SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : THE LAST WORD : SURVIVOR OF A LOW TECH WORLD : TIME STANDS STILL
I was 17 when I learned my first rudimentary lessons about technology. It was 1973, and I spent that miserable summer pleating expensive skirts in New York’s garment district. The pay was so bad it hurt to buy a newspaper; I read library books on the subway.
We used technology, all right. It was high once too, around the time of James Watt, whose improved steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution.
Nothing at Fashion Pleating & Stitching would have confused him. Sweltering in our cavernous workshop-cum-headquarters, we laid out unfinished skirts on heavy-paper patterns, which were custom-made, accordion-like, for each design. Then we pulled the top half of the pattern over “the goods,” as we called these skirts, the way one might pull a blanket over a bed.
With a medieval array of clamps, weights and pins, my fellow somnambulists and I (the boredom was crushing) did this until a master pleater came by. Like an acrobat preparing a death-defying stunt, he held one end of the pattern down with his left hand and carefully took the other between thumb and forefinger in his right. After a deep breath, and with great panache, he pulled the accordion closed.
Rolled up and tied shut, these patterns would accumulate until I wheeled them by the cartful back to the steam ovens, which were usually blasting away at the last batch. The ovens had spring-loaded doors; the trick was to open the latch and plaster yourself against the wall alongside the opening. Otherwise the heat would peel your face off.
Such anachronism. The sickly old owner, Irving, as bald and fragile as a newborn ostrich, was trying to revive a business that seemed as moribund as he was. Grousing endlessly about production, he carried with him the sour smell of rotting vegetation, which belied any pretense that our enterprise might have a future. His kindly and model-thin wife was a ‘50s fashion-plate of big-city sophistication, with her broad belts and broader hats. Now and then, skirt makers would come by and charitably bestow a little business, but we were not long for this world. For Irving, the business must have been a powerful metaphor; he acted as if everything was riding on every pleat.
Irving bought my Dickensian claim that illness in the family forced me to abandon my schooling; he thought I had a future in the business, not seeing that neither of us did. I was soon initiated into all the stupefying arcana of the trade, with its cardboard tickets and crucial lot numbers. We fastened everything with pins, even paper. Irremediably useless, to poor old Irv I nevertheless embodied hope, and for much of the summer he hovered embarrassingly. I spent as much time as I could on deliveries.
But if our leader and his wife were frozen in time, the world was not. It’s amazing how fast things change. Those were the days before yuppies, VCRs and personal computers. The sweaty streets were clogged with hulking American cars. Hardly anyone was homeless. Here and there, we had bums.
People like Irving ought to know about the pace of change. What’s more fickle than fashion, after all? At summer’s end, Irv was shocked when I traded the novel boredom of his factory for the well-worn ennui of another year in high school. But I came away with more than a few bucks for college. I learned the hard lot of the working poor and guessed what it must mean to live with few prospects.
I also learned a bit about technology. For instance, it isn’t automatically the enemy of the worker. Fashion Pleating’s low-tech, low employment, hand-to-mouth existence showed as much. Where I worked, more technology probably would have meant more jobs. Besides, many of the jobs that technology can do aren’t particularly uplifting for humans to perform. We lament lost manufacturing jobs, not because working in a steel mill is uplifting but because it pays well.
Yet the garment business changes slowly. Where labor is cheap, I learned, technology stays low. Just ask Eddie Moya, who got started in pleating 50 years ago the same way I did--as a summer helper.
Today, a visit to his Park Pleating factory on 28th and Main in Los Angeles is a journey back in time. The workers are mainly struggling immigrants, and they use the same equipment at the same old-fashioned tables that I did.
The visit brings a revelation--pleating machines --but even these turn out to be yesterday’s fashion. Moya, who says his hulking units can pleat a skirt in two or three minutes, still uses one built in 1941. Automated pleating dates back to the turn of the century.
“Paper-pattern pleating is still popular,” explains Bob Maxant, whose family owns Chandler Machine Sales of Baldwin, N.Y., and has been in pleating machines for four generations. “But it’s strictly for styles that can’t be done by machine.”
Since machines are no panacea--another of pleating’s lessons about technology--Moya still does hand-pleating, too--painstakingly creating patterns for every new design; often a different pattern is required for every size. He keeps track of them in ledger books. Sometimes they can be used again.
Given the rise of computer-aided design, I ask if a PC might save time. Moya shakes his head.
“Nobody uses a computer in pleating,” he says.
That reminded me of the summer I spent pleating in a plant without machines. It seemed a dinosaur in those days, but in the garment business, dinosaurs still roam.
And that’s the last lesson about technology: It’s mortal, sure, but sometimes it lives to a ripe old age.
