The Ultimate Luxury is Time: This 'Slow Fashion' Brand is Rooted in DIY The Ultimate Luxury is Time: This 'Slow Fashion' Brand is Rooted in DIYNatalie Chanin began making t-shirts that New Yorkers wanted to touch over 15 years ago. It started with a hastily refashioned tee for a swanky party. The rural Alabama girl thought it was unusual that the “fancy fashion city folk” handled her creation with wonder. This makeshift shirt opened an opportunity to connect with people from a different world. That’s how the founder and creative director of Alabama Chanin describes the advent of her sustainable...
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200 One-of-a-Kind T-Shirts
"After spending much of her life running away, a woman returns home to Alabama to manufacture the hand-sewn clothes she has designed."
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Alabama Chanin: Coming Home to Start Something New Alabama Chanin was born out of necessity. Founder Natalie Chanin faced that common challenge – an industry party and nothing to wear. Only Natalie was a fashion veteran, with years of styling and costume design experience, and the shirt she whipped up using thifted tees and simple hand-stitches was the hit of the night. Orders for the shirt poured in faster than she could replicate it, necessitating a cadre of seamstresses. Luckily, Natalie knew exactly where to find skilled textile workers – in her hometown of Florence, Alabama. The result? Alabama...
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You Can Make It There
"In Florence, Alabama, a homegrown fashion line is filling the holes left by the town’s defunct T-shirt industry — and retooling the way clothes are made, from farm to label. As the South grapples with hard truths about its former glory as a textile mecca, Alabama Chanin draws a new blueprint for building careers around community."
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Alabama Getaway "One minute Maggie Anthony-Chanin is demonstrating how to make a balloon giraffe. The next she’s describing the king snake she caught. Later, she’s showing everyone the fossils she found in a nearby creek. She is the life of the party and just happens to be one of the most interesting nine-year-olds you’ll ever meet. None of this is surprising when you consider her parents, Natalie Chanin and Butch Anthony. Chanin runs Alabama Chanin, which she founded in 2006 in her hometown of Florence, Alabama. What started as a hand-sewn T-shirt and clothing brand has grown into a...
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Southern Exposure "Textiles and ceramics collide with Alabama Chanin's collection of dinnerware for Heath Ceramics. Plates, bowls, and serving dishes, etched with elegant eyelets and stitching motifs, are handmade to look like embroidered clay. The collaboration between Natalie Chanin, the textile maker and owner of Alabama Chanin, and her friends Cathy Bailey and Robin Petravic of Sausalito's Heath Ceramics, began in 2011. "It's one of the projects that I'm most proud of," says Chanin, whose family uses the dinnerware at home. "It's great to have something so beautiful yet so durable that even a toddler can use them." GO...
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Natalie Chanin Says Slow Fashion 'Is a Matter of Caring' "A growing fashion movement has taken root in the northwestern Alabama town of Florence. Starting in 2006, Natalie Chanin's Alabama Chanin and its hand-sewn garments helped jump-start the slow-fashion movement, which pushes back against its opposite, fast fashion. Chanin uses organic, Texas-grown cotton spun into yarn in North Carolina, knitted into fabric in South Carolina and dyed again in North Carolina. It's then hand-stitched and often appliqued by a pool of dozens of local Florence seamstresses using Southern rural techniques that leave her designs to dazzle in their simple,...
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Share the Love
"Whip up a few handmade Valentine's Day gifts with some help from Natalie Chanin, the creative mind behind the sustainable fashion company Alabama Chanin."
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Scraps to Fight Over "Alabama Chanin’s first home collection in more than seven years includes throws, decorative pillows, napkins, candles, potholders and even drink cozies, almost all of it made in the company’s Florence, Ala., studio. And because it includes a combination of machine- and handmade items, the collection isn’t quite as pricey as the handmade quilts the company is known for. 'We had all these cuttings from our T-shirt manufacturing process, and found a great way to make sheets of fabric from those leftover organic scraps,' said Natalie Chanin, the company’s founder and creative director. All the organic cotton...
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Reviving A Southern Industry, From Cotton Field to Clothing Rack "You've probably heard of 'farm to table,' but how about 'field to garment'? In Alabama, acclaimed fashion houses Alabama Chanin and Billy Reid have a new line of organic cotton clothing made from their own cotton field. It's not just an experiment in keeping production local; it's an attempt to revive the long tradition of apparel-making in the Deep South. North Alabama was once a hub for textile manufacturing, with readily available cotton and access to cheap labor. But the industry all but disappeared after NAFTA became law, as...
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