For almost fifty years, I have been observing what has happened in the fashion industry. I have heard my family talking about fashion since I was five years old. My parents immigrated to America in the seventies, and I would go to my father’s factory in New York. Over the next five decades, I observed the changes. What I saw was a gradual shift in how America thought about making things.
I dismissed it as nostalgia when I was younger. Just old people complaining, like they always do. Politics, religion, how their steak was cooked. I lumped my family’s warnings about fashion into that same category: cranky complaints about how things are.
Now that I’m my parents’ age, I can draw the lines. I can see the string of events that led us here. I can connect the dots between where we were and how we got to where we are now. This situation is similar to waking up from a bad dream. You know that disorienting moment when you ask “where am I?” Am I still dreaming, or am I awake? What do I need to do? That’s how I perceive the world right now. I’m writing this blog post because I’m hoping to shed some light on what I’m seeing, and to offer perspective from my own personal experiences about how we got here.
I am not a historian. This is not a research document. This is a memoir of my life. A story of what I’ve experienced firsthand or through stories my father and mother told me. I don’t have time to go into libraries and document all of this. If you want academic proof, help me find it.
If you continue reading and hear what I’m trying to say, and if you want to be part of the solution, then I’m all for it. This blog is especially for the younger generation that’s waking up and realizing how messed up it is. History repeats itself if you don’t know the history. I’m hoping my perspective will educate you and help you change the tides.
In the past fifty years, there’s been a radical power shift in global fashion. Two countries got massively stronger: China and France. One country got massively weaker: America.
China and France are polar opposites in how they achieved this power. France engineered artificial exclusivity. China engineered cheap volume. Two completely different strategies. Same result: they won, and we lost something.
The fashion industry is messed up on multiple levels. It’s stifling the worker. It’s destroying the environment. It’s suppressing the craftsman. And it’s manipulating the consumer. Outright fucking lying.
In 2000, I worked with my mother on her collection of novelty evening suits. I was proud of what we were making in New York. I took a marketing class that taught me to survey my customers. So I stood on the street and asked people a simple question: Do you know where your clothes were made?
The answer was always the same: they didn’t care. Or worse, they didn’t want to think about it. It was like asking someone if they worry about an ant crossing the street in front of them. The question itself was beneath consideration.
That moment changed something in me. I wasn’t just frustrated anymore. I could now see what had happened. Not intellectually. Viscerally. The system had colonized us so thoroughly that people didn’t even want to ask where their clothes came from.
When I was younger, working in that moment, I took it personally when people chose Chinese-made over what we were making. I felt frustrated and disheartened. But it didn’t matter because we were forced to close anyway. The Bernie Madoff financial collapse had bankrupted all of our customers.
Even though it would have been easy to move production overseas and survive, I never did that. I couldn’t. I’m a maker. How can I import product if I’m a maker? It’s in my DNA. If I don’t make something, I feel hollow.
Years later, a turning point came. I listened to a podcast called “Dressed.” A consumer was describing her attempt to stop supporting fast fashion. She thought switching from H&M to Nordstrom was the answer. But then she started questioning whether there really was any difference? Was she still contributing to the same broken system, just in different packaging?
That’s when it hit me. The real problem isn’t personal. People aren’t choosing to support overseas production out of malice. They have no idea where anything comes from. Everything is invisible to them. And the real problem is they don’t even know what the correct choice should be.
The world is fed up. People are tired of being sold garbage that costs pennies to make and gets a massive markup. They’re tired of luxury goods marked up to absurd levels. Paying for bags that cost tens of thousands of dollars. What are you actually paying for? A social badge? An identity? But who decided that this was the badge you needed? Who decided this was the correct one? Is beauty itself so rare? Or is it manufactured scarcity?
This is why I’m writing this series. The world is ready for change, but it doesn’t know how to do that. The solution to restore balance is simple and it does exist. And the power is in your hands. I’m not trying to keep you in suspense, but I truly want you to understand it fully. And you’ll understand it better once you can put it in more context.