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| Cindy Ferrara, pattern maker and production manager, in her office on Broadway. |
Interview in New York Time Blog: http://runway.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/behind-the-scenes-the-product-specialist/
In this blog on the New York Times website, Cathy Horyn interviews Cindy Ferrera, a pattern-maker and production manager in the garment industry who has seen the changes between eras of of the fashion industry: the shift of technical skills to overseas manufacturers, and the breaking up of the design process in a society that values convenience and speed above all else. She describes the time when garments were designed and crafted in the Garment district in NYC, and then when China started making them. When production was exported to China, our design process met their assembly-line mentality and history of origami in clothing, and clothes became less about dimension and fitting the body, and more about presentation on the sales floor:
"The Chinese were unbelievable at presentation of the product. It may look like a pancake but it sparkles!"
We are not only seeing a change in how manufacturers produce clothing, but how we perceive them, the increase of products with stretch making it unnecessary for consumers to know what good fit and quality is anymore.
In China is a voracious drive to be the best, the most competitive and an extremely disciplined worth ethic, for example, "A buyer can sit over here and take a photograph of something and then say to someone in China, “This is doing well, give me 15 versions of this.” The buyer can shoot the image and they have these very elaborate systems where they can get the pattern off the image. They can program the machine to knit it and then have a sample in two days."
Here we see a shift from designing the whole way through to just design and marketing the product, as Ferrera describes: "They have the know-how. What we are going to become is the sellers. It’s our marketing, our Web sites, our warehousing."
Now that we are focusing more on the marketing, "we spend most of our time untying communication knots and much less time focusing on the product. There’s more and more attention paid to how to pack the carton—for efficiency, "
The garment industry seems to focus first and foremost on the last step of the design process: surface, and how it will look on the sales floor, and less on the actual product. Not only do they skip to the last step, but the whole process is broken up, with no one designer overseeing every step along the way, and the knowledge of each step in the hands of different people. It is less important for the designer to understand other steps like medium, structure, concept, and craft after decide what product they want,
During this shift in industry, it wasn't only manufacturers that went overseas, but knowledge. What does this exportation of knowledge mean for us? What can we expect when we give all control over the construction of a garment to only certain parties? This can't only be happening in the garment industry; with many manufacturers going overseas, knowledge of craft in design must be going too. There is a possibility that we could be giving the reins of innovation to foreign manufacturers, with the risk that with since they have all the knowledge and technology, they too could start designing the end product instead of just producing it. Designers should have an intimate understanding of the whole design process, from drawing board to materials to assembly line, to shipping and marketing and presentation, so that we don't also export disposable products and control over our designs.
"The Chinese were unbelievable at presentation of the product. It may look like a pancake but it sparkles!"
We are not only seeing a change in how manufacturers produce clothing, but how we perceive them, the increase of products with stretch making it unnecessary for consumers to know what good fit and quality is anymore.
In China is a voracious drive to be the best, the most competitive and an extremely disciplined worth ethic, for example, "A buyer can sit over here and take a photograph of something and then say to someone in China, “This is doing well, give me 15 versions of this.” The buyer can shoot the image and they have these very elaborate systems where they can get the pattern off the image. They can program the machine to knit it and then have a sample in two days."
Here we see a shift from designing the whole way through to just design and marketing the product, as Ferrera describes: "They have the know-how. What we are going to become is the sellers. It’s our marketing, our Web sites, our warehousing."
Now that we are focusing more on the marketing, "we spend most of our time untying communication knots and much less time focusing on the product. There’s more and more attention paid to how to pack the carton—for efficiency, "
The garment industry seems to focus first and foremost on the last step of the design process: surface, and how it will look on the sales floor, and less on the actual product. Not only do they skip to the last step, but the whole process is broken up, with no one designer overseeing every step along the way, and the knowledge of each step in the hands of different people. It is less important for the designer to understand other steps like medium, structure, concept, and craft after decide what product they want,
During this shift in industry, it wasn't only manufacturers that went overseas, but knowledge. What does this exportation of knowledge mean for us? What can we expect when we give all control over the construction of a garment to only certain parties? This can't only be happening in the garment industry; with many manufacturers going overseas, knowledge of craft in design must be going too. There is a possibility that we could be giving the reins of innovation to foreign manufacturers, with the risk that with since they have all the knowledge and technology, they too could start designing the end product instead of just producing it. Designers should have an intimate understanding of the whole design process, from drawing board to materials to assembly line, to shipping and marketing and presentation, so that we don't also export disposable products and control over our designs.
Image courtesy of nytimes.com
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