Takeaways from New York

Readers,

Jack and I returned last Thursday from our week in New York.  It was an all-you-can-eat buffet of museum-visiting, Garment District-shopping, and long-distance walking. Here’s a day-by-day sampling of my souvenirs from my trip:

Friday, August 11

• I bought a lovely scarf at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden shop.

Saturday, August 12

• I was taken by this sleeveless jacket in the window of Mariana Antinori on Madison Avenue.

  

I like jackets a lot but for my daily life, which includes fixing meals and washing dishes, wearing a regular jacket certainly isn’t practical. Now, if I could have the practicality of a vest but the wider range of styles of a jacket, that would be a sleeveless jacket.  One of these days I’m going to make one.

• I caught up with attendees of sewing blogger Peter Lappin’s Male Pattern Boldness Day at the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum’s exhibit, Force of Nature. The show illustrated clothes and accessories using nature–sometimes uncomfortably literally–as inspiration.  This alligator handbag–

  

  –reminded me of the alligator handbag I saw on my field trip to The Alley Vintage and Costume a couple of years ago:

  

• I joined fellow fans of Male Pattern Boldness at nearby Panera for lunch and the much anticipated annual pattern swap.  I put half a dozen choice vintage patterns into the growing pile, but didn’t take any out.  Bonus: couturier and master sewing teacher/author Kenneth King crashed the party, and you can’t get better than that at a sewing get-together. He was mobbed, of course.
• I spent the afternoon in one of the roving bands of Male Pattern Boldness readers ranging all over the Garment District in search of fabrics and trims.  Kyle Dana Burkhardt of the blog Vacuuming the Lawn led our group.  I wanted the chance to see stores I’d never been in before, and I did.  They were amazing
• Our first stop was Metro Textile Corp. at 265 West 37th St., Suite 908.  The owner, Kashi, had opened his store on a Saturday just for us Male Pattern Boldness Day participants, and I think he was rewarded for his efforts.

  

  My mission was not necessarily to buy anything that afternoon but to take a good look at fabrics to go with the unusual reds and browns in my cactus-print skirt or with the subtle yellows of my Pendleton jacket.

  

  I brought the jacket with me, and a decent color photocopy of the skirt’s print, not to mention swatches on index cards of my fabric stash and a small knapsack for wallet, camera, and water bottle. The threat of showers (that never materialized) made me carry a windbreaker, which I tied around my waist.

  All of this impedimenta required managing, as I shifted my bags from hand to hand or shoulder to shoulder while navigating my way around my fellow attendees toward a particular bolt that caught my eye.  Everybody was friendly and helpful, though, and we all did our best to make space for each other. I pulled out my ring of card blanks and Kashi’s law-student son, drafted to be a helper that afternoon, swatched two beautiful linen shirtings for me. I promised to return Monday to have yardage cut.

• Next was French Couture Fabrics, at 222 West 37th Street, 2nd floor, which proclaims on its website that “our buyers work to get the best fabrics from French Couture Houses like Celine, Sonia Rykiel, Chloe, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton.”  Others in my group might have been eyeing the leathers or the silks, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the gorgeous $12/yard cottons, wondering how many hundreds (thousands?) of dollars customers were willing to fork over for the readymade garments. I had a couple of swatches cut, but actually wanted many more.

  

• Our next stops were Daytona Trimmings, 251 West 39th Street; and Pacific Trimming, 220 West 38th Street.  In all my past visits to the Garment District I’d never stopped in these stores, thinking they sold mostly ribbons, tassels, and cords, which I almost never have occasion to use–but was I ever wrong. Trim stores sell every kind of hardware, zippers, buttons galore, and other findings and embellishments for clothes and accessories.

  

  

  

I had remembered to bring the slider for my vintage Harris tweed hat to look for a replacement, and at both stores there was a wide selection, although nothing exactly right.

• Around 4:00 our group wended our way to Bryant Park to rejoin our fellow Male Pattern Boldness Day attendees to brag about our discoveries and envy admire other people’s purchases.  Although I had only swatches to show, my afternoon had been a success, too.  I had the luxury of returning Monday to look at fabrics again at my leisure.

The best part of Male Pattern Boldness Day is meeting members of a special community brought together by the humor, wit, and skill of Peter Lappin.

