Chapter 18
Rose
The workshop smells like thread and sweat and the particular mustiness of a basement that has been converted into something it was never intended to be.
My production space. That’s what I call it, though “space” implies a generosity the room does not deserve.
It’s twelve feet by fifteen feet, located beneath a yoga studio in the Mission, and I share it with a woman named Diane who makes leather bags and does not believe in small talk.
It's perfect for me, I say to myself in San Francisco.
I rent it by the month. Cash. No lease. The building superintendent is a man in his sixties who accepted my deposit without running a credit check because I showed up with the money in an envelope and the desperate expression of someone who needed a room with good light and a door that locked.
He asked what I did. I said fashion design.
He nodded as though this was neither impressive nor unusual, just another person in San Francisco making things too expensive for anyone to buy, and handed me the key.
The reality of building a collection is nothing like sketching in my apartment while Wednesday judges me from the windowsill.
Sketching is the easy part. Sketching is fantasy.
Production is the translation of fantasy into a language that bodies can actually speak, and bodies are inconvenient, inconsistent things that refuse to conform to the elegant lines I draw on paper.
Fabric costs money. Good fabric costs money I do not have in the quantities I need.
I stand in the garment district on a Tuesday morning with a list and a budget and the dawning understanding that the emerald silk I want for the spring collection would require me to sell both kidneys and possibly Wednesday, who would not appreciate the sacrifice but might understand if properly explained.
I compromise. I find a similar weight in a poly blend that doesn’t drape quite as well but costs one-third the price.
I tell myself the difference is imperceptible to anyone who isn’t me.
This is a lie. I can tell. Elaine Chen will probably be able to tell.
But the alternative is three pieces instead of five, and I need five.
Five feels like a collection. Three feels like an apology.
Diane helps me find a seamstress. Her name is Marta.
She is sixty-two, Guatemalan, speaks minimal English, and can construct a French seam while blindfolded.
We communicate through gestures and the universal language of someone holding fabric against a form and saying “No—here—more here—yes.” Marta has strong opinions about darts.
I defer to her on darts. On everything else, we negotiate.
Fittings are their own special hell. The human body is a conspiracy against symmetry.
I work with three models—not professional models, because professional models cost money, but women I found through friends of friends who have the general proportions I designed for and are willing to stand still for forty-five minutes while I stick them with pins and mutter profanities under my breath.
One woman has shoulders that are subtly, maddeningly asymmetrical.
Left sits a half-inch higher than right.
I didn’t account for this. Why would I account for this?
The human form is supposed to have basic courtesy.
I adjust the pattern. Re-cut. Adjust again.
By the third fitting, the dress hangs correctly on her uneven frame and looks wrong on everyone else.
Marta watches this process with the weary patience of someone who has seen designers discover the body’s betrayal many times before.
“We fix,” she says. Which is her answer to everything. We fix. As though every problem is merely a temporary misunderstanding between the fabric and the world.
I make mistakes. A collar I designed with too much structure, so it stands away from the neck like a satellite dish.
A zipper placed in a seam that pulls diagonally across the back, creating a wrinkle that no amount of pressing will remove.
A sleeve cut on the bias that twists around the arm in a way that is interesting but not, as it turns out, wearable for more than ten minutes without inducing existential despair.
Each mistake costs time. Each mistake costs money.
Each mistake arrives with its own particular voice—the one that lives in the back of my skull and has been waiting for this opportunity—telling me that I am ridiculous.
That women my age have established careers.
That designers younger than me have lines in Barneys.
That starting now, with my limited training and my basement workshop and my poly-blend compromises, is the behavior of someone who failed to recognize her expiration date.
I listen to the voice. I acknowledge its points.
Then I take the collar apart and recut it.
I move the zipper. I rehang the sleeve. I make the mistakes, and then I unmake them, and each time the garment emerges slightly better than it was before, not because I am brilliant but because I am too stubborn to let fabric defeat me.
The deadlines are real. Elaine wants five pieces by March first. That gives me six weeks. Six weeks to design, source, pattern, cut, construct, fit, adjust, and finish five garments to a standard that will not embarrass me in a store where the clothes typically cost more than my monthly rent.
I work until my hands cramp. I work until Marta gently removes the scissors from my grip and says, “Go home. Sleep.” I work until the basement feels like the only room in the world and the only light is the fluorescent tube above my table and the only sound is the hum of the industrial sewing machine that Diane lets me use when she’s not here.
There are moments—usually around two in the morning, when the fifth cup of coffee has stopped working and the emerald poly blend is refusing to behave and my lower back has developed opinions about the folding chair I’ve been sitting in for eight hours—when I wonder what I am doing.
Not in the abstract, self-pitying way, but concretely.
What am I doing in a basement in the Mission at two in the morning when I could be asleep in my apartment or, theoretically, asleep in the Pacific Heights home I voluntarily left with its six-thousand-square feet and its absent husband and its life of performative ease?
Then I finish a seam. I hold the piece up.
I look at it under the terrible light and see, despite everything—the compromises, the mistakes, the poly blend, the asymmetrical shoulders—something that did not exist before.
A shape. A line. A garment that a woman could put on her body and feel, if not transformed, then at least seen.
And the exhaustion doesn’t disappear, but it changes flavor. Becomes something closer to satisfaction. The particular tiredness of having made a thing that required everything you had and finding, at the end, that you had exactly enough.
I am ridiculous for starting this late. The voice is right about that.
I should have started years ago. I should have carried the sketchbooks.
I should have danced in the kitchen. I should have wanted the cat.
I should have been this woman all along instead of becoming her through the circuitous, painful route of marriage and its unraveling.
But starting late means starting with the particular clarity of someone who knows exactly what she’s running out of time to lose.
Every challenge makes me more certain, not less.
Every mistake is a lesson I am hungry to learn because the alternative is returning to a life where I made no mistakes because I attempted nothing difficult enough to fail at.
I pack up at three in the morning. The basement door locks behind me. The Mission is quiet, or as quiet as the Mission ever gets—distant laughter, a car alarm two blocks over, the low thump of bass from some bar that hasn’t closed yet.
I walk home. My hands smell like thread and coffee and the particular metallic tang of scissors handled too long. My back hurts. My brain is so full of seam allowances and grain lines that I can barely form a complete sentence.
I have never been more awake in my life.