This is an article I wrote a while back for Save the Garment Center. Re-reading it, I am struck by how recent events have strengthened my conviction that the Garment Center is vital to the pre-eminence of New York City as a fashion capital. The bid to change the Garment Center’s name by the Fashion Center BID (itself a bit of a euphemism since the word “Fashion” elides the manufacturing reality that the word “Garment” connotes), the burgeoning awareness of the “Made in America” brand and the recent release of the Design Trust’s findings on the Garment Center – these changes affect everyone whose lives and livelihoods are linked to the NYC and US fashion industries. I strongly urge anyone who has not read the Design Trust’s findings to do so.
In the meantime:
“You would not know it today but there was a moment in the ‘80s when Singapore seemed poised to launch itself as a fashion capital on par with Tokyo. Drawing on its multicultural traditions and a new infusion of ideas from the international fashion scene, young designers like Thomas Wee and Peter Kor tapped into the then burgeoning textile and apparel manufacturing industries to realize fresh ideas and set about fulfilling their dreams.
Their dreams ultimately proved stillborn as the Asian Financial Crisis and the decline of textiles and apparel manufacturing deprived design houses of vital resources. Production costs increased with the dearth of manufacturing, leading to a decline in the local fashion scene even as mid-priced international fashion began entering the market. In the absence of industry as a vital training ground, the design schools lost their luster and relevance. Contemporary Singapore now has an oddly anemic local fashion scene in a booming retail sector where international luxury fashion houses have multiple boutiques and specialty stores bring in young designers from cities like London and New York.
None of this seemed relevant to me in my first year at Parsons New York. I had left Singapore to learn the ropes at the heart of a fashion capital, certain that I would have access to knowledge and resources no longer available in my home country. And yet, greater acquaintance with the Garment Center brought on a sense of déjà vu as my teachers recounted better days when there were more than a dozen stores specializing in feathers and the buildings were filled with activity.
In an age of global manufacturing, it is easy to dismiss these little stores – the man who covers thousands of buttons a day, the third generation family store that specializes in handmade silk flowers as irrelevant and uncompetitive. They could not, after all, produce a million white t-shirts that the mass production facilities of China might.
They do something else though, for a city that claims center stage on the international fashion scene, they provide young designers and students with the basic ingredients from which dreams are made. There could be no great fashion schools like Parsons, FIT or Pratt without the abundant knowledge stored in the teachers who have spent half their lives in the Garment Center, in the hundreds of vendors who share their knowledge on textiles and manufacturing with students and the numerous design firms who pass on their métier to the next generation. There would certainly not be the names that emblazon the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue, all of whom have benefited from the agglomeration of resource, capital and knowledge that is the Garment Center.
Each year, thousands of students like me arrive in New York City with high hopes and dreams. They choose New York City, not Singapore, for a reason. The Garment Center is a significant part of New York City’s reputation as a fashion capital. Its demise would also mean the end of these students’ aspirations. Time is running out but it is still not too late to take action. There are still about 600 factories and workshops and some 400 suppliers in the city. Each of them make a small but vital contribution to the fashion ecosystem in New York City. It is, in the end, the sum of all its parts that make a fashion capital. “