8sewing

7. The Global Economics of Sewing. I can sew. I own a sewing machine, but it isn’t always set up. Besides, others can do it better and faster. I was in Saint John last summer, with a broken zipper on my jacket. It was raining hard. I saw five old heavy-duty sewing machines set up in the window of a dry cleaners. I entered and showed the elderly gentleman seated at one of the machines my jacket. “Do you have time to fix it? And do you have thread to match?” “Of course.” I immediately noticed his Eastern European accent.“No problem.” Five minutes and a toonie later it was fixed. In a former life this man was an expert in sewing — a master of an art lost to most North Americans. I imagined him as one of the garment workers displaced, by gentrification, from Spadina Avenue in Toronto or the garment district in Montreal, . Still a master, now he only does repairs. In Baton Rouge where I live, most of the people who sew are recent immigrants. They range from the very expensive tailor Manuel Martinez, a Mexican native who ‘builds’ custom made suits and shirts for the many state capital lawyers, to Vietnamese alteration shops. The deterioration and subsequent transformation of Toronto’s garment district on Spadina Avenue begins the complex story told by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein about the branding of contemporary personal and public space. On the first page of her book No Logo:Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies , Spadina is described as a neighbourhood where ‘in the 1920s and ‘30s, Russian and Polish immigrants walked these streets, arguing about Trotsky and the leadership of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union’. 14 Klein’s tracing of the rise of consumerism and the ultimate domination of public space and personal freedom by multinationals, ultimately takes her into factories around the globe where people sew.

The tension between sewing and fashion is huge. It has much to do with architecture in a very public, international and extremely political way. Multination- als sponsor the construction of public buildings and the making of public parks. Drive into Toronto from the airport and you will see large green spaces along the highway which are branded with the names of the corporations which sponsor their upkeep, rendered in shrubbery and well-manicured lawn. This takes me back to Rome and the scaffolds. Last summer, branding was present in huge garment advertisements which covered both monuments and background buildings of piazze . Unlike the green restoration veils which architects romanticize and which were at least transparent, the new opaque fabric billboards are blinders on the windows of even residential buildings. Architecture and sewing, as a topic, reveals many invisible seams, connections implicit but undeveloped, sensed but put aside, personal but over-ruled. These scaffold billboards are both a literal and a metaphoric demonstration of this complex relationship between architecture and sewing. 

Jill Bambury is a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She studied at TUNS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS and Cambridge University, England. She maintains a critical practice, her most recent project was a 200 ft 2 apartment on the roof of the Hotel Laurier in Ottawa, Ontario.

“Ask her what she makes— what it says on the label. You know — label?” I said, reaching behind my head and twisting up the collar of my shirt. By now these Indonesian workers were used to people like me; foreigners who come to talk to them about the abysmal conditions in the factories where they cut and sew and glue for multinational corporations like Nike, the Gap and Liz Claiborne. But these seamstresses looked nothing like elderly garment workers I meet in the elevator back home. Here they were all young, some as young as fifteen; only a few of them were over twenty-one. Klein, xv

The complex street space of restoration scaffolding, Assisi, 2001

16 Klein, Naomi. No Logo- Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies . New York: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

The blind space of corporate advertising on the street. Liptons in the Farnese, 2002.

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