All Our Clothing is Haunted
Working on a commemorative banner and sewing in public
“In the midst of alarming cuts to government agencies tasked with enforcing regulations and protections for vulnerable Americans, it seems more important than ever that we both remember our hard fought gains and continue to press and march for social and economic justice.
We invite you to raise your needles and join us in assembling this memorial banner…”
— TATTER, on their Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial Banner
Stick it out until the end to hear about the many classes and events I’m offering in New England this spring and summer.
I spent most of March embroidering whenever and wherever I could. This is not some textile skill I have been keeping secret -- I don’t think I’ve done any embroidery since learning cross stitch samplers in my early childhood. First I offered to teach monogramming to spice up a hand-sewing class. And then I saw an opportunity to mark the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire with Tatter, a New York-based textile organization I admire. I decided I could figure it out.
Each 14” x 4” strip was embroidered with the name and age of one of the workers who died as a result of the poor labor conditions and disregard for human life that characterized the factories in the early 20th century. We had about a month to help embroider the names of the victims with ages and whatever decoration we could muster. The folks at Tatter hosted a virtual sew-in, where we met other participants around the country, giving it the feel of a quilting bee where everyone was excited about labor protections. I had to start over after my husband pointed out that in my fervor and concentration on the chain stitching, I had missed two letters. This is how I found myself in the waiting room of a doctor’s office that was once a shoe factory, with a small girl pointing at my work and whispering feverishly to her mom. I was embroidering on a foot-wide quilting hoop to try to avoid triggering a dormant repetitive stress injury from a decade and a half of writing and sewing.
“Oh, I see you brought something to keep yourself busy,” says my neurologist. The intake nurse eyes my hoop with naked curiosity. Sewing in public is not always so conspicuous, but at this point, the looming deadline and the pain in my wrists have made me unconcerned with taking up space. When people ask me what I am working on, it makes my day, because mostly I spend my sewing time cooped up in the same office I work in 50 hours a week. Embroidery, with all its vivid and accessible imagery, immediately draws people in.
My mother’s house is filled with samplers and her upholstery and curtains she has dreamed up. A beloved aunt cross-stitched my Christmas stocking. I have up until this point failed to complete a single embroidery project in my life. But Tatter’s vision of this huge public textile work for a parade, with 150 foot long banner of naming of the victims of fire, wrought collectively, captured my imagination. It embodied so many elements of my favorite works of textile and public protest and community I couldn’t resist—even if I had to Google every stitch and plumb the depths of a nearly abandoned Joann’s fabrics to do it.
A new batch colorful floss secured, I embroidered a young man’s name, Jacob Bernstein. He was 38. I wondered if the Essie Bernstein, 19, listed on the list of deceased above his name was a daughter, a sister, a cousin. In the court records of the victims, some have comments noted.
“Father identified by heel of shoe.”
“Mother of two victims below.”
“Identified by a darn in her stocking.”
“Found by fiance; to have been wed in June.”
When I was in college, I attended classes on the same floors where the fire caught in a discard bin, because what is now called the Brown Building is still standing, still in use. For me to get there, it took several generations of familial factory and textile labor. My great-grandfather became a tailor to escape becoming a miner, which was one of two options in Serradifalco, Sicily (farmer being the other option). My grandfather was a mechanic in the Singer factory; he also worked in factories that handled commercial upholstery. I use his old oil can to maintain my sewing machine. I use my nonno’s thimble when I am hand sewing. The work of sitting at a sewing machine for eight or ten or twelve hours is skilled work, and it's backbreaking work. I can’t imagine being a tailor in 1915. Forget my carpal tunnel—a few uninterrupted hours at my sewing machine straight is enough to send me straight to a hot pad.
When I was last in the Brown Building there, more than 10 years ago, I kept my eyes out for the small brass plaques commemorating the fire. I was a freshman on the centennial of the disaster. At 4:45 PM on March 25th, while I was in class, across the campus and the country, bells were rung in remembrance of the tragedy. Long before I knew my own family history as textile workers, the story left an indelible mark on my memory. I grew up in proximity to the mills of the famous Lowell Girls, founders of a female-led textile workers’ movement that paved the ground for the victories of the labor unions in the 20th century. I was taught to look for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union tags on vintage when I was thrifting as a teenager. It did not occur to me until I sat sewing in waiting rooms that there were people who might not know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The middle aged nurse who complimented the French knots on my wheat sheaves was mystified at the mention of it.
