We rented a studio off Orchard Street on the Lower East Side this week, and by ten a.m. it looked like a thrift store had exploded and given up.
Sorting a mountain of vintage for a fall shoot is not glamorous. I want to be honest about this, because Instagram will show you the final image and never the forty coats piled on the floor like a fabric avalanche while three of us argue about whether camel counts as brown.
Most of what we pulled came from the Housing Works on the LES, a few estate sales upstate, and one incredible seller in Bushwick who deals in nothing but 70s outerwear and smells faintly of cedar and secrets. Sustainability isn't a buzzword for our little team — it's just cheaper and better and the clothes have a soul the new stuff doesn't.
Here's the actual work of sorting a mountain of vintage: you check every seam. Every zipper. You sniff things, unfortunately. You steam out decades of somebody else's closet. You find a name tag sewn into a wool coat — this one said "D. Rosen" in careful handwriting — and you feel the whole life behind it for a second before you hang it on the rack.
We were losing the day around three. The light was going, the stylist was stressed, nothing was clicking. And then I found it, buried at the bottom: a deep emerald overcoat, structured shoulders, this rich color that reminded me of a sari my nani used to wear to weddings.
Everything organized itself around that coat. Suddenly the whole story made sense.
That's the part nobody can teach you in a fashion design program. Not the sewing, not the theory — the moment where a pile of dead people's clothes becomes a mood, a season, a story you actually want to tell.
We wrapped at nine. My back was destroyed. My hands smelled like cedar and steam.
I wouldn't trade it for a single corporate desk.
The emerald coat goes on the cover. D. Rosen, wherever you are — you have excellent taste.
Love,