How Fashionable Is Boston?
The Subtle Yet Steadfast Ties to the Industry - by Lauren Dillow (2021)
My friends went to New York Fashion week and I did not. Every day that I remain in Boston, I desperately grasp for some sort of connection to the fashion industry beyond what social media has to offer. More often than not I just find tweets making jabs at the utter void of fashion that is this city (“Boston is such an anti-fashion city if you go anywhere dressed even remotely decently people WILL stare,” says Twitter user, ColetteReneee). Just the other week, I was heading down Boylston street wearing a denim miniskirt, knee high platform boots recalling Versace’s F/W 2021 show and sunglasses taken right out of the Matrix. A man barreling past the Prudential Center in a pickup physically lurched out his window to take a look at me. To this day, I’m still wondering if that was just harassment or indicative of the truth in the popular opinion about Boston’s fashion scene.
I’ve also often wondered why designers base their brands and businesses here. Luxury boutiques abound, however, despite Newbury Street looking like a runway for Urban Outfitters and Zara. What is the extent of Boston’s potential as a fashion city? Many promising designers have originated from and remain here. One of those designers is Daniela Corte, an Argentinian native who gained exposure to the world of fashion design at an early age. Her father was a menswear designer in Buenos Aires, the South American fashion capital, and Corte accredits her love for the practice to him. She honed her craft at the School of Fashion Design on Newbury and opened her Back Bay womenswear boutique in 2000. Her designs are feminine and contemporary, creating bold silhouettes for chic and powerful women. Corte not only believes in the power of Bostonian designers, but American innovation in general. “America is home to some of the most talented and creative designers. Everyone should be exploring these new designers, not just the renowned European ones,” she says. With her designs tailored specifically to every individual customer, Corte aims to encourage fluidity and unapologetic expression to a city that tends to reserve itself on the fashion front.
Sabrina Harris founded her jewelry brand Different Bugs in 2019 while attending college in Boston. Since graduating, Sabrina has moved home and then very quickly turned back to the city. Saying Boston feels like the right place for her to currently be, and that the idea of anywhere else feels wrong, Harris believes that her location doesn’t have much impact on her business. With social media playing such an integral role in marketing and visibility for brands, it is possible for a designer to find commercial success from almost anywhere. Her brand, which popularized the currently trendy style of “junk jewelry,” has amassed Harris a following of nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram. Since launching her business, multitudes of others have replicated the aesthetic of “wearable art” and maximalist charm necklaces, such as Harlot Hands and Sweaty Pigeon. I wear my own necklace from Different Bugs with nearly every outfit.
If you imagine the fashion industry, I’m certain you envision couture gowns under the lights, high profile editorial photoshoots, champagne at afterparties, red carpet stars and cameras flashing. Founder of Boston Fashion Week, Jay Calderin, believes that Boston plays a massive role in fashion that goes unseen beneath the glamour and pretense of the industry. “When you take the cachet of fashion away, you can concentrate on the other elements: the engineering, the usability.” If New York, Paris and Milan are the hubs for showcasing, Boston is the hub of experimentation.
Calderin teaches at the School of Fashion Design on Newbury Street and has mentored many of the city’s standout designers, including Corte. He insists that the Boston area has even more prestigious fashion programs than New York City, which is a bold claim considering the renown of the programs at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was Corte, though, who outfitted Kamala Harris’s younger sister, Maya Harris, for inauguration day back in January. She’s just one of many Bostonians distinguishing the city’s prestige in fashion. There are many more incredible designers coming out of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The annual MIT Trashion Show is a collaboration between the two universities, where designers collect trash and transform it into pieces of wearable art in an effort to promote waste reduction and sustainability.
While this crossover may seem surprising, Calderin says that the creative and the technology go hand in hand. He even thinks that the scientific element of textile construction is a creative endeavor of its own, saying “The tech is definitely creative, but it’s more about different skill sets coming together.” The pattern makers in the lab are as important as those who are designing, drawing and sewing at an atelier. Despite fashion’s reputation as being a frivolous and superficial pursuit, those producing the fabrics that couturiers work with are constantly improving the durability of their materials. In Boston, designers and scientists together are looking at things in revolutionary ways.
One MIT lab engineered brand that is changing the status quo for innovative and sustainable fashion is Ministry of Supply. The mission statement boasted on their website from Co-Founder and President, Gihan Amarasiriwardena, is that the company aims “to provide a balance of scientifically-backed comfort and convenience wherever the day takes you.” Their guarantee is that if the clothes are functional at life’s extremes, they’ll be functional for the average consumer. What does one exactly classify as one of life’s extremes? They sent their signature product that kickstarted the company, the Apollo Shirt, strapped to a meteorological grade weather balloon 160k feet into the stratosphere.
Ministry of Supply utilizes “a variety of ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials), AATCC (American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards” in the durability testing of their garments. They conduct their tests in their labs as well as a third-party facility. The tests they run are designed to determine how well their fabrics can withstand abrasion and wash cycles, and resist tearing and pilling. They test to ensure maximum elasticity and breathability, as well.
Where Boston’s legacy of innovation in fashion technology begins, though, is in Natick, Massachusetts at the United States Army Soldier Systems Center. GQ Magazine has suggested that Natick may be America’s true fashion capital, specifically at the Natick Army Labs, where clothing for the military has been engineered for decades. So many of our convenient little luxuries, like canned goods and high protein energy bars, originated in military labs during wartime. These inventions, produced once out of necessity, found their way to the general public and clothing was very much a part of that dispersal. Plenty are familiar with Meryl Streep’s infamous monologue from The Devil Wears Prada about cerulean blue, explaining how the color appeared in a 2002 Oscar de la Renta collection and eventually trickled down to the average department store.