Sunday, August 13

• Jack and I met our friend Rosa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we took in the Rei Kawakubo show.  The museum literature says “Her fashions…resist definition and confound interpretation,” and I couldn’t have said it better.  We roamed from one astounding–artwork? garment?–to the next just taking it all in.  I think I was smiling the whole time.  Although I’m sure Rei Kawakubo takes her work seriously, that’s not to say there isn’t a great deal of humor in it.

  

• In another part of the museum, while Jack and Rosa looked at posters from World War I, I browsed a book called 101 Things to Learn in Art School by Pratt Institute professor Kit White. Number 85 was “Your studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.”  That got me thinking: What state of mind would I like my sewing room to foster?
• In Central Park after our museum visit I looked at my new swatches and swatches from my stash in the natural light.

  

  Monday, August 14

• Back to the Garment District.

  

• At Gray Lines Linen I admired–everything, really.  I love the colors and weights of their linens for shirts and swatched a stripe and a plaid (seen on the swatch card above) for Jack to think about.  For myself, I admired some of Gray Lines’ yarn dye handkerchief linens for blouses and realized that they are all regularly stocked and on the sample card I’d bought last year.
  Back to Metro Textile Corp. to buy the two fabrics I’d had swatched on Saturday’s visit.  Kashi looked surprised–and pleased–that I had come back as promised.  After cutting the two linen blouse fabrics for me he scanned his stock for coordinates and pointed to a terra cotta-colored rayon knit that I agreed was beautiful.  I needed no further convincing that it would be a very nice addition, and took two yards, although now, I said, I’d have to buckle down and learn to sew knits.  “You can do it,” Kashi replied, “Just go slower.”  As I left with my new purchases Kashi encouraged me to come back leading a group.  Maybe I will!

  

  

  

  

Onward to try again to replace the damaged slider for my Harris tweed hat.  I stopped in at Lauren Trimming, 247 West 37th Street, and found one that was fine, for a dollar.

My last visit in the Garment District was to Mood Fabrics. I knew I’d have to surrender my bags at the store entrance, but I was prepared with big pockets to hold a notebook and swatch cards. It was actually very nice to be free of my bags for awhile.

That morning the aisles were full of kids enrolled in Mood U sewing classes choosing fabrics for their projects and then bringing their choices to the cutting tables.  I sidled past them and began to absorb the breadth and depth of Mood’s collections.  On previous visits I’ve always been dazzled and then overwhelmed by the thousands of bolts and left with nothing more than swatches and shirt buttons.  On this visit, sticking to my “decide nothing in haste” experiment, I enjoyed browsing wools, cottons, linens, knits, and notions as if I were strolling through a gorgeous botanical garden. I had a nice conversation with a salesperson in the Cotton Twill section about raincoat fabrics, and had one swatch cut.  Done.

• After seeing the Neue Galerie’s Austrian Masterworks exhibition we enjoyed Viennese-style hot chocolate and cake in its Cafe Sabarsky.

  

  At the Museum of the City of New York in the exhibition A City Seen: Todd Webb’s Postwar New York, 1945-1960 we were struck by this photo:

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Tuesday, August 15

• I was wondering what home decorating fabrics I could see without having to have a designer in tow, which brought me to Zarin Fabrics at 69 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. I’ve made draperies for our living room and dining room and am “planning” (“planning to plan,” at this point, would be more accurate) to sew Roman shades, sheers, valances, and a shower curtain–right after I master pants-sewing and my serger.

  

  Zarin’s selection is certainly big, but I concluded that actually my local home decorating fabric resources at Fabric Farms and Calico are awfully good and only a short drive away.

  

• In nearby Soho I chanced to see Crosby Street, which reminded me that I’d wanted to see the Crosby Street Hotel, one of two hotels in the U.S. designed by Kit Kemp.  She uses color, texture, scale, fabric and soft furnishings like no other designer I know of. When we walked into the hotel I explained to the concierge that I was very interested in Kit Kemp’s work, and we were immediately invited to look at the lobby, bar, and meeting rooms as we wished.

  

  

  

  I’m not looking to duplicate Kemp’s hotel style in our own house, but as a sewer I’m fascinated by how much importance she places on textiles. Search her name on Pinterest and see for yourself.

  Wednesday, August 16

• I visited the Kangol hat store at 196 Columbus Avenue.  I’ve been a fan of Kangol hats for close to 30 years, and on the rare occasions when I can see a wide selection I can’t resist looking.  With help from Kangol salesperson Steve I walked out the door with a new trilby.

  

  Back at the hotel, I packed my fabrics and scarf and carefully folded my new Kangol to tuck into my suitcase for the next day’s flight home.