I took the L to Bedford on my day off, which is a thing I only do when I'm feeling brave enough to face Williamsburg on a Sunday.
There's a spot I love, a resale place a few blocks up from the Bedford stop, where they have these bins of remnant fabric sold by weight. Three dollars a pound. It's chaos. It's polyester and denim scraps and mystery wovens, and buried in there, sometimes, is treasure.
Thrifting for sari silk in New York is not something I planned my life around, but it keeps finding me. Because tucked between a fleece and someone's abandoned curtain project, I pulled out a length of green silk. Bandhani. Tie-dyed the traditional Gujarati way, those tiny perfect dots that take somebody's whole aching hands to make.
And it was the exact green of my mother's wedding sari. That specific deep green, the color of the first monsoon leaves.
I stood in the middle of Williamsburg holding it and I had to sit down on the little bench by the window.
This is the part of my job — my life, really — that people don't get when I say I work in fashion. They picture runways. But thrifting for sari silk, rescuing textiles that traveled from some Gujarati loom to some auntie's trunk to a donation bag to a bin in Brooklyn, that's the work I actually care about. That silk crossed the same ocean I did.
I bought it. Barely weighed anything. I'm going to line a jacket with it — my mother's green on the inside, near my heart, where only I know it's there.
Sustainable fashion gets talked about like a virtue, like eating your vegetables. But for me it's this: nothing should end up dead in a landfill when it still holds someone's wedding, someone's grandmother, someone's monsoon.
I took the L home with the silk in my tote and I kept touching it through the fabric, the way you check your phone is still in your pocket.
Some things travel across the world just to find you on a Sunday.
Love,