An iconic garment in menswear that nearly anyone would recognize is the G-1 model flight jacket—a leather, typically cowhide, coat adorned with a fur collar— was engineered in Natick. Most recognize this staple piece as the bomber or aviator jacket. There are dozens of these jackets, in every varying model, available for purchase on Amazon for relatively cheap prices. Plenty of high end brands have attempted their own version of this garment, including Tom Ford, Giorgio Armani and Supreme. While it mostly appears in menswear, it’s been featured in “ready-to-wear” womenswear collections, as well. Variations of this jacket have been seen in runway collections like Chloé F/W 2019, and have been showcased as recently as Balenciaga’s S/S 2022 collection. The chic wardrobe staple originated from military innovation and this particular model, adored by the average consumer to trendy French it-girls, came from the Natick Army Labs. Incidentally, Meryl Streep’s lecture on cerulean blue references a Yves Saint Laurent collection of military jackets.
For years Dava Newman, Director of the MIT Media Lab and a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been developing a technologically innovative and fashion forward space suit for a new era of space exploration. Her goal in the invention of the BioSuit was to create a skin tight garment that allowed for a full range of human motion while performing all the systems of an entire spacecraft. In addition to maximizing the energy of its wearers by reducing the mass of the suit, Newman proudly boasts that fashion was a consideration in its construction. She recalls collaborating with engineering, design and architecture students at MIT to determine the aesthetics, colors and materials of the BioSuit. According to Jennifer Chu at MIT, the “nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys” embedded in the fabric of the suit are capable of being trained to retain the shape of the wearer at a certain temperature. Clothing that acts as a second skin is not a new concept in fashion, but I could easily envision the technology utilized in the creation of the BioSuit enhancing the way designers create shapewear and athletic wear.
Functionality and fashion are not all that is considered. Boston’s textile engineers and designers are also leading the push for environmental awareness and sustainability within the fashion industry. Fashion is one of the top industries contributing to increasing pollution across the globe “contributing 2.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases—over 10% of the global annual carbon output” according to the Ministry of Supply climate report. Sustainability is increasing in value among the modern population of consumers. The technology involved in both the production and distribution of clothing are evolving to minimize the harmful impacts that the industry inflicts upon the environment. An increasing number of brands are claiming climate neutrality and decreasing emissions during production. From utilizing recycled materials to creating more durable and long lasting garments, brands like Ministry of Supply are leading the push to mitigate the environmental harm of the fashion industry. That effort is seen not only in the production of apparel itself, but also its distribution.
In the past few years there has been a tremendous surge in AR and VR technology within the fashion industry. While the lockdown took over our world at the beginning of the pandemic, marketing teams everywhere turned to more creative means of virtually distributing their products to consumers. The first time it really grabbed the attention of social media was when bridal brand Hanifa published a digital fashion show presented on three-dimensional models, where the clothing was rendered to look as though it was draped and fitted to a human body. Fashion teams rapidly picked up on the potential of this method of showcasing, imagining more and more ways to present their seasonal collections as alternatives to the traditional in-person fashion weeks. Giorgio Armani broadcasted his F/W 2021 womenswear collection via livestream on Instagram during Milan Fashion Week 2020. Though the industry has been experimenting with these technologies for a while, the pandemic and pressure from consumers about sustainability have accelerated AR innovations. Numerous applications have been developed to project 3D imagery into a physical space, and even platforms like Google and Snapchat have adopted such capabilities.
I was approached by designer Andy Jacques, founder of local brand Gate-26, at the Bless by Bless fashion show in October. We chatted about local designers and the various different exhibits that were only virtually viewable. I asked if he had explored any of the AR options provided during Boston Fashion Week as an alternative to their cancelled shows and what he thought of the experience. He gave an unimpressed remark about how long the technology has to go before it’s polished. Boston Fashion Week implemented an immersive AR experience with the use of the Hoverlay app, one of many aforementioned softwares designed to allow for a projection of art into physical spaces via a user’s phone camera. It’s intent, like so many others, is to broaden the distribution of products by content creators.
Standing at the various panels scattered throughout the Prudential Center, scanning the QR code and holding up my phone to the walls of the mall was decently uncomfortable. As promised, the app transported runway collections and editorial photography right into the room through the screen of my phone. I did unfortunately have to conclude with Jacques, however. The images on display were distant and visible only from certain angles in the room. It wasn’t possible to control the depth perception of the camera and when I moved one way, the art went the other. I was thankful that in a week or so the QR codes for the exhibits would be posted online, so that I could move about with my phone in the air within the privacy of my apartment.
It’s trial and error. Companies like Rtfkt Studios and Farfetch are working to create virtual try-on experiences for brands and customers, so that fashion may be more accessible regardless of circumstances. Despite the awkwardness of one software, others are seeing great success. An article in Vogue Business predicts that virtual fashion experiences are closer than we think, and the sheer number of Boston designers that participated in the AR experiment shows that they are eager to evolve. Considering these designers, as well as the amount of behind the scenes engineering happening in the labs to push the boundaries of clothing as we know it, convinces me that Boston is where to look for the source of the fashion industry’s innovations. Even if your unconventional outfit feels out of place in this city, Boston is more connected to the industry than anyone knows.