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The Future of Fabric

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As the Brooklyn waterfront morphs into a gallery of Pinterest-ready boutiques made of reclaimed wood, it’s easy to grow jaded from a certain veneer of handiwork. One forgets they’re in New York City, a place where people get their hands dirty to make things happen.

Southwest along the waterfront in Sunset Park, urban ingenuity rebuilds itself in tech startups. While many emulate the promise of Silicon Valley, Manufacture New York promises something seemingly loftier: a new Garment District.

“If a tech company only came in to disrupt the fashion industry, which I know  a lot of folks are trying to do right now… I’ve seen a lot of failure happening. They don’t know how to talk to fashion people, because they don’t have the same value system,” said Bob Bland, fashion designer and founder of Manufacture New York. The idea for the incubator came to her “fully formed”: a space where makers can pool their resources and create locally. It’s a holistic vision of production that needs the best elements of both industries to work. “We’re not an industry to be colonized,” she said.

Established in 2012, Manufacture New York helps independent designers create their brands while learning the basics of building a scalable business in their craft, something Bland found absent in formal design school curricula.

“Mentorship was really missing from fashion for the last two decades. We were all trained to be really good employees,” she said. In that time, brands grew rapidly by outsourcing labor, but at the cost of innovation and jobless artisans at home.

Bland’s history in design includes work with Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren. While overseeing supply chains in China for multinational fashion brands, she saw firsthand how vertical integration of onsite complexes expedited turnover from concept to production. But for all their progress, most were tied to big business’ “race to the bottom” towards cheaper labor, leading to tragedies like Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza factory collapse in April, 2013.

“It was an inflection point for our industry when it came to ethical business practices for onsite manufacturing and transparency,” she said. “Consumers want to know more about how things are being made.”

So do designers. With a 20-year lease in their current facilities at Liberty Industrial Plaza, Bland’s team offers education to designers ready to make their brands in the city. “Entire industries need a physical infrastructure that also supports long term innovation,” she said. Bland sees a potential to re-shore the creative process by centralizing talent, production, and R&D in a matrix where designers can utilize cutting-edge technologies to their own ends.

Bland wants Manufacture New York to be both an antidote to the sustainability issues of the fashion industry and a synthesis of their best standards, describing the incubator as “a physical hub of the Internet of Things.” (A term she thinks the Internet probably could have spent more time designing.) Last year, Manufacture New York received a $3.5 million funding contract from the de Blasio administration to jumpstart local manufacturing. Bland’s team continues to raise funds to fill their 160,000 square-foot space with affordable tenant manufacturing spaces, workforce training programs, high-tech textile development labs, and a media production studio.

Part of making that hub a reality demands good, old-fashioned networking. Bland and her team have committed to sustainability through outreach towards other American manufacturers, importing textiles from regional Do-it-yourself businesses. This allows in-house designers to build a firsthand understanding of where their materials come from and how to establish supply chains of their own as they take their brands beyond the incubator. “The thesis that we’re proving here is that keeping your supply chain to as few suppliers as possible and as local as possible is inherently ethical, because you have a relationship involved with everyone in the process,” said Bland. Localizing sources ensures accountability if labor abuse occurs and allows designers and manufactures to work in trust.

While Manufacture New York currently houses 15 designers, they plan to expand their network to include technologists in the wearables space.

That hunt is helmed by Amanda Parkes, chief of technology and research at Manufacture New York. After meeting Bland in the summer of 2013, she brought the ethos of her own biotechnology company, Skinteractive Studio, to the incubator, where she continue to discern how wearables make sense in a “broader ecosystem” beyond clunky armbands and invasive goggles.

“[Tech companies] know they need to be more connected to the fashion industry. They need more integration into clothing,” said Parkes. “From the fashion side, they know that this wearable thing is happening and they’re wondering, ‘We need to be part of this. How do we enter?’”

Parkes is securing partnerships with startups and conglomerates alike to develop high-tech textiles and other innovations. While powerhouses like Intel are ready to lend their talent, smaller but potentially groundbreaking ideas are harder to come by. “We’re trying to source basically every flexible circuit and flex battery on the market… there’s no standard.”

Amid dead ends, this research allows them to act as an in-house database for their designers. “In a sense everything’s in this raw place that’s not as accessible to designers as it could be. There’re certain ways in DIY-type channels that designers can learn their processes and get a sense for what’s possible and think about what they want from the technology and use it for their own aesthetic and expression,” she said. “They have a place to go ask questions. That’s really the baseline.”

While strategizing the best way to secure confidence and intellectual properties with limited resources is always a hurdle, Bland remains impressed by the support rallied by her team and company. The mission remains firm: helping designers and customers alike see the value in sustainable commerce, on their shores and their terms.

“We’re not gonna be in the gadget business. We’re not taking our designers in what we consider to be niche markets. We’re looking to give them tools to tell their story and then for the customer to always be able to answer their questions about the pieces so that they’re willing to invest more in them,” said Bland, referring to MNY’s larger vision of sustainable commerce. “Invest more money, invest more pride; to buy less but to treasure their pieces more.”