Design & production

A golf cart into oblivion

The idea of The Designer came to me through glamorous portraits. P.T Anderson’s, Phantom Thread, in which the tweedy elegance of Daniel Day Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock draws from the real life of Basque master-dressmaker Cristobal Balenciaga, The Beautiful Fall, Lagerfeld, Saint-Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970's Paris, the saucy, gossipy and highly fictional non-fiction by Alicia Drake, that portray the two rivals in the white city during a moment of disco, cocaine and free love, when the designer was both the emperor and the punk of the Parisian night (and as such the European cultural conscience), to finally, perhaps the most fictional of the three, Loic Prigent's propaganda documentary: Marc Jacobs & Luis Vuitton, where we follow the small, energetic New Yorker, Jacobs, through backstage areas of shows and store openings, on first class seats, jetting around the world running fashion houses, chewing pens, laughing and seemingly erupting with ideas, while the calm business mogul, Bernard Arnault, on the other side, makes more money than god. As such this idea of The Designer had very little to do with the trade, but tracked its lifestyle through a type of arc, that warped with sugary infusion of global capitalism from the secluded, socially inapt (nuts) artisanal genius of Balenciaga, into the monster that is Luis Vuitton. The designer diluted with that of the celebrity star. It was the aesthetics of this life, not its creations, that mattered to me.

Well, at times, when I have that need (to show something, to be someone) I do describe myself as a Designer. The images of my life as such however is something rather different - far from the always in vogue Parisian flat of Lagerfeld, or Laurents gardens in Tangier, Woodcocks sitting room with its patterned wallpapers and atmosphere of danger, dominance, and play, - like on this grey afternoon, as it is chirping away its mundane story at the Delta cargo terminal of the JFK airport. (Terminal 8 is not the least glamorous terminal – it was just one of many lies I peppered my last entry with – but this is) An aging heat-less metal husk that lay at edge of a potholed road in the industrial expense that separates the Belt Parkway from the great tarmacs and the sea, in lieu of steakhouses, or even sad fast-food chains, it offers two vending machines and zero seats. Drivers waiting for their pick-ups lounge on crates and lean on pillars, their faces lost in the blue screens of their cellphones, as I, hoping for hot coffee, try to dissect the codes for salted nuts and a bottle of soda-water. After the poor score I return to my assigned landing dock (where I have arrived truck-less, like a loser) and the final chapters of Bulgakov's the Master and Margarita that I by a stroke of luck have found in my bag. It's past Christmas time, it must be. It normally is the time of year when I come here. A gray and cold January light. I'm waiting for a collection when all of New York is on sale, just in time to store it for a coming season.

A designer, as I’ve come to learn the trade, is a facilitating role. To work within production in a nation so profoundly dependent on other people’s work as the United States, a person like me, having no particular skills, become excellent at tracking shipments. A designer makes sure that the artisan has what the artisan needs. Calling them up, learning their ways, hours, languages; describe shapes of boxes, colors of tape, contents, providing updates based on vague movements, learning the map according to the flight routes and to surveil it on my smart phone; the interconnections of New York with Naples, Los Angeles, rural Biella, North Hampton, or the Czech Republic, to mention a few; noticing gaps, irregularities, emergencies. Collecting shipping companies secret direct numbers and getting to know agents by name, and every now and then arrive personally in the flesh here at the cargo terminal. Steam them, describe them, photograph them, fold then onto shelves, invent them as my own. This is the life of the designer. (Working in the West Village, I’ve seen Marc Jacobs a few times, overflowing with energy, opinions, mannerism, now – instead of designing shops and clothing (which he did oh so brilliantly)– busy broadcasting his corrective surgery on social media.)

