Fashion looks like the runway. Fashion is actually a man named Kostas in a shop the size of a walk-in closet on Steinway Street.
Let me back up. We had a shoot Wednesday. Seven looks, borrowed samples, sizes that were more theoretical than real, and a model who was gorgeous and also two inches longer in the torso than the sample was built for. Standard nightmare.
With three hours to call time I did what every stylist secretly relies on and no editor ever credits — I found a tailor. Not a fancy atelier. A neighborhood tailor. The kind with a curtain instead of a fitting room and forty years of pin cushions.
Kostas's shop is in Astoria, on Steinway near 30th Ave, past the Greek bakeries and the shisha spots. It smells like steam and old fabric. He looked at my armful of samples, then at me, and said "who did this hem, a child?" No, sir. A very expensive brand did that hem. He was unimpressed either way.
In ninety minutes this man took in a blazer, re-hemmed a slip dress by hand, and fixed a zipper I'd already given up for dead. He talked the whole time. About his daughter in dental school. About how nobody wants things fixed anymore, they just throw and buy, throw and buy.
That line stuck with me. Because sustainable fashion, which I care about loudly on the internet, is really just this. It's Kostas. It's alteration instead of replacement. It's the tailor most of my industry has forgotten exists between the moodboard and the magazine.
The shoot was saved. The clothes photographed beautifully. And when the images come out, nobody will know that a tailor in Astoria did the actual, load-bearing work of making them fit a human body.
So I'm telling you now. The tailor did it. I just carried the garment bag and cried a little in the corner.
I tipped Kostas double and he waved it off and then took it anyway, muttering. He told me to come back with things that need real work, not "this baby stuff."
I will. Find your neighborhood tailor. Learn their name. They are the least glamorous and most essential person in fashion.
The hem holds the whole thing up.
Love,