On Thursday my studio was going to toss an entire rack of sample garments. Prototypes. Wrong-color runs. Things that would never see a store. Into the trash. Just like that.
I stood there in our showroom off 38th Street in the Garment District and felt something curdle in my chest.
Because here's what nobody puts on the mood board: fashion waste is enormous and it's mostly invisible. The samples, the deadstock, the fabric that got ordered in the wrong dye lot — it doesn't end up in the campaign. It ends up in a bag by the freight elevator.
So I did what I always do. I asked if I could take it. My boss shrugged. "It's going in the garbage anyway."
I carried three tote bags of deadstock and rejected samples down to the 1 train like a woman who had robbed a bank of only cotton.
That night I laid it all out on my apartment floor. A half-finished linen shirt. Four meters of a mustard silk that someone decided was "too warm." And a bolt of block-printed cotton that reminded me so much of the dupattas my Nani used to fold into perfect squares.
I've been sewing since I was nine, sitting beside my mother's tailor watching him pin. Reworking deadstock is my favorite kind of fashion work because nothing about it is wasteful or precious. It's just problem-solving with a needle.
I turned the mustard silk into a slip dress. The block-print cotton became a wrap top with the print falling exactly where I wanted it. The linen shirt I just fixed and kept, because it was perfectly good and someone was going to throw it away over a crooked hem.
This is the part of fashion work I actually love. Not the runway. Not the front row. The floor of a small Manhattan apartment at midnight, giving fabric a second chance because the industry couldn't be bothered.
I wore the wrap top to work Friday. Three people asked where it was from.
"The garbage," I said, and meant it as a flex.
Nothing should be this easy to throw away.
Love,