Chicago’s apparel makers have all but disappeared. And the Apparel Center — the city’s central showroom for fashion designs for the last 35 years — evicts its last tenants this month.
But on the top floor of a tiny shop at 601 W. Roosevelt Road, two men hope to train a new breed of clothing manufacturers and tailors and bring them together with the city’s far-flung designers.
“In one space you can learn the tailoring and sewing business and produce a clothing line, all manufactured in Chicago,” Mark Sussman said during an open house in February at the fledgling Chicago Fine Tailoring and Design Institute.
Sussman, 42, and business partner Gidal Vodovoz, 51, say they’ll charge $1,800 for multiweek courses to help designers either create a business strategy and a five-sample clothing line or be trained as tailors. The company recently received a $46,000 grant from the Chicago Department of Housing and Economic Development.
The Institute also doubles as production space, to manufacture small clothing lines for designers. In effect, it’s an effort to restore a lost industry.
Roughly two-thirds of Chicago’s apparel manufacturing disappeared during the past decade or so, culminating a decline that began decades ago.
“Until the 1950s, the industry here in Chicago used to be the biggest in the United States,” said Marsha Brenner, executive director of Chicago’s Apparel Industry Board, whose mission is to nurture clothing design and sewing. “We made most of the suits and coats in the country. Apparel from the most couture down to coats and uniforms.”
But less-costly labor in New York and Los Angeles pulled talent and factories to those cities, Brenner said, causing Chicago’s factories to close one after another.
In turn, the Chicago public school system ended its sewing classes.
“Sewing was offered as part of fashion design courses but was phased out by school year 2009 due to a poor labor market in fashion design in the Chicagoland area,” said Marielle Sainvilus, a spokeswoman for Chicago Public Schools. She said such courses were common in high schools through the 1970s, ’80s and up to the early ’90s.
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Today the roughly 150 clothing designers spread over the Chicago area face myriad challenges getting their designs turned into clothing lines.
Consider designer Anna Fong, a Columbia College graduate who lives in Hyde Park.
“I’ve had times when I’ve had to hire a pattern-maker to do the patterns and find someone else to do the cutting and then move that all over to someone who sews, and that can become complicated,” Fong said. “There are times when it is so gut-wrenching that I can’t sleep at night.”
Lidia Wachowska, owner of Evil Kitty, a women’s clothing design business that started in Chicago in 2003, said the Sussman-Vodovoz concept would save designers time and money.
“Instead of driving from my pattern-maker and grader to a fabric store and then to a manufacturer, I can have all these services done in one place,” Wachowska said.
The few apparel manufacturers Chicago does have often are overbooked. Larger orders take priority, and sometimes “you have to wait forever,” Wachowska said. Out of necessity, she said, some designers have learned pattern-making, tailoring and manufacturing.
Manufacturing overseas isn’t an option for most designers here, who order pieces by the dozen, not by the thousands.
“Small clothing companies don’t have the scale of economies or ability to manage an efficient supply chain to realize cost benefit from outsourced apparel manufacturing,” said Vipin Goyal, senior manager at consulting firm Kalypso, where he works with apparel manufacturers.
Other designers say they are forced to manufacture overseas. George Zaharoff, who receives orders from retailers such as Nordstrom, said he was couldn’t find a manufacturer here with the talent and time to produce 700 men’s jackets. “I wanted to do a Chicago label, but we weren’t able to do it,” he said.
Outsourcing, however, brings its own headaches. Zaharoff said it involves traveling abroad to keep an eye on production to try to prevent expensive mistakes. It also means paying taxes to import the garments into the U.S.
Zaharoff said six or seven well-trained tailors in Chicago could have turned out his order in two months, the reason he is watching the progress of Chicago Fine Tailoring. “If it’s done properly, it could be beautiful for Chicago.”
Debra McNeil, owner of De’Bora Designs in Country Club Hills, said a talent pool here would allow her to spend more time on what she likes doing best — designing.
“I’m up, 3 or 4 in the morning. I’m up sewing,” McNeil said. “Sewing to get ready for shows. Prom dresses. I actually had to turn away some of my prom clients because I didn’t have time for it.” She also said the city’s small number of talented tailors and seamstresses are in high demand and that having more expertise would bring down those costs and make Chicago more competitive.
In fact, most of the people in contact with Sussman and Vodovoz, who operate Chicago Fine Tailoring, are designers. “These businesses are mostly owned and operated by artists, not business people,” Vodovoz said.
Chicago designer Lauren Lein exemplifies that kind of business operator. “I been doing this a long, long time, and I’m still in business,” she said. “But I feel like part of the reason I am is because I’ve been willing to be a risk-taker — maybe take an order even if I don’t know how I’m going to produce it. When I need something, it’s magically here.”
Others are like Val Nash, a young designer from Roselle. She has a fledgling scarf line called Kavalena and big dreams. “I want to start by making a product line, then do a whole clothing line and compete with people likeJ. Crew,” Nash said, wrapped in a scarf she designed from T-shirt material.
Nash wants her $12-$20 scarves to be ethically produced in the United States — which, in Chicago, means doing it herself. “I don’t like not knowing where my clothes come from,” she said.
And that’s where Chicago Fine Tailoring and Design Institute comes into play — from both a manufacturing and marketing standpoint.
Sussman said eventually he would like to create a retail space where designers can show off their wares, hold trunk shows and meet with clients. Animated and donning a blue velvet jacket and ripped jeans during the open house, he said, “What we want to look at is — how do you develop a cash flow immediately from your artwork?”
The ultimate goal, Sussman added, is to help incubate small apparel companies, then “kick them out.”
For more information, visit chicagofinetailoring.com.
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