The boxes I’m expecting are arriving from Portugal. It's a defeat to have them arrive here. I thought we were making headway this year but then there was something about a thread or a button, some radio silence, a rushed decision, an order amongst the freight that needed fulfillment, and here we are, flying them in. Next season, I hope to meet them at sea. What is it like at the docks of Newark, that first impression I ever had of New York City? Querelle of Brest? Naples? A sailors bar? Is there a sailor’s bar there in lieu of these vending machines? The large cranes of the dock give me a feeling of transcendence. The marine port is a wound, a vulnerability, a bite of land that the sea is chewing. That I am not at a maritime connection with the fruits of my labors is simply bad planning. Environmental, spiritual and economical waste.

The Master and Margarita and their company of misfits are finally leaving Moscow. They ride their dark horses towards Jerusalem, and I lay the novel down on the cold concrete, dust the salt spills off my pants and walk over the office building in the center of the warehouse (a small heated kiosk – with a sign above claiming – NO EXIT ). The personnel have a private coffee maker and are all holding steaming mugs. I ask, for the third time, about the progress of my delivery: “I've been here for over an hour now,” I say defeated. The agent, a muscular compact man with a broad mustache, says “Here, one hour is nothing”. The cup in his clenched fist like a pint of beer.

My neighbor at the landing dock, Dmitry, paces violently talking on his phone. In gestures of regret and frustration he expresses anger and defeat towards the unrelenting kiosk in the center. He drives a beat-up rental truck. I feel brotherly towards him – gesticulating as he does, working the room, as if there was still hope, as if someone paid attention – he clearly is a no pro like myself. He's here to pick up furniture to take to Indiana. “Is there no closer airport?” I ask him. He’s not sure. He'd never been there. As we’re talking a man in shiny black shoes pass. We lower our heads, take a step back and let him by. Solemnly he walks slowly up to the kiosk. The “IMPORT” window we've been dealing with share space with the “IMPORT OF BODILY REMAINS” office. Their lane counts on its own and is faster. The tie, the shiny heeled shoes, the somber appearance give the undertakers away. It seems to make the office uncomfortable and there’s a remarkable turnaround with these customers. “I've been here for five hours already,” Dmitry says, “and the shipment is lost. I don't even know if they're looking for it.” I ask him if driving to Indiana will take him through Manhattan. “It will take me through New Jersey so it should go something like that. I will check with the company if they care. It would only be a small detour. I wouldn't mind.” A remarkable answer. It always the issue of getting a pickup behind the gates. I take a step back and bow to Dmitry, as another dark dressed undertaker pass between us.

It's a pleasurable work I have with the Portuguese, but one with margins so small I have to, instead of paying for a third party, come to receive the goods personally. (Last week, in a most profitable of field of my work, I was involved in the hand delivery of a suit from Naples, Italy, to the Superbowl in New Orleans. A member of the owner family of the Philadelphia Chiefs, superstitious since last time we dressed him their team won, had wanted to wear a new suit for the event. Our workshop had missed the deadline for our regular commercial carrier and we engaged a company, mostly busy with private jet rental services, in a same day delivery. On Friday evening, just as the Superbowl was laying its soft commercials arms over America, Susanna, a colleague, took the suit home to her house in the outskirts of Naples and Emanuele, a father of one (I could tell from his Whatsapp profile picture) got on train in Milan. At 11pm Emanuele was at the door of Susanna to pick up the suit, then got on a train for Rome and a flight for Atlanta. His progress was communicated to me by Ily, working at the corporate office in North Carolina, while I in my turn communicated with the client. Asking – quite naturally – for a tracking number – I said there no such thing, but that I would convey itinerary of the suit as it progressed. I kept thinking of Emanuele leaving Milan unaware, finding himself en route towards the cold heart of Superbowl America. I have myself tried to find a decent coffee at the Atlanta airport. I imagined as the assignment unfolded how increasingly upset his wife most have been. When the delivery was done, and I’d received the calming message from the client (a court-side selfie claiming the suit is great) I personally called Emanuele to thank you him. He was then sitting at the airport on his way to leave. “New Orleans is crazy place, so much people,” he said. He worried his return would be canceled since President Trump was approaching. The most ideal image of doom, I thought. Emanuele at the airport as Air Force One pulls in.) We started working together years ago when, Victor, our Portuguese agent, showed up at our showroom in Manhattan. He had spent most of his professional life working for a New Jersey shirtmaker, but at the time of the visit, due to health reasons, he was returning to Portugal. There he’d start a production company to connect smaller Portuguese producers with foreign clients. He wanted to work with us. At the time what he offered was not a need we had to fill, but we liked him, and we came up with a new product, a small collection of deconstructed suits. The key for any design is to find the right workshop, for a smaller company it needs to be one of the right size, with a personal, flexible approach, one willing to produce small quantities. The European south is filled with niche, special workshops that due to their size are cut from their markets. They turn out a beautiful product but they lack commutative and organizational skills. I could see that Victor did something important for his community. Our first project, however, came in months late – and the fabric, which was a delicious two-toned flannel – with a subtle plaid running over the face – was turned inside out – so the suits were just plain navy. Victor sent them out the night before holiday closing with the message: “Unfortunately they were made inside out but we are sending them anyway since we close today for two weeks. We hope you will like them.”

