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Sewing the Seeds San Francisco is the spiritual home of America’s blossoming Slow Food movement. Could Slow Fashion be the next frontier? |
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posted on February 25, 2008 |
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Imagine a San Francisco Fashion Week on a grand scale: bright lights; tents on the sprawling lawns outside the de Young Museum; industry A-listers—the likes of Anna Wintour, Peter Nordstrom, Michael Kors—descending upon the city. Sitting elbow-to-elbow along the catwalk, they await the parade of models wearing designs by some of San Francisco’s own: Derek Lam, Alexander Wang and Erin Fetherston among them. In between going from shows to parties to after-parties, enterprising fashion editors and buyers hail cabs or brave Muni to visit small studios and warehouses in the city’s bustling Sixth Street Fashion District. Here, amid the workshops and manufacturing facilities that have returned to this neighborhood, emerging designers are presenting their own collections in smaller, off-venue fashion shows, where said editors and buyers are vying to discover the next Peter Som. And why not? This pocket-size metropolis is teeming with fresh design talent. Could this really, one day, be San Francisco? Sure, San Francisco may be relatively small, and we may have a ways to go before completely shaking our hippie reputation. But the city also has five big schools with strong fashion programs, eager young designers who would probably love to live and work here, a thriving arts scene and a relatively young population with plenty of disposable income. And yet, despite the fact that such national brands as Esprit, Bebe, Levi’s and Gap were founded here, SF has never managed to sustain a real fashion industry. Even L.A.—thanks to its denim craze, solid manufacturing base and red-carpet trendsetting—has San Francisco beat as a fashion center. Bay Area natives Lam, Wang, Fetherston and Som have all had to relocate to the Big Apple to make it commercially. This could be the moment, though, when San Francisco finally stakes out its own fashion territory: local, organic, green, artisanal, ethically produced, sustainable … sound familiar? They’re the same qualities we prize in food, and they’re the values with which the Bay Area has become synonymous. Could this be the future of San Francisco fashion? To answer that, one needs first to explore why, exactly, San Francisco hasn’t yet made it as a fashion capital—and it’s faced more than a few roadblocks. Listen to what those commercially successful designers who still call the Bay Area home say about working in San Francisco: “You can do it, but you won’t have as many resources,” says women’s-wear designer Julie Chaiken, who, back in 1994, founded her eponymous ready-to-wear label here. While SF once did have a thriving manufacturing base, the apparel factories that supported the city’s large-scale retailers eventually disappeared, supplanted by offshore producers. Then, during the dot-com bubble, skyrocketing rents in light-industrial districts such as SoMa drove most small-scale clothing makers, on which local designers relied, to Oakland, Daly City and South San Francisco—or out of business entirely. “In terms of manufacturing and raw sourcing, in New York or even in L.A., everyone is right there,” Chaiken says. “If I need a button, there are 50 people to go to just for buttons.” Couture designer Colleen Quen has also managed to succeed in the Bay Area. But after 22 years working in the fashion industry, she says, she’s had to make her own compromises. “I can only hire a few seamstresses, because it’s so expensive and I’m still so small,” says Quen, who relies upon traditional methods of French couture handwork to construct her dramatic evening gowns. “I do everything else, pretty much. It’s hard to survive, but I have a good group of patrons who support me—that’s enough right now.” Then there’s the issue of media exposure and marketing. “The New York and European press define top fashion—and they aren’t looking to San Francisco,” says Chaiken, who lives in Marin and has a satellite office in San Francisco’s Financial District, but travels frequently and does most of her business through her showroom in NYC. “It depends on what you’re trying to do,” she says, “but if you’re a designer trying to create a national label on this level—and you live here—you still have to go to the major marketing centers to sell and market your product.” Others in the industry point out that even if the rest of the world wanted to focus on the San Francisco fashion community, they’d be hard-pressed to find it. “There’s no defined retail hub here,” says Cheryl Locke, fashion-journalism coordinator at the Academy of Art University. “Boutiques are scattered throughout so many neighborhoods. From a retail point of view, independent designers would be more successful if there was a central place to find them.”
