Natalie Chanin - 200 One-of-a-Kind Shirts

 

I am from a small town in northwest Alabama. In that place, and at the time I was growing up, it was about buttoning yourself in, being tucked in and hiding things away. Because although all the farms and the textile mills on the outside, just on the edge of those mills was mother nature. She was always so close, just right to that edge of all that cultivation. And so, in my part of the world, a house that's [chuckles] left alone or not cared for can really melt down into this fertile wet green mass, where animals and kudzu wait to grow into the buildings. And so, people hoe and they cut things back, [chuckles] and they keep it pruned, and they watch and wait for that little slip that's going to come through.

 

So, there's this moment in my childhood where I'm walking down the stairs of the church, and a friend of the family is coming up the stairs. She looks at my cousin Pam and she goes, "[gasps] Pam, you have just grown up to be the most beautiful young woman. Just stunning." She looks over at me and she goes, "And Natalie, you're so, so exotic." [audience laughter] And sitting here today, I look back and I know that what she was trying to say was there felt there's this little piece of that outside that she could smell underneath, and it scared her. And so, I hit the ground running just as fast as I could [laughs] to get away from being tied up in nature.

 

I tried to run towards exotic [chuckles] and what I thought I could find in the world. I traveled around the world, and I came back again, and I learned how to-- I did things I never imagined I could have done as a girl from rural Alabama. But there was a night I arrived back in New York in the year 2000. I was moving away from a marriage that was gone wrong. I was questioning and not finding answers. That night when I arrived, it was snowing outside, and it was really cold and lost, and everything was raw.

 

I was invited one night to what I deemed this really fancy fashion party, like only New York City can do, right? And so, I had been wallowing in my self-discovery, or you could call it self-pity during this time. I was pretty broke [chuckles] and I didn't have anything to wear to this party. So, I took a T-shirt out of my backpack, and I cut it up, and I pinned it back together on my body, and I sewed it back together again with needle and thread. And so, I went to the party that night, and the strangest thing happened that people would see me across the room, and they would walk across the room and touch my body, which people in New York City don't really do. [audience laughter] 

 

In the south, you hug people whether you like them or not. [audience laughter] But people in New York City don't really do that. But people were touching me and they were asking, "What is that? What do you have on?" And so, the next morning, I woke up and I was really proud that people had liked my shirt, that I had found this approval from the fancy fashion folk. But what really struck me that morning when I woke up, was that although I had been a designer and a stylist for a really long time, it had also been equally as long since I'd made something with my own two hands. I felt so moved to get up that morning and make another T-shirt. And so, I made another T-shirt and another T-shirt, and I just kept making shirts and I kept wearing them. People would stop me on the street and they would touch me. [laughs] 

 

In the middle of all this making and touching, I had this vision that I wanted to see these 200 one-of-a-kind, cut-up T-shirts sewn back together again and laid out on the floor. And so, I started going around to manufacturers in New York. [chuckles] You know, these bags of Salvation Army, Goodwill collected throwaway things that were cut apart. They thought I was a crazy bag lady. [chuckles] And so, rejection after rejection, excuse me, nobody really wanted to help me make these shirts. 

 

And so, I'm standing in the street corner on 8th and 38th one afternoon, and I'm looking down at the T-shirt, and I'm like, "[gasps] It's a quilting stitch." I realized in that moment that I was going to have to go home, because all of the ladies who quilted with my grandmothers were still there in Alabama quilting, and I was like, "This is such a great idea." In my mind, I thought, this is going to be so great. I'm going to go home. They're going to love to do this. This is going to be so easy. And so, I write a proposal, I raise some money, I call my aunt down in Alabama, I explain the project to her, and I say, "I'm looking for a house that can be project headquarters. Can you help me find something?" She calls me back a couple of days later, and she's like, "I have the perfect house. The house is just behind my mother's childhood home. It's built by my father's father for his very best friend. It is perfect, right!"

 

And so, in December, I rent a car and I drive down to Alabama, stopping at every thrift store along the way and buying all these T-shirts. On December 23rd, I arrive in Alabama with a friend. You can't see the house from the road, right? She had forgotten to tell me that the house had been abandoned for the last five years, [chuckles] that no one had really lived in the house since that time. There's like a little path that goes around the back of the house that used to be a driveway. We drive around to the back door. My aunt and my mother have cut a hole through all of the nature into the back door with a chainsaw. [audience chuckles]

 

And my dream, my project is really just an old mattress thrown on a 1970s vinyl floor in a house that smells of old chicken bones, and shut up, and animals and things that live on the edges of places. [chuckles] So, I go to bed that night, and I'm laying on this mattress on the floor, and I just start to cry, and I cry and I cry and I cry some more. I just think I spent my whole life running away from this place, traveling the world, doing these things, and all of this comes to laying on the floor in the middle of the night, waiting for ghosts or kudzu to crawl up the floorboards and lay down next to me.