It would be years before we would engage him again. But collaborators are not strictly the practical or financial decisions they should be, often there's emotional attachment, not unlikely sprung from dysfunction and dissonance. (At the Regen Projects on Santa Monica Blvd the other night, I was called out by two of my clients in how I had butchered their first orders, delivering a sock along with a suit to one, and a shirt with a rip to the other. I vehemently denied it; but we all knew the joke was on them, since they were still there with me.) There might be an easiness to the flawless, but it doesn't glue you together as trouble does. At the time of the two-toned suits, we had not been serious in working with Victor. It was just this one fabric that we were sitting on, and Victor’s visit triggered our curiosity. Our suits were already then migrating towards Naples, where they since have mushroomed into what has been by far the most transcendent part of my professional life, that has tainted my whole worldview, in ways introduced me to my wife and the glory of all things Italian. One item, however, a sample of a moleskin jacket, came out beautiful and this is what we later came to reenact with Victor. It was just as it had been imagined and more. It's rare to find that exact right place for something. I also had a sentimental attachment to Portugal. It was the first country I visited outside my own when my father was invited to speak at the Sevilla world fair in 1994, and he arranged for my mother, brother and I to stay that week on the nearby Algarve coast. (Tarantula on the window, cactuses lining a dirt road, high pitched chirping trill of crickets, the windswept drama of the Atlantic coast) and so a few years later when my friend Shawna did a residency in Lisbon, I took the opportunity to visit her and to see what else Victor could do.

I spent a dreamy weekend in the tiled city. It was winter and very cold, wet without raining. “That twist that happens when Europe turns to face the ocean, the land no longer in possession of the sea, as with the quaint green Mediterranean, but rather at war with it, the crisp cold air of the Atlantic that rise and slowly, refreshingly, whistles between the buildings, blows away whatever tenderness of morning sun.” (As I later wrote for Shawna’s series) There she had found a new texture to her photos. The odd items that seem to collect in old Catholic houses invading her very modern, queer, subjects. The day started at the cafe and then wandered as faces and friends all unfamiliar to me drifted in and out. It had the repetitive romance of a text by Pessoa. Inez, the one stuck to my imagination the most, broke into a park past dark and performed a light and sound show in the bushes. An artwork blossoming and disappearing without a trace. They walked me to the bus after the weekend and I rode to Aveira were Victor picked me up. The weather was wet but it was not raining.