The city’s fashion events are equally disjointed. San Francisco already has a scaled-down version of Fashion Week, founded in 2004 by event producer Erika Gessin; however, with plenty of other competing fashion events happening year-round, there’s a lack of real cohesiveness. “A lot of [San Francisco’s] fashion shows are just parties,” says 35-year-old Irene Hernandez-Feiks, who 10 years ago founded Chillin’ Productions, which puts on fashion and arts expos at, among other venues, Mezzanine and 111 Minna. “We’re still not on that level where we’re being taken seriously in fashion.” One woman in San Francisco has a plan, though, and she’s up for the fashion challenge. Born and raised in Berkeley, 35-year-old Yetunde Schuhmann is president and founder of the Innovative Fashion Council of San Francisco, a new nonprofit trade association backed by Mayor Newsom’s office that’s working to unite the city’s fragmented fashion community. On a rainy weeknight in January at Muse Photography Studio, she makes her debut at the Council’s inaugural networking event before a crowd of fashion students, event producers, photographers and designers. The casually dressed Schuhmann cheerily greets guests at the door, scribbling name tags and collecting business cards, before ascending to the balcony, taking the mic and—in her distinctive booming voice—outlining her ambitious vision for the city. Her plan? To create a SoMa fashion district with affordable retail and production space for local designers on and around Sixth Street and then, perhaps more importantly, to brand San Francisco worldwide as a center for sustainable fashion. “I have big projects for us,” says Schuhmann, who has no formal fashion training but attributes her passion to her childhood visits to France. (She later earned a master’s in business in Bordeaux and worked until recently as a marketing manager for the French-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco.) “We’re never going to be London. Or Paris. Or New York. They’re established. They are what they are. Instead, we have to figure out: What is it we’re good at? And how can we do it in San Francisco style?” “Yetunde came into the mayor’s office with a pretty amazing proposal,” says Mike Farrah, director of the San Francisco mayor’s office of neighborhood services. “It was long, extensive and had big vision—if you’ve met her, you’d know that’s exactly how she works.” “She’s been a huge champion for the plan for a fashion center on Sixth Street, which has been a priority for the city’s economic redevelopment,” adds Todd Rufo, a project manager at the mayor’s office for workforce development. “To the extent the designers are successful, we also see it as a way to create manufacturing and production jobs that we’ve lost to New York or L.A.” Since Schuhmann began the project on her own dime a little more than a year ago, she has managed to recruit a who’s who in San Francisco fashion circles to the council’s advisory board. So far, retailer Wilkes Bashford, couture designers Quen and Lily Samii, publicist Claudia Ross and designer and co-op owner Yugala Priti, among others, have signed on. In February, brother-and-sister team Ben and Chris Ospital (co-owners of the Hayes Valley boutique MAC—Modern Appealing Clothing)—gave the first guest lectures for the council’s Fashion Studio industry-speaker series. Nick Graham, the founder of Joe Boxer and the designer behind the new eco-friendly clothing label William Good along with Amber Marie Bently of Bently Holdings, and Thomas Onda, chief intellectual-property counsel for Levi Strauss & Co., will headline the council’s March events. And that’s not all Schuhmann has on her ambitious agenda. She’s in the midst of drafting a request for $1.6 million in city funding that would support other far-reaching goals: a new and improved green-themed San Francisco fashion week that would unify the city’s various events; travel subsidies for emerging designers to attend trade shows; a designers’ resource center and a Fashion Council headquarters on Sixth Street; and an international eco-fashion trade show in San Francisco. So far, the mayor’s office hasn’t given any direct grants to the council, Rufo says, but it has assigned staff members to help launch the nonprofit and provided advice on logistical details, from securing public-event parking to applying for business loans through the redevelopment agency. “We’re at this tipping point,” Schuhmann says. “If we don’t take that leap now as leaders in the green movement, someone else will do it.”  FUTURE SHOCK (LEFT TO RIGHT): linen-silk “mushroom top” from Amy Sarabi’s Spring 2008 collection ; sketch by Colleen Quen of her “modern miao” gown; Continuous- loop knitted garment by Cathy Nguyen, created for CCA’s sustainable-design course; Yetunde Schuhmann, president and founder of the Innovative Fashion Council San Francisco. But could sustainable, green and all those other feel-good words really provide San Francisco’s fashion niche? Tifani Wilt, women’s fashion director at Macy’s West, thinks so. “It’s good to keep San Francisco unique,” Wilt says. “We certainly have the talent here. