Copyright Vogue Knitting

I did a new pattern for Tilli Tomas featuring their new SOCK and oldie-but-goodie Symphony Lace (yes, lace mohair that comes pre-beaded (!)). I like it very much. Originally it was a wide crew neck, but the wise people at Vogue decided to build up the T-neck. Either way, yay.

You can see both versions of the neckline here. If you like, go out and buy VK Fall 2011, and some Tilli Tomas yarn, and get knitting!

The Eliot School in Jamaica Plain, MA has invited me back again for 2011 to teach a really fun class – Making Old Coats New.

In this 5 week class, students will bring in a coat or jacket from their closet or a vintage find, and learn how to take it apart, reshape and restyle, and then reassemble it to create a fresh, new style for the season.

If you have any interest in learning some basic tailoring, repair, and design, this is definitely the class for you! Basic sewing skills and experience with a sewing machine are required, but no design or tailoring experience is necessary.

Class runs from October 27th through Nov. 25th, finishing right in time for you to wear your newly tailored coat this winter! You can get more information and sign up now at the Making Old Coats New class page or visiting EliotSchool.org.

Dia de Los Muertos editorial by New Brahmin. Makeup by Rose Fortuna, who is now my new hero. Photos by Jackie Puwalski.

I totally want to look like this all the time. Okay not true, but feels true at this moment. Also, if I had seen this in High School, I totally would have gone to school like this at some point.

*LOVE*

I’m psyched to be running a quick workshop on how to make a custom pillowcase Wednesday, Sept. 15th from 6-9 pm at The Stitch House in Dorchester, MA.

If you’re looking for an excuse to improve your sewing skills and spruce up your home for fall in the process, then come join us! Just bring a pillow you want to cover and you’ll learn the rest.

Photo for The Stitch House by Bill Dristas

The Stitch House sells beautiful fabric by Amy Butler, so if you aren’t sure what you’d like your cover to be, there’s plenty of inspiration right in the store.

You can download The Stitch House’s most up-to-date list of classes here, or call 617-265-8013 for more information and to sign up. Hope to see you there!

2. Knitting these (from this book).

3. Making another one of these salads:

4. Reading this book so I can finally get it back to the friend who lent it to me (and because so far it is hilarious).

5. Reading Amanda Palmer’s Blog. The Rocky Horror veteran that I am wants very badly to attend this.

6. Working out. No, really. Four days without my regular bike commute and I feel very unlike myself.

7. Making love with my man.

8. Dancing.

9. Moving into our new digs.

10. Having a leisurely lunch with my besties.

What would you rather be doing today?

Real person, real clothing, really amazing. Almost makes me want to wear heels again. Almost.

Cathy Horyn’s thoughts on the new Fashion Design Protection bill.

One of my other heroes, Kathleen Fasanella, also has some great thoughts on the new and old bills in this post from last week:

Fashion Incubator sounds off on IDPPPA

To get people up to speed who didn’t know about last year’s proposed bill, here is a great and thoughtful post from the guys who brought you Freakonomics on why the original DPPA (Design Piracy Protection Act) was deeply flawed. There is also a podcast interview I did with Guido from It’s a Purl Man which shares more of my thoughts on the old bill.

The gist is that the former DPPA was so broad that, like the original CPSIA it threatened to do more harm than good, making it easy for companies to bring lawsuits against each other over trivial differences in design, and potentially harming the DIY industry, which takes a LOT of inspiration from designer fashion, and in some cases is directly supported by designers themselves. Prior to the bill crafting was largely left to its own devices because any copying was considered for personal use, and besides how many people are really going to knit themselves a Rodarte sweater anyway?

If what Cathy and Kathleen are broadcasting about the revised bill by Sen. Schumer is true, I am rather excited about it. We definitely need better protection in the US for our designers, and hopefully this will help us achieve that without squashing the free reign of creativity in an open market that the US is also so famous for.

When I was in high school I was fortunate enough to be in this great program for a couple of years which allowed me a now-extinct thing in public schooling – art classes.

I used to carry this great, black sketchbook about the halls on my head, covered as it was in stickers and Sharpie and some made up runic system I’d devised for encoding some of the more personal things I wanted to say in it. And amid all the self-absorption and angst, I actually learned a few things.

One that stuck with me quite strongly was the knowledge of Francis Bacon and his meat-paintings. I copied his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (above) on black paper with chalk to what I considered to be outstanding results.

Sadly, I no longer have it today to confirm this, but regardless of the quality of my homage, I had a great time making it and learned a lot about drawing, which is what counts.

Now that I look at his work, especially Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, I see a lot of H R Giger, which I suppose is in reverse, seeing as how Giger was born in 1940 and Three Studies came out in 1944. But either way, there you have it. And I appreciate both artists so this should not surprise me that I see similarities there, even if the only true similarity is the great shadow of Death.