He drove me slowly through the eucalyptus forests. Elderly prostitutes lined the road. We had lunch at fork in the road – a few hours after service when we were alone - and Victor spilled his many disappointments in Portugal. The difficult bureaucracy of the old land. Seeing him there, far from Manhattan, I could see an anger I hadn’t noticed before. Like myself a European who had gotten used to the American carelessness and optimism he was now, as he described it, “rowing through mudd.” Later I would learn that Victor was very sick and that the medication made him fade over lunch. I sat in silence and drank the heavy Portuguese wine. I had a feeling I was at sidelines of life, Portugal this sliver at the sea, has always been consider a backwards region. It was in Portugal that Henri, in De Beauvoirs, The Mandarins, which I had read prior to the trip, get his first taste of adventure after the war. “that hard thing inside his chest, that had taken the place of his heart, become soft wax’’. Driving the “burning roads of Algarve” “Hillsides covered in golden mimosas: endless groves of round-topped orange trees which brought to mind calm, primitive paradises: the twisted, frenzied, rocks of Battaglia […] the streets of Beja through which echoed the ancient cries of a lovesick nun.” I had expected a peacefulness with the backwards and old, barefoot walkers on dusty roads, not this fuming man at the table of an empty restaurant. Even the forest, the eucalyptus, he said, was a type of weed. A rash planted for wood pulp production that displaced native oaks, laurels and chestnuts, created a monoculture from the rich fauna, exposed it to disease and wildfires. Portugal had, much like his own life, started with promise and beauty, but accounted to very little.

We drove on to the small workshop. A free-standing house in the back of a farmhouse. A bright workshop with the pleasant smell of manure. It was run by a younger woman, Sofia, and indeed only women worked there. To this day this is not anything I'm used to, the offices of southern Europe remain sadly masculine. They received us at a table by the window while the work continued around us. That pleasant hum of sewing machines and puffs of steaming tables blended with the sounds from the fields behind the window. That day we worked through all the patterns and systems of receiving and shipping that we needed to do. Victor had a chair, and Sofia kept touching his shoulders as he translated our conversation. Portuguese spoken between friends become very soft, with gurgling sounds, like streams, or perhaps soft foam pulsating through craters. We laid the two new trousers we wanted to make. We talked about Europe. Afterwards Victor was emotional. We had two hours to kill before the bus back to Lisbon, and he drove me to the sea, which was shockingly nearby. A wild enormous white winter beach just behind the thin strip of forest. I have a picture of him there, the last I ever took.

Back in Lisbon, Shawna and I had massages in a tent on the square. (Lisbon, as De Beauvoir’s had described it: “with its quiet heart, its unruly hills, its houses with pastel colored icing, its huge white ships.”) Both of our works at that time, after a long stagnant period, were mushrooming into something yet undefined, but fascinating, and so, we were happy. The sounds of Lisbon, distant traffic, steps passing nearby the tarp and the heat inside of the tent, we laughed at it, laying in a womb in the strange land, being embalmed before some battle.

Suddenly, a forklift come racing from the interiors of the warehouse and dump a big box at the feet of Dmitry. It screeches as it turns and heads inside to pick up another load. Dmitry smiles at me. You will have to find another ride he says. I walk over and start helping him load. “Also: the office didn't like the idea of the detour.” They bring out his shipment without a word of explanation. Six large antique closets coming in from Vienna. Dmitry just does the delivery. He does not know the goods or the receiver. When I inquire again with the agent about my shipment, he says: “You hate us, don't you?” Then they all, the whole cubicle of them, laugh.

And so, in this the design work is often accidental. It is not act of will, but of events clashing. Like in the teachings of Democritus, who thought that the world existed in a rain of atoms, and all objects was created by them accidentally attaching to each other (the surfaces of the atoms were thorny and easily attached), the world is governed by the laws of physics, with no room left for free will. We decide what is decided outside ourselves. We are all, like Joni Mitchell, trapped between the two lanes of the freeway. That the idea that the designer would draw up the item before it’s made would be a kind of hubris. The item is made and this is the drawing. (It’s as surprising the game where a folded paper travels around a table and each draw a section letting the edge line over the fold. This is the design returning to you.) The designer, more than anything, establish a pattern then sticks to it. Perform variation on it. Pieces with slight updates, shades, textures. The suit has remained, to its basics, the same for two hundred years. Flash photos over its history, and it’s a game that changes hardly, and then only on the surface, like the sea. The designer then is a chef, and it’s the fabric, the ingredients, that matter. And if you don’t mill it you hunt for it.

