Creating With a Conscience
"Sustainability is a complex concept to understand and apply in any business, let alone one as quickly changing as fashion. The notion of sustainable fashion can even seem paradoxical: How can fashion ever be responsible with its focus on novelty and inbuilt obsolescence? Yet a new wave of independent designers whose businesses are based on an appreciation of craftsmanship, quality materials, and ethical production of fewer, higher-quality, longer-lasting, and cherished products is a testament to change."
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Made in America: Not Just a Menswear Thing "Alabama Chanin designer Natalie Chanin, who has been producing goods—and sourcing materials—in the US for more than a decade, reiterates McMillan's sentiment. 'There is an iconic image of the American male and that man looks a certain way, drives a certain truck, and has a specific set of values. I think that, for that reason, men began to embrace the idea of Made in America first,' Chanin says. 'It was easier to market to men than women because there was a built-in cultural acceptance of these values.' But again, she sees...
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True Colors: Lauren Hutton
"The daring, dangerous life of a true American Beauty."
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Alabama Chanin Debuts New Collection at Heath Ceramics "Natalie Chanin is someone I deeply admire. The Alabama native started her designing career in New York, but when she found she needed skilled seamstresses to complete her designs, she moved back home, to Florence, Ala., where textile mill closings had left many women without work. With Alabama Chanin she created a whole line of high-end appliqued and embroidered clothing around their considerable skills with a needle. She also has hooked up with Heath Ceramics to design her own line of dinnerware and table textiles. I love Chanin’s ceramic collection in simple...
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Crafty Cook Natalie Chanin
"I got my nickname from biscuits," said Natalie "Alabama" Chanin, the force behind the handcrafted clothing and housewares company Alabama Chanin, based in Florence, Ala. She earned the moniker a dozen years ago after baking her signature buttery discs for a group of hungry strangers while on vacation in Venezuela."
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The Well Made Life
"To Natalie Chanin, Alabama Chanin is not a business; it's a lifestyle company. Thorugh her practices and products (which range from couture clothing to tea towels), Chanin is sharing a vision of a well-crafted life – a slowed-down, balanced life, with emphasis on sustainability, community, and skill. At the heart of any lifestyle is home, so we asked Chanin to share how she crafts hers."
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Pull Up a Chair, Then Fix It It’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement of Design Week in New York, when the newest home furnishings are introduced at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and related events happen all over town. But what about all the old furnishings: those forlorn, broken-down pieces that are forgotten, cast off and kicked to the curb, seemingly destined for the landfill? Not everyone, it turns out, has left them for dead. Last Saturday, as part of a conference called MakeShift, Natalie Chanin, the founder of the fashion label Alabama Chanin, held a...
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How to Embellish Any T-Shirt "Chanin is out to challenge the idea that 'fashion' is about the designer, and 'sewing' and 'craft' is about the home-made. As she puts it, making things needn't be viewed as a competition between the 'auteurs' and the 'amateurs.' (This view also has a gendered dimension that is itself inherently problematic — 'fashion' connoting that which is hierarchical and male, 'craft' that which is humble and female.) When she started selling her patterns, she says, others in the industry told her, 'You just killed your business.' But sales of her collection remain robust, she says...
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Neighborly Couture
"How the local food movement is spreading to fashion."
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Blanket Statement | Quilting for a Cause “'I may be their most passionate member,' says the snow-white-haired designer Natalie Chanin of the Southern Foodways Alliance (S.F.A.), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the culinary heritage of the American South. For years, it’s been Chanin’s calling to preserve the textile traditions of Florence, Ala., with her clothing line, Alabama Chanin. So when the S.F.A. director John T. Edge approached her about doing a collaborative project, hand-sewn quilts seemed like an obvious departure. Auctioned off this weekend at the Taste of the South event at the bucolic Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, this particular...
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