Making Things with Natalie Chanin

S2E3:

Making Things With

Natalie Chanin

Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.

Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane, and it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change-makers, from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.

This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores.

This episode is also sponsored by Phlox, a personal style consultancy and high fashion vintage retailer where responsible fashion meets creativity, individuality, and beauty. Developing your own personal style and buying what's "you" is the key to sustainability. Phlox presents timeless, modern, vintage clothes with a heavy dose of glamor to shop and learn about available services, visit Phlox, that's P H L O X.com or follow them on Instagram at @phloxslowfashion.
My guest today on the Green Dream is Natalie Chanin, founder of Alabama Chanin, a Slow Fashion brand in Florence, Alabama. Slow Fashion is exactly as it sounds: a growing movement of makers, designers, merchants, and manufacturers who, in response to fast fashion and globalization, have significantly dialed back their pace and financial ambition, freeing themselves to focus more on creating items with inherent value, curating the customer experience, and reducing environmental impact. This quiet revolution is also driven by their desire to improve the quality of life for their families and their employees. Slow Fashion champions localization and regionalism rather than massification. It honors craftsmanship and respects tradition while embracing modern technology to make production cleaner and more efficient. It’s about treating workers well, and, as Natalie told me for my book Fashionopolis, “buying from the person down the street whose face you know and love.”

I first met Natalie in 2004 at the Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood. She was there promoting her company, and I was there working on my book Deluxe. Natalie sat on the mid-century modern sofa of the bungalow, and taught my four-year-old daughter to sew. To start, she showed us a practice called Loving the Thread. She’ll explain what Loving the Thread is in this episode.

Natalie is a native of Florence, which is across the river from R&B recording mecca Muscle Shoals. During Natalie’s youth, Florence was the Cotton T-shirt Capital of the World. Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Walt Disney all produced there. After the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was enacted in 1994, Florence, like much of the textile-driven South, plunged into a financial and social crisis. “In 1993, five thousand worked in this two-block radius,” Natalie told me when I visited her factory a few years ago. “And that didn’t include all the service industries—restaurants, daycare centers, gas stations. There used to be twenty dye houses in this town. When manufacturing collapsed here, everything collapsed.”

Natalie left that all behind. She first went to New York, and joined a Seventh Avenue junior sportswear brand. Then she moved to Europe, to work as a stylist for music videos. She returned to New York in the early 2000s, and launched her own company, refashioning vintage T-shirts with unusual embroideries that had exposed knots and dangling threads. A quilting stitch, she realized. Just like the ladies did back in Florence, Alabama.

In 2006, Natalie moved her business back home and embraced what her fellow Florentine, singer/songwriter John Paul White, calls “the nurturing benefits of a small town.” Everything at Alabama Chanin is made-to-order, sewed by local seamstresses. Chanin concedes that implementing a more ethical business model hasn’t been the most lucrative way to run her company. And there are times she says that she misses “the deeper connection to the industry and the heartbeat of what’s happening in design in America.” But the advantages of being “hyperlocal,” outweigh that. She is 100 percent self-owned, and has no debt. She invests in young people and trains them well. Her business practice is zero-waste. And she has a deep commitment to her community.

This year, Alabama Chanin is celebrating its 21st year in business, with a new book called Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making, about sustainability, community, artisans and makers, published by Abrams. The preface was written by Natalie’s friend, the singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash. They met through a mutual friend. In 2012, Rosanne and her husband John Leventhal, took a long road trip through the Mississippi Delta, and stopped for a visit with Natalie in Florence. Afterward, Rosanne and John wrote a song called “A Feather’s Not a Bird,” about the trip and Alabama Chanin. The song, Rosanne writes in the book, “led to more songs, and became an album, called The River & the Thread,” which won three Grammys in 2014, including Best American Roots Song for "A Feather’s Not a Bird." Rosanne and John have kindly given us permission to play it.

Natalie Chanin, welcome to The Green Dream. Where are you this morning? Where are you talking to us from?

Natalie Chanin: I'm in my home office in Florence, Alabama.

Dana Thomas: It's beautiful. Lots of books behind you and lots of sunshine!

Natalie Chanin: Yeah, I'm a bit of a book hoarder. So this is just a little bit of the massive collection.

Dana Thomas: You're one of the great proponents of Slow Fashion. Can you tell our listeners what Slow Fashion is?

Natalie Chanin: Well, it really grew out of this Slow Food movement, this idea of things being produced as locally or regionally as possible. Adherence as closely as possible to organic standards, living wage, community investment in the process, I would say, is a really big part of that.