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the level of fashion in New York and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, which is known worldwide. We have to come up with something else, like going green.” The green trend in fashion has definitely caught on, says Lynda Grose, a senior adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts who teaches courses on sustainable fashion, but consumers should understand what green really means. “It’s meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs,” Grose says, referring to the oft-cited landmark definition of sustainability coined in 1987 by the report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future. “Organic is one of the tools to get us there. Fair trade is one of the tools to get us there. Recycling is another tool. But none of them in and of themselves defines sustainability. As a society and in the industry as designers, we’re still in the middle of figuring this out.” Already, several of the city’s retailers are moving in that direction. Such eco-friendly and fair-trade-fashion boutiques as Wildlife Works in Cow Hollow, EcoLogiQue in Hayes Valley and Eco Citizen in Russian Hill have opened in the past year. Other SF fashion veterans are changing the way they do business. Blakely Bass, curator of the co-op R.A.G., spent six weeks and $15,000 remodeling her sunny Hayes Valley shop to become a certified Bay Area green business; 10 of the co-op’s 70 designers, all from Northern California, use entirely recycled, vintage or organic-cotton fabrics. In the past year, she says, many more local fashion designers have approached her about contributing sustainable lines. At MAC–Modern Appealing Clothing, the Ospitals recently decided to work solely with vendors who have reduced or eliminated packaging materials. The Ospitals also embrace the notion of buying locally. Although MAC is famous for its range of hard-to-find European collections—and that’s not likely to change—the pair has made a serious effort to stock pieces by designers located within 100 miles of San Francisco. “We are finally starting to think and buy locally again,” says Ben Ospital, who compares the momentum of going green in the local design community to the Slow Food movement. “We’re realizing the repercussions of fast fashion and the clothes that end up in 99-cent bins. It’s like seeing the growers of the food you’re eating at the Ferry Building and the care that went into it. People here are starting to appreciate the notion of the craft, the creativity and the hand that makes the clothing. That’s what makes a garment special and lasting.” For local designer Yugala Priti, going green means incorporating a broader social consciousness in her work. For 13 years, Priti has been committed to living and working in the city—first as the in-house women’s-wear designer for A Motion Studio, a studio and retail space in South Beach, then as the creative director for the women’s-wear label Saffron Rare Threads. In July 2007, she left Saffron to launch her own label, which is still in its early-planning phase. Her sketches show stylish variations on such city-girl basics as clean-cut trench coats and body-conscious bamboo-jersey dresses in neutral and jewel-toned palettes. Last month, Priti opened the Mission Statement, a co-op and work studio in the Mission District, along with her friend Estrella Tadeo. Eleven local designers each chip in about $150 per month in rent and spend three to four days a week overseeing the 600-square-foot shop on 18th and Valencia streets. In exchange, they get retail space and help from interns, whom they all mentor. “The fashion industry can be so empty and unrewarding if you aren’t doing anything to give back to the community,” says Priti, a petite, energetic 35-year-old who volunteered early on to help Schuhmann launch the Innovative Fashion Council. “Rents are high. Production is expensive. It’s a way to band together so we can make it as artists and give people who live here a place to buy local.” Colleen Quen has made a similar commitment to keeping it local. Two years ago, she opened her own atelier with her husband, industrial designer Rick Lee, in the SoMa district. In addition to designing evening wear there, she’s taken on several students for tutoring in French couture—an art, she says, that’s rarely taught outside of France. “I want to reach out to the emerging designers here so that they don’t feel so alone,” Quen says. “I know how it is when you’re starting. I’d really like to be able to support the young ones here so they feel like they can stay—like I did.” While she’s never considered permanently leaving SF, Quen says she’s ready for