I found a blazer at the Housing Works on Crosby Street for $18. Oversized, boxy, this beautiful oatmeal wool, but the lining was ripped to shreds, hanging in there like a bad relationship.
Most people would've passed. I saw a project.
Because I've been carrying around one of my Nani's dupattas for three years now. A deep marigold with tiny mirror work, gara embroidery along the edge. She wore it to weddings. It smells like nothing anymore, which broke my heart a little when I realized it, but the color still does that thing where it makes me stop.
I couldn't wear it. Not in the way it was meant to be worn, not in my life here of subway rides and studio floors. So it lived in a drawer. Which is another way of saying it lived nowhere.
This week I finally understood what to do. I took the blazer to the little tailor on 30th Avenue in Astoria — Mr. Kaan, who I trust with my life and my hems — and we lined that oatmeal wool with my Nani's marigold dupatta.
Sustainable fashion gets talked about like it's a spreadsheet. Carbon this, water that. And all of that is real and matters, I promise. But the part nobody puts on the mood board is this: sometimes the most sustainable fashion is just refusing to let a beautiful thing become garbage.
Now when I open that blazer there's a flash of marigold and mirror work, my Nani's whole aesthetic living secretly against the wool. Only I know it's there. Which somehow makes it more mine.
Mr. Kaan held it up when he finished and said, this is a good one. He didn't know what the fabric was. He just knew.
This is the fashion work I actually care about. Not the trends, not the twelve-collections-a-year machine. The keeping. The carrying forward.
I wore it to a meeting in Soho the next day and felt armored in the best way.
Don't throw away the beautiful thing. Give it a new job.
Love,