People think fashion is the runway. Fashion is actually a woman named me, alone in a studio off West 39th in the Garment District, sorting a mason jar of vintage buttons at 2am, questioning every life choice that led here.
We had a lookbook shoot in the morning. Small brand, deadstock fabrics, the kind of sustainable project I actually believe in, which is why I'd said yes and why I was awake.
Here is the thing nobody tells you when you get a Fashion Design degree. The lookbook shoot is the tip. Underneath it is a mountain of steaming garments, taping hems, hunting down a size 8 shoe from a sample rack that only holds 7s, and yes, matching horn buttons to a jacket because the original ones fell off in transit.
I love this part more than I'll admit out loud.
There's a meditative thing about sorting old buttons under a single lamp. Each one has a history. Bakelite, mother of pearl, a brass one with a tiny anchor that clearly escaped from someone's coat in 1962. I sourced most of them from a thrift bin in the East Village and a closing hardware-turned-notions shop on Orchard.
Sustainable fashion sounds so clean in a press release. In reality it's this. Reusing, rehoming, refusing to buy new when an old thing will do. It's slow and fiddly and it makes for a very long night.
Around 1am I put on old Kishore Kumar songs, because my father used to hum them while fixing things, and something about repairing a garment felt like the right soundtrack.
The lookbook shoot went beautifully, for the record. Morning light through the studio windows, the jacket buttoned up perfect, nobody the wiser about the anchor button holding it all together.
That's the secret of this industry. The lookbook shoot everyone sees was held together by a girl who didn't sleep and a jar of other people's forgotten buttons.
Glamour is just tired people who cared enough to stay up.
Love,