If you are also unfamiliar, the details are important to remember. The doors and stairwells were locked when the fire started on March 25, 1911. The sewing took place on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors, just a block from Washington Square Park. The workers, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, worked cutting and sewing on the machines nine hours a day, six days a week, and seven on Sundays. Within a few minutes of the fire starting, any stairs or elevators that were previously accessible were unusable. Victims had to choose to face fire, or jump from the windows into the streets of a horrified New York City. The building was equipped with fire escapes, some of which broke and sent the workers falling to their deaths. The fire department only had ladders tall enough for the 7th floor.
Two years before the incident, a fire prevention expert suggested improvements. They were ignored. There were large scale strikes that year, too. Two months before the fire, more than a ton of textile waste was removed from the factory, and the following two months cutaways piled up and fueled the fire on March 25th. The fire started just before quitting time, at the end of a long day, around 4:30. The spring light would have still been bright even on a day of raw and unpleasant weather. There was still snow on the sidewalks. That time of year, birds would have just started returning to the parks. By 5:15 the fire was under control, and 139 people were dead, many of them from jumping to escape the sealed ninth floor. 9 more were dead within the week.
146 people died. 123 of them were women or girls. They were making fashionable blouses with delicate fabric, clothing that was the equivalent of our fashion fashion today, relatively inexpensive and newly available at high volume and low prices to middle class women. The men who owned the factory were ordered to pay $75 per victim in a civil suit; the insurance company payment amounted to $400 a person. It was a profitable tragedy.
The last survivor of the fire, Rose Freedman, died in 2001, having spent her life working toward worker safety. Eyewitness Frances Perkins, later the US Secretary of Labor, was instrumental in lobbying for a 54 hour work week in New York. The labor victories in New York led the country. In a very real way, that fire on a raw spring day is the reason we have a 40 hour work week, OSHA, and weekends. The events of March 25, 1911 drove a building solidarity and galvanized a growing labor movement into powerful unions across the country, setting up a standard of living and prosperity that is regarded in the United States with deep nostalgia.
Times haven’t changed much—textile work has been displaced to other parts of the world with the same disregard, as in the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013. Do not get too comfortable, imagining such travesties are only located in the factories of Shein and H&M production. LA’s garment production is still often run on piece work, and brands like Fashion Nova were getting busted for sweatshop-like conditions in California in 2020. “Made in the USA” nationalism trades off the gains that textile workers made in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Workers are still fighting for rights, both in textiles and other industries like food processing.The strikes in Lowell and Lawrence, of “Bread & Roses” fame, helped win the weekend and labor protections that lead to the formation of OSHA and other oversight. Those are the same mills I go to explore the antique mall or get my eyes checked. Some still wait, empty with broken windows, full of memory.
Even if you buy the most sustainable and ethical clothing available to you right now, your clothes arrive haunted by the conditions of their production. The ghosts of the supply chain follow them even after you wash and dry and toss the package it shipped in. Everywhere, someone made choices that come out in the wearing: the warped side seam that twists your t-shirt around your middle from the efficient but off-grain cutting template; the serged seams to save time and money; a variation in sizing because the margin of error when you stack that many steps grows with each hand. Then the journey from hand to home. Your clothing should never be worn new, by the way, either off the rack or out of the package. Its fibers leak holdover dye, surface treatments; it rested on factory floors, in shipping containers collecting dirt, even maybe even mold. Any body that works in those production facilities 8, 10, 12 hours a day is likely as haunted by the process as the clothing it works to produce.
Being cognizant of the skilled labor behind your clothing, even when you’re purchasing under less-than-favorable circumstances, is a powerful antidote to mindless consumption. Maybe it’s even more important to remember when a garment was produced by the deeply flawed system (ethically, materially), because despite those systemic flaws, skilled human hands every step of the way. Remembering keeps us from stripping away the meaning behind the making; our clothes are part of how we invent ourselves. Nothing we wear is created in a vacuum, devoid of its history—low prices don’t actually erase provenance.
Sewing in public has been a good reminder of the divergences of nostalgia and remembering our history. Everyone who encountered me with my hoop in March asked me what I was working on. The interest in the visibility of the work did not translate into interest in the subject of the work or the history surrounding it. It’s not the same ego-boosting hit as getting to say, thanks, I made it. But it was worth the time, sitting on my porch or the front seat of my car, waiting to pick someone up, idling in the parking lot, working on my chain stitch. I messed up my wrists and elbows badly in the final mad dash to finish, and it was a reminder of how much I take my sewing machine for granted to make magic happen. By hand or by machine, a finished piece always feels like a surprise, that you’ve made something out of pieces and now it lives on in the world. I wish I could have seen all 50+ yards of names waving down Washington and Waverly Place this year, but I am excited that it now lives on in the Tatter archives.
