But everyone was kind, maybe because I was quiet and shy. I wanted to know what the buyers thought, and they would tell me and I would listen. Gail had been unimpressed with the designs. Put some piping on it or something. I was learning to communicate and to express my needs and ask for payment and other things that were hard for me to ask for.
She thought that my taking a divergent path was some kind of sabotaging behavior. This was more than Gail could manage, and a small factory in Queens was found to do the sewing. Hilary Old and Monica Rowe had been listening quietly while Eileen told this history in answer to my questions. She had not touched her lunch, and, so that she might do so, I questioned her companions about what they did in the company. Rowe, a handsome African-American woman of forty-five with an air of friendly reserve, had only recently joined the company.
Old, who is also forty-five, with a fresh open face and a manner that is at once confident and modest, has been in the company for eighteen years and rose through the ranks from a job as a saleswoman in the White Plains store. When I asked about the hard times, and how they were surmounted, she and Eileen spoke about the almost magical intervention of a woman named Susan Schor, who arrived as if from Mt.
Olympus, though she actually only came from Pace University. I was always good with numbers. I was good in math.
Eileen struggled to explain. He was a lovely guy. He would have been the right C. But it was the old paradigm of somebody directing the action. She is the second oldest of seven children, six of them girls.
My father was an accountant at Allstate Insurance. He was a quiet guy, kind of disengaged. With my six siblings, we ran the show. We did what we did.
My mother put food on the table and cleaned the house, but she never told us what to do. The incomparable Susan arrived a few years after the C. Eileen tried to say, but her reply was like a hermetic text by Judith Butler. The talk gradually grew less opaque. But I noticed that whenever the workings of the company came under discussion the language became peculiar and contorted, as if something were being hidden.
In fact, the company has nothing to hide. It is remarkably benign and well intentioned. It has a profit-sharing plan for its employees, whereby twenty-nine per cent of the profits are given to them. The plan includes the salespeople, who do not work on commission.
The salespeople are expected to wear Eileen Fisher clothes to work, and are given five free garments a month so that they may do so. Along with being generous to its own employees, the company tries to help the workers in the Chinese factories where most of the Eileen Fisher clothes are now made; there is a director of social consciousness, who oversees the inspection of those factories.
In addition, there is a director of sustainability, who is in charge of environmental exemplariness. The company tries to be as green as it can without losing its shirt.
For example, fifty per cent of the cotton it uses comes from organic farms that do not use pesticides, and dyes that are not toxic are preferred if not always insisted on. However, when Susan Schor arrived at the company, in , it was slipping away from Eileen.
In , she had married David Zwiebel, who owned two dress shops in upstate New York and was one of the early buyers of Eileen Fisher designs. After they married, Zwiebel joined Eileen at the company. Before the opening of the Madison Avenue shop, department stores had hesitated to take Eileen Fisher designs; now they saw the point of doing so.
In the late nineties, the marriage ended, and Zwiebel left the company. It sort of reminded me of that situation with the Japanese boyfriend. Why do we repeat the same things? Deadlines were more important than the process that led to the deadlines. Schor is a handsome, vivacious, articulate woman of sixty-seven. Schor was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes. Where the male C. Old, Rowe, and I followed her into a spacious room with a kitchen at one end and beige sofas and armchairs and side tables with books and magazines and attractive objects on them at the other.
Two cats curled up on cushions completed the picture of pleasing domestic comfort. I noticed a third cat on the outside of one of the French doors that lined a wall—standing on its hind legs, its paws eagerly pressed against the glass—and asked if I should let him in.
She explained that this cat was never let into the house. He was the bad cat. He had once lived in the house with the other cats, but he had fought with the second male cat and peed all over the floor and when the housekeeper threatened to quit he was expelled from the house and now lived outdoors.
He was begging not to come in from the cold, Eileen said, but to be fed. A meeting was going on in the room where we had eaten, and I was led to an upstairs room, lined with racks of Eileen Fisher clothes, all in gray, black, and white.
Eileen, again, looked beautiful and elegant in a black ensemble of trousers and scoop-neck sweater. She has gone to China and to meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. In the studio, she spoke of another influence on her design that had almost the significance of the Japanese one: her Catholic-school uniform. The school experience itself had been less edifying.
It was always risky to speak at school. There was yelling. They would humiliate you and embarrass you. Eileen asked if I would like to drop in on the meeting downstairs.
In the lunchroom, the long table had been pushed against a wall, and ten or twelve women wearing Eileen Fisher clothes were sitting on chairs arranged in a circle. They spoke in the same coded language that Eileen and Old fell into when they talked about the company.
What were they talking about? The meeting ended when an elegant older woman held up two bronze bells connected by a cord and rang them. Then an object, a sort of gilded gourd, was passed from hand to hand. Each woman said something as she received it. The book proposes that organizations conduct their business in circles. You sit around in a circle. This eliminates hierarchies. Everyone is equal. Back upstairs, I asked two questions I had been somewhat nervously planning to ask. The first—yes, you guessed it—was about the cat.
In the weeks between my visits to Irvington, there had been a spell of exceptionally icy, windy weather, and I had thought of him miserably huddled under the house in the low temperatures. Had she relented and let him in?
