Invisible Seams

Invisible Seams is a 17-minute documentary spotlighting eight talented Asian women working in various often unseen capacities in New York city’s garment district. Through their 2022 film, director Jia Li and executive producer Jodie Chan share the stories of Yaqi Sun (patternmaker), Nay Huang (general manager), Joy Mao (designer), Lorraine Lum (patternmaker), Fanny Huang (patternmaker), Inni Choi (patternmaker), Liangqin Chen (studio manager), and Ai Qin Shi (seamstress).

Joy Mao. Joy, a 29-year-old designer who graduated from the Parsons School of Design, spoke about the fashion industry’s elevation of designers at the expense of the many hands that help make beautiful clothing. The designer creates a sketch, which gets turned into a pattern that the patternmaker then passes to a cutter, who cuts out the fabric pieces and passes those to the sewer. Every person in the chain has to do the best job they can, which is a creative energy. Mao noted that while many first-generation Chinese immigrant women might have worked in New York’s garment factories during the 1970s-90s manufacturing height out of necessity and a lack of language skills, even if their investment of time and energy to develop more skills and expertise may similarly stem from acts of survival, these are nonetheless skills that aren’t accorded the respect they deserve. 

Fanny Huang. Fanny, 76 at the time of filming, arrived in New York in 1988 with just $600. An engineer in China, her first job in New York was in a garment factory, although she admitted: “Making money in the factory was too slow - $30 a day for trimming threads! So I stopped working in the factory. Because I was a bad seamstress, always sewing things the wrong way, my two sisters would come to my factory after their shift, to help me undo all my stitches.” Knowing that few opportunities were open to her in the U.S., she seized on the chance to take a training course when she found out the Chinese-American Planning Council was recruiting fashion students. “Ever since I started doing the patternmaker job, I really loved the work. As a patternmaker, you don’t have to sew! You don’t do that yourself. This job is also drafting drawings on a big table.” This drew on her engineering background and Fanny proudly said: “A lot of companies wanted to take the paper pattern samples that I made back to copy. Eventually making patterns felt as easy as eating tofu to me.”

Ai Qin Shi. Ai Qin, a seamstress with designer Rachel Comey’s atelier who came to New York in 2001, said that “whenever I leave 8th Avenue (Brooklyn Chinatown), it’s like I become mute.” Even without fluency in English, Ai Qin reminisced that the “most memorable piece I’ve made was the one I made before for First Lady Michelle Obama. To think that us ordinary people can make clothes they can wear, there’s a bit of a sense of achievement.”

Nay Huang. While recognizing the decline of fashion manufacturing as an industry in New York city, Nay, the general manager of One to 13 Studio, also discussed the expertise of the women working in the fashion ateliers and how these skills might evolve in the future: “These highly skilled workers so deserve to be seen, to be supported, and to be celebrated. How do you merge traditional craftsmanship with technology?”

From the Costume Institute’s 2023 Women Dressing Women exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I learned that as eponymous couture houses emerged in the mid-1800s, along with the practice of labeling garments with the house name, this attribution to a single maker, namely the designer, tended to ignore the contributions of textile workers, premieres d’atelier, patternmakers, seamstresses, and embroiderers, many of whom were women. The Met’s retrospective of Karl Lagerfeld’s lifetime of work during the same year, though, included recorded interviews with the female premieres d’atelier who translated Lagerfeld’s visions into Chanel or other fashion houses' garments and were recognized (at least for purposes of the exhibit) for their expertise. This crediting of an atelier backing a couture house seems implicitly restricted to appreciating Parisian or Milanese craftsmanship, however. For Asian seamstresses, the stereotype persists that they are merely cheap labor for fast fashion brands. The women featured in Invisible Seams span different jobs, backgrounds, cultures, languages, ages and immigrant generations, but all form part of the larger fashion enterprise. I hope as the stitches binding together the fashion industry that they'll no longer remain invisible. 

Sources & Further Reading

• Watch the documentary at https://vimeo.com/692427218.

• Website for Invisible Seams: www.invseams.com.

• “Invisible Seams with Filmmakers Jia Li and Jodie Chan” podcast episode (September 29, 2022) of Dressed: The History of Fashion. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/dressed-the/invisible-seams-with-GQ8E6qnKd3c/?srsltid=AfmBOorVwtPvOpYjeF4t6yVOI68fXXlH4Ucfa8gG7L4g4tlIhI5IachQ