Dana Thomas: And how do you apply that to Alabama Chanin? How does that translate in your company? You're based in Florence, Alabama, which is in Muscle Shoals and you're a direct-to-consumer mostly. Are you 100% direct-to-consumer now?

Natalie Chanin: No, we have a few wholesale accounts, but our primary business is direct-to-consumer.

Dana Thomas: And you're made-to-order?

Natalie Chanin: Yes, we are. We produce very few items in advance, so when guests come to our website and place an order, we make it for them at that moment. So that helps reduce inventory and save resources.

Dana Thomas: And it takes what? A week from the time I order it until it arrives at my home., about? A little bit more?

Natalie Chanin: It really depends on what it is. We have a machine-made division that we make in our factory that's on the outskirts of the Muscle Shoals community. So some of those things can be made really quickly. And then we also continue since the last 22 years to work with these hand-embroidery artisans. So some of the pieces that we make can take a month or more, just the making by hand. So it really depends on what the item is.

Dana Thomas: And then you send it straight on to the person, there's no middleman. This seems like a very wise way of running a business. Slow Fashion is a lean model too, isn't it?

Natalie Chanin: Yes. The way we work would be considered what they call lean-method manufacturing. So we purchase raw materials and we keep the raw materials stored until it's ready to be produced for someone.

Dana Thomas: And you source everything more or less In America?

Natalie Chanin: It's mixed. We do have an unbroken supply chain for cotton. We work primarily in organic cotton jerseys and other organic cotton knits. Ninety percent of our materials are grown in Texas and processed in North Carolina and come to us here. I'm not against outsourcing, I'm for outsourcing for a good reason. So for example, we buy some threads from Northern Europe that are organic and really beautifully made. To have the highest quality thread means that the seams stay stronger, longer and will remain in someone's wardrobe for a longer period of time.

Dana Thomas: It's so true. The strongest thread I have in my sewing box was my great-grandmother's really good cotton thread from Texas in the 1920s. And it was a big spool and it was just basic black and it still says on the wooden spool that it costs 5 cents for this spool of yarn — maybe it was from the thirties — and I still use it and whenever I repair anything with that thread, it never comes undone. Quality thread is key.

Natalie Chanin: It really is. In the sustainable design world we always talk about price-per-wear or price-per-use. Something may be more expensive, but it's important that it stays in your wardrobe for a long time. That favorite T-shirt or that favorite dress that you have, that you've had for 20 years and you wear over and over again, becomes a part of your life, collects all the stories as you move through your life.

Dana Thomas: So let's talk about the T-shirt I'm wearing, which comes from Alabama Chanin. It's my favorite T-shirt. I live in it, I work in it, I garden in it, I travel in it, I sleep in it sometimes and it has a really wonderful backstory. Can you tell us the story about the cotton project in Alabama?

Natalie Chanin: We had been working in cotton for 20 years at that point, and a friend of ours, K.P. McNeill once questioned me what could it look like if we raised the organic cotton in our community and tried to find a way to process from field all the way to shelf in our own community.

Dana Thomas: And K.P. at the time was working with Billy Reid, who was also based in Florence.

Natalie Chanin: Correct. And they're at Imogen + Willie now, he and his wife Katie who are still doing...

Dana Thomas: Exactly in Nashville, Tennessee.

Natalie Chanin: I had thought about it but it was really interesting and the more we had these conversations, K.P. was like, "Well we have a little plot of land that's not too far from here. Should we just try to plant six acres and see what happens?" And so we set off on this project that wound up going on for two years, to find the seed all the way through the end—the picking, the ginning, the knitting, the sewing. It took us two full years to process and that , is one of the things that was the result of that wonderful experiment.

Dana Thomas: <laugh> And it's so soft, it's so beautiful.

Natalie Chanin: We had sort of an old tractor that made the rows and we planted the seeds and we found out that there wasn't a harvester that would fit the way we had planted the rows. We were real novices, just flying by the seat of our pants. And so we wound up picking all the cotton by hand over the course of the summer, and we had a lot of volunteers who came out and helped us pick the cotton, and consequently the spinners let us know that it was the most beautiful cotton they had ever seen in their lives. It had almost no trash in it because we had picked every bowl by hand.

Dana Thomas: No seeds, no sticks.

Natalie Chanin: Even Lisa, who had helped manage the field, she named all the different plants and used to talk to them. So they were very well-loved cotton plants.

Dana Thomas: I'll have this shirt until the day I die. It's so solid. It's so beautifully made. And this is the natural color cotton. It's not dyed. It's just this gorgeous ivory that's so pretty and so soft. Do you think you'll do something like that again or was that just a one-off?