No, there had been no reason to do so. It was painful. Every time it would snow or rain I would feel terrible. One freezing-cold day, I thought, Oh, my poor cat, and picked him up. On another freezing day, I let him into a stone entryway. I thought I would just let him be there, and he kind of walked around a bit and then he stood by the door so that I would let him back out. I asked my second question: Why were Old and Rowe present during my interviews with Eileen? I found myself babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism, about the risk subjects take when they let journalists into their houses and the pangs journalists feel when they write their betraying narratives, and saw Eileen and her colleagues looking at me—as I had looked at them when they talked about their company—as if I were saying something weird.
We were in different businesses with different vocabularies. I turned to Eileen. At the celebration, Eileen was waiting for me at the door in an especially fetching outfit of black harem pants, boots, a charcoal-gray cardigan over a gray asymmetrical top, and a light-gray scarf.
The store was full of people, some sifting through racks of clothes or waiting in line for a dressing room and others conversing, with glasses of champagne in their hands. It was a nice occasion. Eileen made a gracious speech of greeting and introduced a dance performance by students and teachers from a local dance studio.
After the performance, people came up to tell her how much they loved her clothes and admired her. A woman with a cane who said she had just turned eighty-five was among them. She was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes from another time, which suited her well—an unobtrusive outfit of slacks, shell top, and jacket of an easy fit.
It occurred to me that Eileen looks better in her clothes than anyone else. What she selects from her little closet and puts on for the day is a work of design itself. In Manhattan, there are small enclaves where almost every woman looks chic—Madison Avenue in the Seventies and Eighties, for example. Almost everywhere else, if you walk along the street and look at what women are wearing, you have to laugh at the disparity between the effort that goes into shopping for clothes and the effect this effort achieves.
During the dance performance, Eileen pointed out an attractive bearded man standing across the room. What is it about? Without her I would be a totally different person. You go through all this stuff and let it go. Eileen left the Catholic Church during college, and now attends weekly meetings of the Westchester Buddhist Center the meetings are held at her offices in Irvington. Four years ago, she went on a weeklong meditation retreat in Colorado with her children, now twenty and twenty-four.
Maybe because I grew up the way I did. Last year, the brand collaborated with downtown cool-kid brand Public School on a line of upcycled garments, including a felted cap. Among the trees, I arrived at the Tiny Factory, the former warehouse out of which the Renew program is based, in the car Eileen had sent for me. The brick building is on a commercial street near the pristine houses and front yards of Irvington the white picket fences here are literal ; a few miles downtown and on the river is the Lab Store, where EF customers can buy items from regular collections as well as Renew pieces.
The space was clean and brightly lit, though so full of material that we seemed to be actually inside one of those bags you drop off at Goodwill every six months. Boxes of returned items come in from Eileen Fisher stores, around 2, pieces a week a little less than in Seattle, the other Renew base ; the boxes are then opened and sorted. A woman and man were quietly handling items on tables in the factory as we walked by—they supposedly know the material so well that they can tell linen, cotton, and wool blends simply by touch.
Bedoya explained that Eileen Fisher clothes are more suited to recycling than others because they have long been ethically sourced, organic, and free of the harmful dyes that would make it difficult to clean them en masse, and reconstitute them. Garments are either cleaned and resold as is, sold with a flaw, overdyed by an artist in Seattle to hide discoloration, or stripped and made into something else entirely.
Huge amounts of data are collected and analyzed. For example, it takes 2. What can we do at the design stage to extend the life cycle, to extend the quality of the product so that people will hold onto them longer? But making clothing is only one part of the Renew program nowadays. Everything else Eileen Fisher is doing with old clothes, which happens in another room in the Tiny Factory, exists at the new frontier of recycling.
She showed me the giant felting machine that enables her to turn Eileen Fisher clothes into bucket hats, bags, acoustic panels, wall fixtures, and pieces of art. The machine is sort of like a giant toaster; fabric is piled in layers and fed onto a slowly moving belt, once it is free of zippers, buttons, and the like. Then, inside, 1, needles pump quickly in and out of the fabric so ruthlessly that it all becomes one. The result is gorgeous, and industrial: The felt is thick, with a dot-like pattern, the color of the new fabric saturated yet blended.
You can even see, in some cases, the light outline of a shirt or pair of pants, an imprint of what used to be. The machine enables Renew staff to use every bit of fabric, down to scraps, to make something that would otherwise likely be created from virgin textile stock. Of course, the process is in its earliest stages. The Tiny Factory has just one large felting machine, which was custom-made in China in collaboration with an engineer.
As the machine was being noisily demonstrated, Eileen appeared. Very small, wearing the coziest black cashmere sweater I have ever seen, cotton pants, and felted shoes non-Eileen , and her skin makeup-free and luminous, she shook my hand with hers.
As Ahl explained how the felted pieces could be made into textiles for homes and stores, restaurants, and other commercial spaces, Eileen eagerly nodded, sometimes chiming in. We went to another room where more of the felting products were on display, stunning against the brick walls of the factory.
We all had our water. She laughed. But she was, in fact, once in her 20s, having just moved to the city from Illinois to become an interior designer. I was a struggling designer. So I just roamed around looking for simple things. She told me that was a funny question, one of a litany of affirmations I received during our conversation.
She only started making clothes when she traveled to Japan with a Japanese boyfriend, with whom she was working and living, and was inspired by the simple, elegant draping of kimonos. He was cute," she said. She never wanted to be a boss. I saw a lot of people living in Soho, who were artists and they had day jobs. I wanted to be one. I wanted to work and live in what I wanted to do. Her leadership style is reluctant. Would she ever call herself a boss bitch?
I liked working together. So we did everything kind of fluidly together.
0コメント