Singular fashion

Thinking about apparel manufacturing in Los Angeles, what first comes to mind are mass-market denim and sportswear labels. But beyond the large-scale production houses in Vernon and South Gate is a small fashion community committed to making high-end clothes the hard way, on their dining room tables or out of their garages, if necessary.

Calleen Cordero, Anamyn Turowski and Barbara Tfank are representative of the kind of cottage design industry that thrives here, making this market a place where retailers look to uncover new talent that can help distinguish their stores in what is becoming a homogeneous shopping environment. As designers, they are dedicated to producing in a specific way, even though it’s not always the cheapest or the fastest, taking advantage of the ever-dwindling number of specialized pleaters, sewers and cobblers in this city.

Cordero is a Fred Segal manager-turned-shoe designer whose hand-studded slides and clogs are like works of art; Turowski is a former actor who scours rag houses for discarded finds to cut and sew into new garments; and Tfank is a one-time costume designer who chose the talent pool in L.A. over New York to produce her couture-quality clothes in vintage fabrics. Here is a glimpse into how they do business.

Anamyn Turowski

Anamyn Turowski has been turning other people’s trash into stylish wares for more than 12 years. She spends at least one day a week at L.A.’s rag houses sorting through musty clothing. She’s looking for polyester Aloha shirts to convert into patchwork print dresses, rock ‘n’ roll tees to customize with lace overlays, embroidered Mexican peasant dresses and Indian saris to reconstruct into shirts, and cashmere sweaters to convert into jackets, all of which sell from $85 to $350 at Barneys New York and other stores around the world and at her new YNOP3 boutique on Cahuenga Boulevard in Cahuenga Pass.

In a workroom behind the store, she has 14 people who cut and sew each piece. Claudette was her first line, co-designed with Janine Milne. It’s more feminine than the ethnic-inspired Ynnub, a line she debuted in 1999 with Paula Scolaro. The two also make children’s clothes under the label Claude and more specialized pieces such as a blouse made from Hermes scarves under a label named after the new YNOP3 store.

A regular hunting ground is State Waste, one of L.A.’s half-dozen or so rag houses. It comprises several vast warehouses filled with 100-pound bales of T-shirts, polo shirts and more, stacked to the ceiling and earmarked for shipment to countries such as Mexico, India and Bolivia. Workers wearing masks to protect from the dust sift through piles two and three times as tall as they are, looking for rock ‘n’ roll tees and other pieces that might be of interest for the presorted room, where clothing is sold by the piece instead of the pound. Several religious T-shirts hang on the wall behind them like icons, with the Virgin Mary or Pope John Paul II pictured on the fronts.

With so much waste, much of it purchased in bulk from the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other charities that accept clothing donations, it’s difficult to imagine the need for even one more well-designed shirt. Which is why Turowksi has taken up the cause of eco-friendly chic.

“I come from an environmentally active family,” says the designer, dressed on a recent morning in jeans and a salvaged T-shirt that reads, “It’s better in the Bahamas.” “So the more people are reusing, the better.”

She has help hunting and gathering from co-designer Scolaro, who wears a jacket made from cut-up Harley-Davidson T-shirts. In the presorted room, they cull racks of vintage leather jackets and princess coats, trash bins full of fleece pullovers, thermals and silk scarves. And rather than being embarrassed, Turowski speaks proudly of the time one of her own pieces turned up in a large blue bin. “I felt like I had come full circle.” She even found her cat at a rag house, a stray she named Gracie.

Scolaro looks for early to mid-1970s sports tees but also turns up Grateful Dead tie-dyes, Ben & Jerry shirts, Esprit logo tees and a rainbow-striped vest that was once part of a Hilton Hotel uniform.

In the nearby warehouse, Turowski inspects a bale of T-shirts, scanning slogans for a Lutheran camp, the Denver Broncos and Bugle Boy. Machines compress and pack the shirts into dense bales, which are wrapped in discarded bed sheets to keep them together. The designer has been trying to figure out another use for bedding -- in her designs. “But people can’t seem to get past the fact that it’s other people’s sheets.”

Her haul for the day is 216 pounds of clothing for $1,418, including a California State Parks jacket she’ll wear as-is and an ivory wedding gown (she’ll use the lace). “That should last me a couple days,” she says.

Calleen Cordero

Few would have guessed that Calleen Cordero’s vaguely 1970s shoes, which have graced the runways at L.A.’s hottest shows, are produced in a factory in North Hollywood.

Clogs and flat sandals decorated with starbursts of studs, boots with Native American coins up the sides and wedges with rhinestones embedded in the heels (all $260 to $750) have an Old World feel. Cordero employs 36 workers, who hand carve heels out of wood and fold leather uppers around wooden lasts -- tasks that today are typically done by machine.

Jars of studs sit on shelves in the corner of the factory, and on a drafting table in the art department, a designer studies copies of Civil War-era buckles for an upcoming collection.

Making one pair of shoes can take up to two weeks.

