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 operations...
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Billy Reid and Alabama Chanin's Homegrown Cotton
"Two years ago, I found myself knee-deep in a field in rural Alabama, picking organic cotton by hand. A few hundred other pickers were there too, bent over the rows of white cotton with bags at their hip, repeating the same hand-to-plant-to-bag motion over and over again. It was a picking party hosted by Natalie Chanin, the founder and creative director of the clothing line Alabama Chanin, and the fashion designer Billy Reid to celebrate and harvest their first homegrown, organic cotton crop."
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A Day In the Life of Natalie Chanin "One of my secret (although it’s not so secret now) dreams is to move back to the South and work on creating a more unified and formalized community of southern designers to promote and celebrate in the design community at large. The deep South in particular is full of incredible talent that I think is oftentimes overlooked by design publications and television. I’ve always had the pie-in-the-sky idea that I could somehow win the lottery and then devote all my time and energy to helping those designers do anything they need to...
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All Sewn Up
"Farming organic, GMO-free cotton is not for the faint of heart. It can be back breaking work to tend a field without synthetic pesticides to control weeds, and sourcing organic seed can be challenging. "There's a dearth of organic cotton seed on the planet," says Natalie Chanin, who in 2012 worked with friends at fashion company Billy Reid to raise a test plot of organic cotton near their mutual hometown of Florence, Alabama. Their goal was simple, yet daunting: to explore the viability of growing organic cotton locally."
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Natalie Chanin: Bringing Fashion to Her Small Town "Alabama Chanin, the fashion brand helmed by designer Natalie Chanin, is headquartered in a spacious former textile-manufacturing factory, which includes not just a design and production studio but also event space and a public café. But the most unique aspect of the company’s headquarters are implied in its name: the company is based not in one of the known fashion meccas but in Florence, Alabama, a town boasting a population of around 40,000. Natalie Chanin grew up in Florence but after college headed to New York City where she made a name...
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Portraits in Creativity
"In beautiful and evocative videos, Gael Towey & Co. Short Films document artists and their inspirations, revealing the courage and curiosity that propel the creative act."
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Rosanne Cash's Ode to the South "The opening track, 'A Feather’s Not a Bird,' came out of one of your first trips back, in 2010. John and I went to Natalie Chanin’s workshop in Florence, Alabama. Her company is Alabama Chanin, and I had seen her clothes at Barneys and Bergdorf’s. I’d go through the rack and finger every piece of her clothing, just touching the threads and marveling at something that was original and hand stitched like that at Barneys. We met in New York and just started talking as if we had known each other our whole lives....
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Who's the Greenest Designer Out There? "The fashion industry’s acceptance of the need to address environmental concerns in design is still in its early days. Only two years ago, Melissa Joy Manning, attending her first meeting of the Council of Fashion Designers of America as a new member, raised her hand and asked with a red face what the council was doing to promote sustainability. There were blank stares, but a few designers approached her later and formed a committee on the subject this year. Ms. Manning recalled this moment on Tuesday at a lunch to announce the winners of...
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Eco-Fashion Tour de Force Natalie Chanin Has the CFDA In Her Corner "'The embroideries at the core of our work started as simple quilting stitches—a 'living art' that found resonance and utility in rural communities all over America,' she said. 'This inspires me every single day.' The key, perhaps, to her consciousness lies in something one doesn't often hear: 'Part of the appeal of being a designer, for me, is the act of bringing not only products but also systems of making to life.' For her, it's not about the end, but rather, the entire. As Amber Valletta put it,...
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