Before the advent of the sewing machine and the many inventions that industrialized cloth making from the spinning jenny to the water frame, every step of the fabric making process would have been legible. Most of the population would know a few textile crafts. Village or city, they would have likely participated in some aspect of the creation of their clothing, whether homespun and homesewn or drawn up by a tailor like my great grandfather. Clothing was a fundamentally familiar and even agricultural product. It all sounds very picturesque, a textile literate society. It was also long hours and endless familiar labor with ideally expensive results. Factory work allowed for both that labor and that profit to be hidden, sequestered, and controlled. The response was unions, formed to build solidarity, community, and power. One of the ways the people who made clothing built that community was by being visible—in the clothing, in the streets, and in popular imagination. The tradition of the commemorative banner unfurling at a march is a long one, and so is the concept of community textile work. I hope there are more banners in my future.
Classes
I’m so excited to share I am offers a bunch of local classes in the New England area. If you’re local to Boston have suggestions for places that might host classes, let me know! All my classes are for beginners at the moment — no sewing machine or prior experience required.
Intro to Machine Sewing, April 16, 26, 30 in Ipswich, MA: Come to the scenic Northshore to learn how to use a sewing machine and make your first project! A few blocks from the local Boston commuter rail, the classes on April 16 and April 30 on Wednesday evenings make a great evening out. Or a come to the two class intensive on April 26 and walk away with your first project (a tee shirt) completed. Hosted by Labor in Vain, a lovely local studio and curated shop, you can make a day of it by exploring the bookstores, cafes, and shops of downtown Ipswich. Learn more and sign up here.
Intro to Hand Sewing, September 15 - 18 in Meredith, NH. Join me for a three day handsewing workshop on Lake Winnipesaukee for Creators Week on Three Mile Island. This incredible location is a beautiful island escape in the heart of New England. Classes will focus on hand sewing skills and we’ll complete a t-shirt with embroidered monogram, entirely hand sewn. No prior skills required, just an interest in the skills. You’ll also have a chance to explore some of the other skills offered through Creators Week, including basketweaving, crochet, and watercolors. Slow down and enjoy a few days where meals are take care of and down time is yours to swim, read by the fire, or explore the island. Learn more and sign up here.
If you’d like to keep up with my class schedule as I add more, you can check my website or make sure you’re subscribed here! Also, if you have sewing questions, hit me up in the comments.
Phenology1 Lately: We finally hung our bird feeder in a visible location and our days are a parade of titmouse, cardinal, chickadee taps and trills. The wetlands around the house are slowly filling with life again, including my favorite spring peeper frogs. The first night we can hear them singing marks spring for me. This year one hung out on my glass door and let me examine him closely, which was delightful. The crocuses are up, everything else bulb-based is will pop any moment. Every magnolia and forsythia seems to be on the very of blooming. It has rained for almost two weeks straight, but then, we need the rain. Wish me luck mushrooming the next few weeks.
Wearing Lately: My beloved green tweed overcoat, to which I have reaffixed buttons, is getting a lot of play in the rain, as well as a paint of black gingham culottes I bought for a Halloween costume that are now my favorite pants. Black silk crepe Eileen Fisher pants have become an easy staple, though they are in need of hemming. I’ve been delighted to break out my favorite Martiano flats, of which I have slowly collected several from ebay, as well as my collection of loafers. Shoes I almost never buy new, but my mom gifted me a pair of soft slipper-like loafers in Florence last year which are perfect. I need to get them soled to match my ardor; the leather soles can’t take any more 20K step days.
Reading Lately: The Life and Death of the American Worker by
, Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson, A Woven World by Alison Hawthorne Deming, The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi, The Wild Flag by E.B. White, Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb, Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952 to 1964, No Shortcuts: Organizing For Power in a New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAleveyI also want to include some other short form pieces I loved recently:
- also wrote about her experience with the Tatter project and workers’ right and our current political climate, featuring ’s incredible reporting.
I hosted a digital social hour for textile crafters for
this month, which was great, and so discovered ’s series on what she’s wearing and repairing.- wrote a great essay for Vogue on her no-buy experiment and how it changed how she wears her closet.
More on labor and community work from
, one of my favorite newsletters (plus Jenny Holzer)
Phenology, also known as observational biology, is “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate…Examples include the date of emergence of leaves and flowers, the first flight of butterflies, the first appearance of migratory birds, the date of leaf coloring and fall in deciduous trees…” Thank you, Wikipedia. The transcendentalists loved, and folks who know me from Twitter will know that the Morning Report started as brief, daily phenological reports. It seems like a nice way to preserve the spirit of the thing.
Wow, what a beautiful project Haley! Love hearing about the personal & family connections too.