine. The seams of clothing hold two pieces of fabric together, powerfully transforming the flat, two dimensional into the third, of shape and curves and bends around the body, into the fourth dimensions of a moving body that crosses landscapes, cities, and borders. In this way, fashion, worn on the body, materially traces the transformations of work. It is a narrative jour- ney, not just of its wearer, but also of the fashion workers who’ve migrated through its global supply chains, crossing national and state borders, shifting the meaning of their own identities as they transform landscapes of work. Fashion is a way of traveling from here to there just like any story or drawing or map. Pull on a thread and it will lead you to the many tangled knots and neighbor- hoods of streets, the fronts of houses and back rooms, the offices and design studios, the large-scale assembly factories and small workshops of its production. Covered buttons once led me to a buttonhole maker in a single room in the New York Garment District, buttons of all colors, sky-high to the ceiling, with a small rug for praying next to his metal hole-puncher. Snaps on jeans led me to a woman who, for two decades, sat in the window of Steinlauf and Stoller on 39th Street, powering an antique foot- powered industrial snap and grommet machine. I once traced a pico stitch cut in half that could make a scalloped edge on the strap of a dress to a certain sewing operator working in a samplemaking room on the 11th floor of a Sixth Avenue fashion company, using a 1940s machine he found from the Hecht Sewing Machine & Motor Company on 38th Street—a machine that was built to make this one single type of stitch. Certain colors and dyes, threads, zippers, and bra hooks have led me back led back to laboring individuals, sets of skills, and technological machinery throughout the geography of cities such as New York. The hand-printed silkscreens or the com- puterized digital prints, the machine-stitched or hand-stitched sequinning, embroi- dery, or the rhinestones glued onto your shirt have led me to second- and third-tier cities of production, industrial districts, and urban villages, large-scale and small-scale factories of mass assembly across South Korea and China. If fashion is the material embodiment of labor, what kinds of skills are involved in its making, fragmented in divisions of labor across the global commodity chain? How might the material embodiment of labor capture the various skills, industrial histories, migrations, imagi- nations, aspirations, and selfhoods of its workers in its making? Fashion tells the story