 

The whole night I can't stop looking around me, because all I can think about are all of the heat-seeking snakes that are in the house. [audience chuckles] As soon as I'm still, I'm going to feel that cold thing slither up next to me and lay down. So, sometime about in the very early morning, I closed my eyes and I fell asleep for a minute and I woke up and it was the most beautiful, crisp, clear December morning. The light in Alabama at this time is absolutely beautiful. It was Christmas Eve. 

 

I get up out of the bed, and go over to the kitchen and clean up a little place, and make my tea. I sit down on this borrowed stool, and I look around the room, and I realize that it may have 1970s vinyl on the front floor, but the walls are completely covered with heart pine paneling. I don't know if you know this, but these really old broad heart pine boards from the south were made from the longleaf pine trees which were called the giants of the South. And so, they're hundreds and hundreds of years old, these trees, before they make these boards. And so, I think I'm just going to clean one board and just see what the wood looks like. 

 

So, I go over and I clean this one board. And it is so beautiful. I mean, the wood is spectacular. I stand there and I look and I think, okay, I can clean one more board. So, I clean one more board. When I finish with that board, I realize that I can do have the resolve within me maybe to clean one more. And so, throughout the day, board by board, I move through the room. And by the end of the day, as the sun is setting back behind the kitchen there, I sit back down on the stool and I've cleaned the entire room, and I think, I can do this.

 

So, the next morning, I get up and I get a phone and I start calling these women who used to quilt with my grandmothers, and I'm like, "This is going to be so great. You're going to love it. It's like New York City fashion, and Vogue, and everything that you could dream of." They so don't love it. [audience laughter] They could care less. [chuckles] They talk to me about their kids, and their grandkids, and common acquaintances, and church, and their gardens. 

 

I show them the shirts and one of the ladies says, "My grandmother would say about that, 'Honey, those stitches are so big that you could get your toenails caught up in them.'" [audience laughter] They laugh, and they talk to me about planting turnip greens and the importance of that. But [audience laughter] turnip greens are really important. [audience chuckles] My aunt once asked me, I was telling her about a boy that I was interested in, and she said, "Yeah, but can he grow turnip greens?" [audience laughter] It's true. [audience chuckles] 

 

But what I did find out from having these conversations with the community of my childhood, was that the mills had closed down, and that there were women and men who were out of work. Maybe they would want this work. And so, I ran a little ad in the paper that said part-time hand sewing and quilting. And about 60 women called and about 20 women stuck. We sewed the 200 one-of-a-kind shirts, and I brought them to New York Fashion Week, and we sent out a little catalog. The first person to walk through the door is Julie Gilhart, who was then the buyer from Barneys New York. Julie sweeps back in a few days later with her buyers, and they look at all the T-shirts and they go, "We'll have 12 like this and 12 like this, and 12 like this." [laughs] 

 

And I'm like, "Wait a minute. [chuckles] These are one-of-a-kind shirts. How are we going to make 12 shirts like this that says Smith Family Reunion from Roanoke, Virginia?" [audience laughter] And they said, "Just make something like it." We made them, and we brought them to New York. We took the orders. Julie Gilhart and Sally Singer from Vogue went out into the world and told everybody about the work were doing. All the T-shirts had been made with all of the seams on the inside out. That night, when I sewed that first shirt back together again, I had turned everything to the outside, so it was raw and exposed, like I was in that moment of my life.

 

This style, this idea of everything being turned on the outside has really become our signature style. So, it's 15 years later and I'm still at home. [chuckles] We have about 32 women who still sew these shirts in the field by hand. Everything completely sewn by hand. We have about 40 of us that work in our studio. We have just opened a new machine-sewn textile factory in hopes of recreating this community of my childhood. We have a cafe. People come from all over the world now to Florence, Alabama, to sit with us, to sew with us, to eat with us, to laugh, to tell stories.

 

I live at home. Some days, it feels like I'm still cleaning heart pine boards, board by board. I live really close to nature, and I can sometimes feel it coming out of the edges and up, around, and into my life. But I guess I like it that way. So, thank you.