By Andrew Kolczynski
I’m standing there with a mic threaded up the back of my shirt and two cameras pointed at me while I can’t get through the outro of a fashion documentary we’re shooting. Tears keep welling up my eyes for a few reasons — one being that once I get it right, the whole shoot is over, and I want this to last just a little longer. Another being that two years ago I was in a much different place. I had tried to do the fashion thing: sell my clothes and make it big. I failed, of course, and didn’t think I would ever return to fashion.
But if that were true I wouldn’t be here writing to you. Instead, I’m still banging my drum about the importance of clothing and fashion, for all my big fashion nerds at the vintage stores this weekend, and, maybe more importantly, for those that pass reasonable judgement on fashion: it’s too expensive, too exclusive, too Clueless. This story is about rediscovering why I fell in love with making clothes in the first place. Fundamentally, this is about what it means to make something with your hands.
When I was in high school, I was often heading back to art class after detention to learn Adobe Illustrator from my teacher, Ms. Joseph, who… well, she was the one who gave me detention. Her gift was in giving me detention along with her full support of my growth as an artist. I surely deserved to cut the school’s grass with scissors, but she also knew I deserved structure and support in my interests. Her school-bought Gateway desktop whirred as I learned Adobe Creative Suite 2, designing t-shirts for my friends with high hopes that we would form our own snowboarding team. In the meantime, my mom, in her never-ending quest to keep me at my home so I would behave, bought herself and me a sewing machine. She proclaimed that at least one of us was going to learn how to sew in the end.
14 years later and I’ve designed for a high-end women’s label that has dressed both Dr. Jill Biden and Melania Trump; assisted on an NBA collaboration; and dressed people like Nick Kroll, Jim Parsons, and Wisdom Kaye in clothes that I personally made — I did that all while running around the New York City garment district with rolls of fabric, bags of buttons, and big big dreams. My mom was right, and she now reflects, “I spent all that money on fabric, but at least you were in my basement sewing and not getting into trouble.”
But I’ve also failed immensely. In the midst of a congested fashion landscape, I tried desperately to keep my own clothing label afloat, selling at pop-up markets around the city, sending clothes to influencers and maintaining a frequent online presence. Instagram likes, internet virality and fickle friends dominated my life while I lost the sincerity in my creative process. I ended up spending the rest of the money I had on a small collection, hoping it would turn everything around. It was a bad bet.
I’ve messed up at jobs before, but this time around it felt like I had failed myself. There was no one else to take accountability but me, no matter how much it hurt. Tired of the games of the capital-F Fashion Industry, I had no wind in my sails and hoped to quietly dock ship.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Life doesn’t ever let you quietly dock ship.