The spring collection currently in the works will be made in dead stock fabrics we found on a trip to Florence. We go there yearly for the Pitti Uomo fair and on one of the evenings this year we sat down for dinner at a restaurant near the Ponte Vecchio Bridge. (Monroe, a friend, knew of it since he used to go there with his ex-wife and her grandfather, Tony Bennett, who’s favorite Florentine restaurant it was). At dessert, a wild haired man in a canvas jacket walked in with his arm around the chef. I recognized him from a performance the night before when he had sung Modugno’s “Volare” with the band. The chef’s nose was large and dark and infected, as from some terrible drug habit (but the story that unveiled itself over the night was worse: a prostitute had kicked him with her stiletto heel during an argument. His already very prominent nose was swollen and greenish grey.) The arrival of the two men altered the polite and sleepy atmosphere of the dinner (we were at the end of the week, and we’re just with our closest associates). The man sat down at the table and put his arm around John, an American restauranteur, who introduced him as Frank. Frank was very physical, like men from Florence always are, and kept stroking the back of John, a large, friendly Italo American, proud of his masculinity. After dinner we stood around and smoked. The restaurant was at the mouth of a tunnel, and a freezing wind from the river blew through my coat. There was an Irish Pub near my hotel where we have been ending the nights, and we talked about walking over there. Frank offered to drive us. We were seven middle-aged men and Frank, it soon become clear, had arrived in a golf cart. We climbed on top of it. Being the smallest one I got the worst seat at the very back. It took off with surprising speed over the cobblestone. At the square of the pub Frank, excited about the speed and camaraderie, yells out that we will continue to “Guess Jeans Party” at the other edge of town. I’m holding on for dear life as the wagon weirs and bumps. It’s a crowded Friday night and as we turn a corner the street fills up with college girls on the way to the nearby club. The golf cart presses through them. Gasps can be heard around me. “Mamma mia”, Frank screams, if just a portion of these women show up at the jeans party we are, he claims, “al cavallo”. They part around us as the cart continues ahead. I have a strong, not unpleasant, sensation of riding a golf cart of middle age through a sea of youth into oblivion. We’re all wearing coats, while they are in small black dresses and faux fur scarves. Arriving at the party Frank parks the cart in the massive line and then proceeds to the door. “Don’t you know who I am?” he negotiates with the doorman, “I am Pitti Oumo!” he screams and gets us all in.

The morning after I wake up without my phone and call my boss from the hotel landline. He says we’re about to meet Frank in thirty minutes and to meet him in the lobby. It takes me a moment before I realize, and I say: “You mean that lunatic from yesterday?” Frank has a warehouse in a bleak industrial neighborhood twenty minutes from the city. The warehouse, once inside of it, is large and open, bathing in light. We’re surrounded by eccentric collections of games and bicycles. Frank welcomes us fresh and full of energy. He is connected to all big fashion houses and mills and gets dead stock fabrics that he then resell cheaply. It’s a golden egg, a remarkable find. The madman takes off his coat and behind it there’s a small well-oiled universe. Before lunch, that is served after hours at the restaurant next door, we have selected a whole new palette for the spring. Frank has an agreement with the restaurant and all thirteen of his employees go there daily. He has an egg and tuna salad off menu and a glass of wine mixed with water. He can stay out all night and work all day, he explains, because he started to mix wine with his water at five years old, and he takes two aspirin before bed every night. This meeting is a door into something. The fabrics we selected are already cut (they got there and into production quicker than it takes me write this text) in Sofia’s studio in Portugal. The atoms here connect in a seemingly effortless way, and we still have plenty of time to spare before the magnolia blooms. I say I am a designer when people ask, when I want it to sound that way, and today, I swear, as such I’m doing my last shift at the cargo terminal. This new collection flies without me hardly touching it, and I will meet it at the docks of Jersey, with the seagulls and the cranes, since this is how I see things flow.