“It’s not easy to have a successful business here, with worker’s comp and minimum wage -- and who can support a family on that anyway?” she says. “But I thought I would try to create a noncorporate working environment, because each pair of my shoes is like a piece of art. It has to be extraordinary.”

In the factory, workers sit on stools doing free-hand studding on swatches of leather. “There are no patterns,” she explains. “It takes two hours to hand-stud one upper.” She picks up a shoe with a heel carved into an arrow shape. See this heel?” she asks. “It’s carved like the bow of a ship. Nothing is done on a spindle.” And with orthopedic insoles, even wooden platforms are as comfortable as sneakers.

Cordero enjoys the freedom of small production runs such as a group of clogs made from cashmere scarves she picked up on a trip to Europe. She doesn’t sell to department stores because she doesn’t like complying with their strict delivery dates. “Four times a year, all the stores get their shipments. And everything starts to look the same.” Instead, she does business with independent boutiques (200 of them worldwide), and recently opened a store on Beverly Boulevard.

She started her company four years ago in her garage, inspired by the look of a vintage belt to create her first shoe. Now, six to eight collections a year roll out of her factory. “I don’t ever stop designing, so the stores can buy fresh merchandise all the time.”

If there is a shoemaker she admires, it is Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, whose chunky styles resemble hers. Otherwise, Cordero is a Birkenstock girl, more likely to be in a drum circle at her Laurel Canyon home than shopping in Beverly Hills.

“I know this is my true calling,” she says. “It comes to me in my sleep, from seeing the shadow of the foot of someone walking through a restaurant. I see a pair of jeans folded and that turns into a shoe. I can actually scan my brain for a clog.”

Barbara Tfank

A former costume designer, Barbara Tfank first garnered attention in the fashion world while working as a design consultant for Prada. She created the ethereal lavender gown worn by Uma Thurman at the 1995 Academy Awards that put the Italian fashion house on the map. She launched her own label for spring 2001, after moving to L.A. with her film writer-director husband, Peter Markham.

“I used to design for films, but there are so few films now that require the clothes that I wanted to design,” says Tfank, who worked on “Midnight Clear” and “Dream Lover.” “I was living in the fantasy of Old Hollywood, of Adrian and Chanel, when she came over to do costumes. So I decided to make my own movie,” she says, speaking figuratively of her line of cinematic metallic brocade cocktail coats, capelet jackets and dresses with nipped waists and full skirts, beginning at $1,500.

In September 2000, she nailed her first retail account at Barneys New York armed with just seven pieces and a swatch book of vintage textiles, brocades and florals. Fine European fabrics are the foundation of her business. She has collected swatches for years, which are piled in baskets in her home studio and in a storage facility across town. For fall, she designed a shirtdress in an English fabric with gold and black horizontal stripes and frieze-like details and a godet skirt and trench coat in a French fabric that simulates lacquer.

The line is also sold at the Susan stores in San Francisco and Burlingame, Calif., alongside Balenciaga and Lanvin. Owner Susan Foslien says, “It’s wonderfully chic without being a huge label.”

Over tea at her apartment, in a historic Asian-style building in West Hollywood, Tfank breaks out a swatch of linen embroidered with raffia that costs $385 a yard, and swoons over a moody black-and-white floral.

Tfank (the T is silent) may source her fabric in Europe, but she is adamant about keeping her production in L.A. She contracts sewers in Glendale and does all of her pleating downtown at Park Pleating. The piece of fabric she is having pleated on a recent afternoon is an ivory silk organza that is being tucked and smocked using a technique popular in the 1930s for “suit blouses.”

It’s difficult to imagine an entire shop devoted to such a specific task. But Park Pleating has been doing just that for 40 years, under the ownership of Eddie Moya -- Sr. and Jr. Here, at one of the handful of pleating shops in L.A., the Moyas and 12 workers pleat by hand and on machines 70 to 80 years old. Bark pleats, radiator pleats, Fortuny pleats, crisscross crystal pleats, they do them all for apparel labels such as St. John Knits, Liz Claiborne, BCBG and Tfank.

At the peak of his family’s business, Eddie Sr. had 50 employees. Now a lot of work is done offshore, but things are looking up. He says, “Better fashion is making a comeback in L.A. There are more name designers and the design schools are putting out lots of talent.”

Eddie Jr. demonstrates his craft on a table in back of the shop, in front of shelves containing hundreds of rolls of paper -- every pattern Park Pleating has made for any designer -- including Nancy Reagan favorite James Galanos.

First, he scores the pattern, figuring out the distance between each pleat using a ruler and pencil. Then, he and a partner fold the paper into pleats, so it resembles an accordion. Tfank’s fabric is then sandwiched between two paper patterns, which are rolled up like a carpet. The whole thing goes into a steamer anywhere from four to 30 minutes, depending on the fabric. After the paper cools, the fabric emerges with pleats that can be stitched down.

“The great thing about working with Junior is the personal attention,” Tfank says. “I come in and know that I want a pleat, but I’m not sure which one. Do I want a stitch-down barrel pleat? Or would it be more slimming and more contemporary another way? He helps me choose.”