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Thursday, December 10, 1998

Junior review today. Five finished garments on the form, a sketchbook, a fabric board, and a panel of four faculty sitting at a long table with coffee and nothing on their faces.

I did a little collection of fitted wool jackets with the lining as the point: plain charcoal outside, and inside, when you open the jacket, a print I made by photocopying Grandma's feed sack scraps onto transfer paper and ironing them onto cotton lawn. You can only see it when the jacket moves. I pressed every seam open as I went.

Professor Ingham was on the panel. She's the one who said my freshman sketches were what a nice girl wears to church. She opened the gray jacket and looked at the lining for a long time and then looked up at me and said, "There you are."

That's all she said. Then the next panel member asked me about my buttonholes.

I didn't cry in the stairwell this time. I went out to the street and stood in the cold and called Grandma from the pay phone on the corner and told her. She said, "Well, it took her long enough."

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Saturday, October 10, 1998

A few people have written to ask about the guy from my last entry. Fine. Pete. Peter Stegall, 24, line cook, from Hoboken, New Jersey. He works the sauté station at a restaurant in the West Village where my roommate Diana waitresses, and I met him at their staff party in August, when he came out of the kitchen with a burn on his forearm and asked if anybody had a Band-Aid, and I was the only person in the room with a sewing kit, and somehow that turned into me fixing his torn apron with a needle and thread while he told me about risotto.

His shift ends at midnight. Mine at the store starts at nine. So we see each other from about one to three a.m., at a diner on Ninth Avenue, where he orders eggs and then tells me everything the cook is doing wrong. Or he comes to Astoria on his night off with a bag of groceries and makes something in our tiny kitchen and Christina and Diana suddenly become very friendly.

He has burns and knife nicks all over his hands. I have needle pricks all over mine. Diana says we should start a support group.

Junior year started. Tailoring class: menswear, canvas interfacing, pad-stitching lapels by hand, thousands of little stitches so the collar rolls the right way. I love it. It's slow and nobody can rush it.

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Friday, August 14, 1998

Last day of the internship.

The final count: I cut and labeled somewhere around four thousand swatches. I matched colors to the lab dips from the mills about two hundred times. I ran to the trim store on 38th Street so often the man at the counter knows my order before I say it. I learned how a line of clothes actually happens: the color story, the fabrics, the first prototypes, the fittings, the spec sheets with every measurement, the revisions, the factory overseas, the second prototypes, the revisions on the revisions. A seam on a shirt in a department store has been argued about by six people.

Constance, the design director, took me to lunch today. Real lunch, a sit-down place. She said I'm the first intern in years who knows how a garment goes together, and then she said, "Don't come work for us. Not yet. You'll learn to design what sells and forget what you like. Do your own thing first." I didn't know what to say, so I said thank you about nine times.

She also said that if I ever do come work for them, she'd hire me. I'm going to remember that part too.

Then I went to Diana's restaurant's staff party and met a line cook. More on that later, maybe.

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Wednesday, July 22, 1998

Swatches.

That's what I do. A swatch is a little square of fabric. You cut it with pinking shears so it doesn't fray, and you staple it to a card, and you write the mill, the fiber content, the weight, the price per yard, the minimum order, and the color name. The color names are a whole language. This season's navy is called "Harbor." The red is called "Signal." There's a gray they call "Pebble" and another gray they call "Slate" and if you mix them up, someone notices.

I cut swatches all day. Then the designers pick them up, pin them to the big boards on the wall, take them down, move them, argue, and give them back for me to re-label. Some days I cut a hundred. The pinking shears gave me a blister on my thumb that turned into a callus.

I'm not complaining. Okay, I'm complaining a little. But on Tuesday Constance let me sit in the back of a line review, where they decide what goes into the collection and what gets cut, and I didn't say one word for two hours and I learned more than in a semester. Also, every swatch I've cut is a fabric I know now. By the end of summer I'll be able to tell a twill from a gabardine with my eyes closed. I almost can now.

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Thursday, June 11, 1998

First week at the internship. I'm not going to put the company's name here, in case anybody there ever finds this. It's a sportswear company with offices on Seventh Avenue, in one of those big old buildings with the brass elevators where every floor is a different company, and the hallway on our floor smells like steam irons. They make clothes for department stores: khakis, polos, twinsets, jackets, the kind of things your mom buys for the whole family in one trip.

It's unpaid. I'm still working at Mr. Peiffer's store on weekends and two nights, so I can eat. Mr. Peiffer was so proud when I told him where I got the internship that he told every customer that day.

The design director is Constance. She's maybe thirty-five, wears a white shirt and black pants every single day, and talks very fast and very quietly so you have to lean in. On Monday she showed me the swatch room and said, "This is yours now." I thought she meant I'd be working in there. She meant I'd be living in there.

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Thursday, March 26, 1998

I GOT THE INTERNSHIP. Ten weeks this summer at a sportswear company on Seventh Avenue, in the design department. Forty-something people applied from my class and they took two.

The interview was last Friday. I wore my one black suit, which I made, and brought my portfolio, and the design director flipped through it without saying anything, and then she turned over the jacket I was wearing, right there, grabbed the front edge and flipped it to look at the inside facing. I held still. She said, "You made this?" I said yes. She said, "Hm." That's all. Today they called.

Mr. Peiffer says he'll keep me on weekends. Grandma says to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Also, a new name for the page. "Michelle's New York Journal!!" with two exclamation points was making me wince every time I opened it. The seam allowance is the extra fabric you leave outside the stitching line, five-eighths of an inch on most dress patterns, so that the seam has something to hold on to. You never see it. Without it, nothing holds. That's what this page is. The part nobody sees.

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