We tend to see the fashion industry as a glamorous place, mainly populated by hip designers who often think they are untouchable gods and celebrities in astonishing gowns on endless red carpet events. Yet there is more behind the fury and the glamour: there are indeed myriads of figures in different roles in this industry, just like behind each garment there is more than just one person.
A designer may indeed come up with a concept, a sketch or a drawing, but patternmakers dissect that idea, turning it into a fascinating paper puzzle that then allows cutters and seamstresses to complete the magic and create the final design.
In the same way, there is more to discover behind the definition "Asian garment workers" that too often conjures up in our minds stories about cheap labor and fast fashion.
These points are what prompted Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jia Li, director of photography and founder of Hi-Lo.tv Production, and executive producer Jodie Chan to work on a documentary focused on New York's Garment District and on the Asian women who work there.
The 17-minute film "Invisible Seams" tells the stories of eight skilled Asian women working in the industry. At the very beginning of the documentary, patternmaker Yaqi Sun, of Atelier YQS, makes a statement that sets the tone for the entire documentary: a lot of young people go into fashion design thinking of doing so because they love shopping. Soon, though, they discover that glamour is just one of the many aspects of fashion. "Making a garment is not only to make yourself pretty, there's more technical parts you need to learn," Yaqi Sun explains.
And so we encounter more skilled patternmakers including Lorraine Lum who, when she graduated in the '80s, first got a job as a cutter of cardboard patterns, and Fanny Huang, who is now 76-years old and who came from a family of scholars. She and her husband were engineers but, when they moved to the United States, Huang longed to become a fashion designer. She then took a course and became a patternmaker, a job that satisfied her passion for beautiful things.
As the documentary progresses, you realise that Chinese women mainly ended up working in the garment industry because of the pattern of immigration and the type of labor that was available to them.
While it was true that the language constituted a barrier, these workers communicated through the silent language of garments. This hidden workforce became more and more skilled as the decades passed, but remained unacknowledged.
All the women interviewed are proud of what they achieved despite difficulties going from the trials of immigration and the relentless fashion rhythms to racism.
Ai Qin Shi, a seamstress, mentions the fact she worked on a dress donned by the First Lady of the United States (2009-2017) Michelle Obama stating, "To think that us ordinary people can make clothes that [they] wear, there's a sense of achievement."
Inspired by what she saw in the pages of Vogue and Elle magazine, Inni Choi dreamt of working in the industry when she arrived in 1997. She eventually got an interview with her favourite designer, who told her she was looking for more "staff" rather than "employees". Choi eventually went on to become a patternmaker, working behind the scenes and contributing to that industry she had grown to admire from the pages of glossy magazines.
The pandemic, the constant decline in the industry with manufacturing processes taken to other countries, and the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the area, made things even more difficult for these women: studio manager Liangqin Chen, shares her worries about post-pandemic times, while Nay Huang, who took over a factory just before the pandemic struck and had to face a major crisis, explains how the production had to shift from garments to face masks and PPE.
The film also features a young designer, 29-year-old Joy Mao, a graduate of Parsons, who mentions her doubts at the end of her course about her place in the fashion industry and her realization that beautiful clothing is a collective effort and not just the product of one single enlightened mind, but of a team.
In March this year the Museum at FIT paid homage to the Asian American community and their contributions to the New York Fashion scene with a dedicated exhibition. "Asian Americans in New York Fashion: Design, Labor" was split into two parts, the first looking at Asian fashion designers, the other at the history of Asian garment workers, such as factory seamstresses.
Let's hope that there will be more explorations into this community, but also into other community of migrants (there would be more documentaries to shoot about Italian tailors, Latina patternmakers, Indian embroiderers and the contribution of the Black community to fashion...). But let's also hope that the documentary will inspire more young people to look at alternative professions in fashion and get fascinated by the skills of patternmakers.
In the meantime, "Invisible Seams" recently won the Best Short Documentary category at the inaugural Tokyo Film Awards and will be screened on June 24th in Chinatown to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1982 garment worker strike in which more than 20,000 (mostly Asian American women) garment workers gathered and won a fight for better conditions and wages.
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