a new challenge in Paris, where she’ll present a collection in 2009 (inspired by her recent travels to China) during the off-schedule of haute couture. “The international media market will be there to see my work,” she says. “I’ll be the first ambassador representing SF. It may take a long time, but it’s a dream for me and one I’m determined to make happen.” So maybe the goal isn’t—and shouldn’t be—to become the next New York, Paris or Milan. Maybe all this activity and planning should be aimed at making San Francisco the next … Antwerp? Like SF, that small yet cosmopolitan port city in Belgium doesn’t have much manufacturing, but it does have a strong cultural and historical identity. And despite its relatively small population (about 466,500 to San Francisco’s 750,000), Antwerp has managed to gain legitimate fashion credibility on an international level thanks to a group of Flemish designers—all graduates of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts—who became renowned as the Antwerp Six. Of this pack, who joined forces to stage shows together in London and Paris in the mid-1980s, several have become household names, including Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck. The city, which also has a bustling fashion district called ModeNatie, has continued producing such young talent from its fashion schools as Raf Simons, A. F. Vandevorst and Veronique Branquinho, who are regulars in the international fashion press and yet still call Antwerp home. “If 20 years ago you were to tell me that we’d be seeing Belgian designers make a splash,” Ospital says, “it would be like saying we’re going to be seeing a Lodi Fashion Week. Now, there are few people in fashion arenas who haven’t thought of Antwerp as having a fashion movement. And it’s only existed because of the quality of its creative people.” San Francisco certainly has its own creative talent. If you were to start casting a “San Francisco Six,” you’d look to individuals like 24-year-old Amy Sarabi, who’s already been hailed in international circles for her intricately layered, one-of-a-kind linen and silk pieces. After graduating from CCA as a fashion-design major last May—and being chosen as one of Gen Art’s five Fresh Faces in Fashion for 2007—she now holds a day job as a menswear designer for Old Navy. Sarabi is also the only designer in the US to receive the international Duperré Award from the SF-based Arts of Fashion Foundation, which will be sending her to the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris for a summer fashion program in July. (And this spring, the Ospitals will be selling her first collection.) Despite her early success, Sarabi has no plans to leave the Bay Area. “I’m adamant about staying in San Francisco,” says Sarabi, surrounded by a flotilla of patterns, sewing machines and fabric, all jammed inside her Oakland apartment’s bedroom-turned-atelier. “This city is art-based and creative, and we’re interested in doing something that has meaning behind it. I feel strongly that a fashion movement is coming. Something’s about to happen, and I definitely don’t want to miss it.” Credits: (dress): courtesy of Wildlife Works; (Eco Citizen): courtesy of Eco Citizen; (mushroom top): Michelle Biloux; (gown illustration): Colleen Quen; (knit top): Pablo Wilson; (Schuhmann portrait): courtesy of Warren Difranco Hsu/after5media.com
Imagine a San Francisco Fashion Week on a grand scale: bright lights; tents on the sprawling lawns outside the de Young Museum; industry A-listers—the likes of Anna Wintour, Peter Nordstrom, Michael Kors—descending upon the city. Sitting elbow-to-elbow along the catwalk, they await the parade of models wearing designs by some of San Francisco’s own: Derek Lam, Alexander Wang and Erin Fetherston among them.
The city’s fashion events are equally disjointed. San Francisco already has a scaled-down version of Fashion Week, founded in 2004 by event producer Erika Gessin; however, with plenty of other competing fashion events happening year-round, there’s a lack of real cohesiveness. “A lot of [San Francisco’s] fashion shows are just parties,” says 35-year-old Irene Hernandez-Feiks, who 10 years ago founded Chillin’ Productions, which puts on fashion and arts expos at, among other venues, Mezzanine and 111 Minna. “We’re still not on that level where we’re being taken seriously in fashion.” One woman in San Francisco has a plan, though, and she’s up for the fashion challenge. Born and raised in Berkeley, 35-year-old Yetunde Schuhmann is president and founder of the Innovative Fashion Council of San Francisco, a new nonprofit trade association backed by Mayor Newsom’s office that’s working to unite the city’s fragmented fashion community. On a rainy weeknight in January at Muse Photography Studio, she makes her debut at the Council’s inaugural networking event before a crowd of... |
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