Fashion Illustration class is what brought me back to Bacon. I’m gearing up to start and complete an 8-outfit mini-portfolio over the next two weeks and after screwing around with some markers last class realized that my style is better expressed with a mix of details where important and a rougher hand where not. And some personal stuff this morning brought the inspiration of a Self-Portrait piece with a half-creamy-skin, half-charred-skull type of treatment.

Which in turn led me to think of the old Bacon Pope Innocent homage and I thought “Hey, why not do this up fine arts style? Why not use this opportunity to practice this self-portrait-decay-from-within concept and go all McQueen with this project?” To which a voice replied, resoundingly, “YES.”

So much for Deus Ex Machina.

That’s my great internal struggle, aesthetically speaking. I want so badly to be color and light and the sartorial equivalent of champagne colored currants in a turquoise bin. And then Maynard Jame Keenan and Trent Reznor call me up for a play date and it all goes deliciously black.

So, making peace with my warring selves, what else is new? I think the good news is that artistically speaking this is a gift. To be drawn to both the sweetness and the sorrow in life in equal measure means that hopefully my look, as I work to hone it, will show that kind of joy-mixed-with-pain, will celebrate all aspects of life.

But for this project, the skulls cometh. Gotta start somewhere.

At that price you may wonder why I only left with one pair, and that is because even when I espy a bargain I still have shopping ethics that can be summed up as efficient. My sartorial aim is to be high quality and well edited – I have never really been a clotheshorse.

Now, $14.95 is not only a far cry from $285, but it’s also not a normal retail price even for these jeans. They are normally about $69.95, and were on deep, deep discount to make room for new merchandise.

I decided one nice pair of jeans I can respectably wear pretty much everywhere was certainly worth even $69.95 never mind less than 21% of that, so I went for it.

At 1% spandex and with a slight gaping in the back waistband (very tough for me to avoid, honestly) they are also a far cry from perfect. But for Salvation Army prices, I can take the time to put a dart or two in the back if it really bothers me.

What this brings up for me is, were these jeans fairly priced even at $69.95? Meaning, should they have been charging more because they should have been paying the people who sewed them more? Or could they have used a higher percentage of recycled or organic cotton?

I very rarely have the opposite train of thought anymore: “Why would I ever pay $69.95 when I can get them for $14.95?” or “Doesn’t that show just how overpriced jeans are!” because I know how markups are calculated and can determine a fair one. I also know how little it costs to make these goods, especially a simple pair of cotton denim pants, never mind something complex and rarer, like a cashmere sweater.

The tag is stamped Made In China. Great, people in China can make jeans just as well as people in the US, that’s a non-issue on one level. On another level, the reason Imogene + Willie charge an order of magnitude higher is partly economies of scale and partly labor.

The person sewing my Levi’s in China and the local TN working upstairs at I+W may both make a great pair of jeans, but in China that skill gets paid $0.75/hour and in Tennessee the minimum wage is now $7.25. Speaking of orders of magnitude.

Important point, and I want to be clear on this: Both are fair wages. Number of dollars required to live a middle class life in urban China, while not minuscule, is not nearly what it is to live the same lifestyle in Nashville, TN. Why? Comparative growth of the two local economies. There’s a whole other ball of wax about devaluation of China’s currency, which helps maintain that difference in cost of living and therefore wages, but that’s for another time. Suffice to say, they require less money to do the same work.

But that won’t always be the case, and even if somehow it does remain the case for the foreseeable future, there’s no virtue (and quite possible some great problems) in letting that low-wage logic strip the US of all it’s garment manufacturing. And yet, when it seems that even the average worker in TN couldn’t afford a pair of the jeans they’d be making ($7.25/hr, no way any time soon; $15/hr, now we’re talking about the ability to save up over,say, 6 months for a pair of I+W’s – assuming you don’t have kids, student loans, or any other sizable debt), it does beg the same question over and over again: how to keep manufacturing here and still make goods that serve more than the luxury market?

Which backs us into the really big question: does it really matter if there are “classes” of things, and is the perceived quality difference between those classes drastically different?

The person working at the Levi’s store where I got my pair is part of the target audience for the very product they sell. Moderately priced and decent quality with classic American style. Not junk, but nothing you’ll be freaked out about if it rips, stains, or needs to be replaced. The person who owns that store or designed those jeans or manages the office where those jeans are designed? Those people are able to afford what is perceived as a whole different level of quality, and they are, in fact, not really their own company’s key audience (though Levi’s may certainly reach out to those higher-earners with special collections at times.)

But when those high-earners pay more for what is supposed to be a better fitting, better-looking pair of pants, are they really getting what they paid for? The last time I bought a really expensive pair of jeans (which to be fair at less than $200 was still only moderately expensive by 2010 standards) they lasted a matter of months before the seat and knees ripped due to normal wear. I didn’t do yard work in these, nor did they rip at the seams. The styling and construction were great – the fabric was cheesecloth. It was hard to tell this by trying them on, and they were not marketed as “lightweight” or “casual” or anything like that. Normal jeans, normal wear, busted within 12 weeks.

