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Anna Sui & the Garment Center
By admins | April 27, 2009
You must, must, watch this! The other week Anna Sui sat down with a panel at the City University of New York to discuss all things fashion. The panel featured herself, as well as, Guy Trebay a writer for the NY Times, and Gabby Asfour another fashion designer, answering questions from a professor in the department of fashion studies. While the whole discussion is fascinating, we highly recommend you click on chapter 10 “What’s new in New York” a particularly engaging 5 minutes.
Some interesting points to mention are Guy’s remarks regarding how New York has become too difficult a place for young artists and designers to move to and begin a business without parental support. They mentions the old art and design Warhol crowd, and how inconceivable it is for a young kid to move to Manhattan today and get an apartment or big studio space without any financial backing. At the same time Gabby pointed out that there are many areas of New York still attractive for up and comers like Chinatown and Williamsburg. He also mentions how affordable New York is in comparison to living in Europe and with the dollar down how many fashion entrepreneurs have decided to move from London and Paris to NYC. Since the economy has slowed there has definitely been an influx of foreign capital into the city, from tourists to real estate investors, foreigners are still spending here. Anna Sui, known for her efforts in the Save the Garment Center campaign, as well as for being a fabulous designer had much to say about the state of our neighborhood. One interesting tidbit is that just a few years ago landlords would not lease space to garment manufactures and suppliers, but today they are much more willing. While fashion related vendors, fabric suppliers, and sample rooms were facing exorbitant rises in rent just a short time ago, things have begun to turn around. Now that the building boom has stopped and the real estate market has frozen, garment center landlords are no longer trying to force out fashion businesses in favor of luxury hotels and condos.
The discussing covers much more than just the New York fashion scene, and if you work in the industry, or are a fashion student, you must watch this.
Here is more related scoop;
Topics: garment center, new york | 3 Comments » 
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April 28th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Love, love, love Anna! Bravo for all her efforts on behalf of the american fashion industry. Thanks for sharing this.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:30 am
This is an absolute gem. I’m definitely linking to this one. Thanks for sharing.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
[...] for our neighborhood and a force behind the Save the Garment Center campaign. We have written extensively about our and Anna’s belief in domestic production. So when we first heard Anna Sui for [...]