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  • The Art of Fabrication
  • Anonymous, Amy Herzog, and Libby Vanderploeg

The narrative that follows was shared by a prominent fashion director who has served as the creative force behind some of the biggest clients in the industry (including Chloe, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, and Narcisco Rodriguez). She has been cited as one of fashion's "most powerful people," and is a prominent advocate for industry standards on labor and safety. She has asked to remain anonymous. [End Page 303]


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[End Page 304]


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My Introduction to fash ion was not in the obvious made-clothes-for-my-dolls way. When I came to New York City in 1959, my mother, my brothers, and I were very poor. We lived on Broome Street between Orchard and Ludlow, and I never had anything to wear. I tried to wear my aunt's clothes but they didn't fit me and they were from the 1940s, so instead I would wear the same blouse over and over again. It was a sleeveless, white, cotton/polyester, button-back shell with a giant, graphic red rose print in the middle (now I realize it anticipated Comme des Garcons- the only designer I wear). I bought it from a pushcart on Orchard Street for ninty-nine cents. I would wash it and hang it up to dry every night, to the point where my teachers began to comment on it. I loved that blouse, and hid my embarrassment of wearing it so often. [End Page 305]

In 1960, when I was about ten years old, I started going to the University Settlement Camp in Beacon, New York. In those days, many of the Jewish intellectual parents who supported the camp wanted their kids to integrate with people of other races and economic positions. So I was a poor Eurasian girl who received a full scholarship to go to this Jewish communist-inspired camp. Most of the other kids seemed to me to be extremely wealthy; their parents were psychiatrists, and architects, and professors at universities. They lived on the Upper West Side or in the Village in sprawling apartments or on Long Island in beautiful homes. By the time I was fifteen, I stopped hanging out with my poorer neighborhood school friends and spent all my free time with rich, smart, cool Jewish kids.

And I started to lie about where I lived; I lived in the tenements but I told my friends I lived in the fanciest building in Hell's Kitchen. They would walk me to the building, and I would walk into the lobby. I had befriended the doorman, and he would let me sneak out of the basement. Now I look at the apartment building on Eighth Avenue and West Fifty-Third Street and it looks like my worst nightmare. But at the time it seemed incredibly glamorous.

There was an interesting transition taking place in fashion during this time period, the mid-sixties. The beatnik, bohemian, hippy way of dressing had worked for me. I could wear ripped jeans and vintage 1940s blouses I bought in a thrift store in Newburgh, New York for twenty-five cents and look cool. But then the British Invasion started in 1964 and the Carnaby Street mini-skirt fashion craze hit. I couldn't do the worn jeans/vintage look anymore, so I realized I was going to have to learn how to steal. I started going to stores like B. Altman, Bloomingdale's, and Henri Bendel, and I would covet all the clothes that came in from London—the "Total Look" which might be a navy blue suede military jacket and skirt for fifty dollars which was way over my fifty-cents-a-week allowance.

In those days, there were no sensors on the outfits. You'd go into the dressing room with five outfits and the salesperson would give you a tag with a "five" on it—but I would flip a hanger on top of another hanger so they would just count the top of the hangers. In the winter, I bought...

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