I am betting dollars to donuts I get more than 12 weeks out of these Levi’s. I am also betting that if I had bought the Jean Shop or Imogene + Willie jeans, they would also not have steered me wrong.

My challenge is to understand the world I’m living in and all the pluses and minuses of these different manufacturing and selling paradigms. It’s also my job, as a designer and manufacturer, to find a way to offer a product whose quality I am sure of at a price that is fair and based in material reality and allows me to continue to make those items at that quality for that price – for a living.

I can mark anything up if it’s marketed correctly, and I agree that branding is key. But it seems an unstable proposition to either make an item unthoughtfully, sell it at a low price in high volume to make up the margin, and then market it as being premium, or to flip that coin and pay more than you have to in order to design and produce an item that is only a marginal distance in terms of style and quality from its mass-produced counterpart. And then of course the latter item has to be marketed with even more romance to get people to “buy-in” emotionally to the higher price tag.

A great book which I am hoping will give me some ideas to chew on, and maybe even some clarity on the issue, is Fugitive Denim. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months now, and I’ve had the clipping from WWD from back when it came out on my fridge for a year before that. But I am hoping to get to this sooner now rather than later. If you’ve read it and have feedback on the book or the whole denim topic, please let me know in the comments.

Photo from Imogene + Willie Look Book

It would be disingenuous to say they’re not into fashion, since their look book clearly speaks for itself. It’s that they also seem to be into making a product that lasts and is meant to be worn in by the wearer. In other words, I’ve heard they’re somewhere around $400/pair (don’t take my word for it, I haven’t called them to ask yet, as the jeans can only be procured at their store in Nashville), but are supposedly amortized over the next 30-50 years of wear. Yes, I just used amortized to describe a pair of jeans. That’s how tough they purport to be.

The really funny thing? I found out about them via a WWD article reporting on their upcoming collaboration with J Crew.

This doesn’t exactly trounce their street cred – both founders are industry veterans, and Jenna Lyons is essentially the smartest business person in fashion right now, so it’s just a lot of experience and intelligence that brought that together. However, it is a bit of a wink and a nod to the fact that, at the end of the day, all the marketing of integrity and grit in the world won’t make up for a plain old roll in the mud to see how the jeans hold up.

I don’t expect the J Crew collabs to take a beating the way a full-priced pair from the Nashville I+W store would (as that would be pure folly), but as a designer and as someone obsessed with the conundrum of providing high quality items at fair (not disposable) prices, I am really curious what the delta will be for price and quality when they arrive in J Crew stores.

Photo from front page of Jean Shop

So here I am pining away for ONE good pair of pants I could really live in (you know, once I have the kind of lifestyle that would permit me to, say, live in a single pair of pants without it being a running joke in the office – or perhaps once I’m willing to be a running joke) and over the weekend I stumbled upon another great option in the same vein from Jean Shop.

Jean Shop is apparently an outfit in NYC (read more about the experience in their downtown shop here) that, like I+W, make their jeans more or less on-site and make them built to last.

I discovered Jean Shop via Jean Therapy in Kenmore Square. I’d never been in there and had heard great things, which apparently are true. At first the sales person (owner? I think her name was Leah, so that may be the proprietor) seemed a little put out at some of my initial questions but once I asked her to show me some “jeans that could really take a beating”, her whole attitude changed and she was extraordinarily helpful.

After asking me how much I was willing to spend (Jean Shop runs about $240 – $285 and up depending on customization) she showed me some raw denim skinnies and a once-dark-washed boyfriend jean. The boyfriend jean fit so well and felt so durable I was damn near ready to fork over the cash. But being the responsible bride-to-be, I decided to wait until our new mortgage/wedding/slew of other responsibilities are taken care of.

This whole experience really heartened me because I’ve long been trying to edge toward a life in which I own fewer things – especially in my closet – but where each thing is really stunning and robust. Durable and Breathtaking don’t usually find themselves in bed together, but that’s the kind of wardrobe I aspire to and the kind of clothing I want to create for my customers. So seeing some people who are making and marketing that kind of clothing is really inspiring.

I took another lesson away from seeing all three of these stores (the two online and Jean Therapy in person) and reading their stories – they aspire to the customer who understands quality and longevity, but they also keep afloat by offering less expensive items and accessories. I don’t get the impression any of those shops offers anything they wouldn’t be proud to wear themselves (personal style notwithstanding) but that they understand the necessity of peppering inventory with more accessible items too.

For me, business and creative lessons aside, I can’t wait to get my first pair and get back into clothing that’s more forgiving and ages gracefully.