Natalie Chanin: You never know. I always get caught up in some sort of crazy experiments and things like that.

Dana Thomas: Well, you have a new book out.

Natalie Chanin: I do, yes.

Dana Thomas: Called Embroidery: threads and stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making. You've written this book for your 21st anniversary of being in business as Alabama Chanin.

Natalie Chanin: That's right.

Dana Thomas: Now why did you choose 21 years and not 20 or 25?

Natalie Chanin: Well we definitely had intended on that coming out at 20 years and Covid and all of those things happened and so it just took us longer to get the project together and so we just embraced as it came and just decided to celebrate 21 years, which is an awesome number.It's always been my favorite number, anyway, 21.

Dana Thomas: It is an awesome number. It’s good luck. And it's so beautiful. I mean you have sewing, but think you also have pictures of your fields and pictures of your clothes and you have pictures of cloth and then you have pictures of the shoals. Can you explain what the shoals are? What do shoals mean?

Natalie Chanin: The shoals comes from the name Muscle Shoals. A lot of people think it's a mollusc, but it really has to do with the muscles of the arms. Before the Tennessee River was dammed, it was rather wide and shallow and there were all these shoals in the river. And so, if you traveled, you had to pick your boat up with the muscle and carry it over the shoals to get to the next part of the river. And so this became…

Dana Thomas: Oh Right!

Natalie Chanin: Muscle Shoals community and you know, was inhabited by Native American Indians for very, very long time.

Dana Thomas: So you have a forward in your book written by your friend Rosanne Cash, the singer-songwriter. How did you all meet?

Natalie Chanin: We met through a dear friend and you know when you meet someone and you feel like you've known them forever, it's like, "Hi, I've been waiting for you all these years." And so we just hit it off right from the bat. We've been told that we were soul sisters and that was indeed the case. I feel very lucky to have...

Dana Thomas: She wrote a beautiful song called "A Feather's Not a Bird," and it's about her visit to Florence and to you, and about getting a pretty new dress and then visiting the Magic Wall. Can you tell us about the Magic Wall?

Natalie Chanin: Yes. A dear friend of mine, Tom Hendricks, who's since passed away, constructed this monumental wall that was built in honor of his great great grandmother, who was a Yuchi Indian in our community. I guess Tom spent 35 years working on the wall. It's the largest free standing rock structure in America and has come to be a Native American holy site. And so a lot of people go there, there's a healing circle there. It's just a very magical place as you can attest.

Dana Thomas: I know I've been there. The energy changes, you feel something, there's something really magical, and spiritual, and otherworldly going on there when you go, the energy's incredible. And it's so peaceful and it's in this forest, but just on the side of the road it's not a big adventure. And it was what, about a half an hour outside of town?

Natalie Chanin: Yeah.

Dana Thomas: And so Rosanne Cash went there too, where you took her there and she equally felt the magic outside. She said, "As I sat on the stone bench in the middle of the circle of stones, totems, and sacred objects, I closed my eyes and I felt something was meditating me instead of the other way around," which I thought was a really beautiful way of describing it and a nice way to open your book. And then she wrote this fantastic song called "A Feather's Not a Bird," which we'll listen to.

Roseanne Cash: A Feather’s Not a Bird

Dana Thomas: Now, one of the things that you taught me years ago when I first met you and you actually taught my daughter when she was four years old, was "Loving the thread." And Rosanne Cash talks about "loving the thread" in her song. So can you tell us what "loving the thread" is, and why it's important?

Natalie Chanin: So thread, when it's manufactured, is just an act of twisting. So it's like spinning, you just take the fiber and you twist it. So there's not really anything holding the fiber together except this the physical act of torque and tension. What happens when you first start sewing, everybody has come across it, the threads tangle, it's called knotting. You get knots in your thread. But it's really just...

Dana Thomas: Oh boy, do you.

Natalie Chanin: It's really just a tangle. So if you'll just run your fingers over the thread...

Dana Thomas: Pulling the thread right between the index and the thumb, over and over again.

Natalie Chanin: Correct. You can actually feel the thread starting to release some of this excess tension. And at the same time, you're coating the thread with the oils of your fingers. And so what happens is you release that excess tension as you begin to sew, the thread won't tangle as much.

Dana Thomas: That was so kind of Roseanne Cash to let us play this song on our podcast. What did you think when you first heard the song and that you learned that she was writing a song about you and your company and your town?

Natalie Chanin: Well, of course I couldn't believe it. She was exploring the South and obviously where her family was from, where she was born. They traveled all the way down to Arkansas, and she and I sat in the studio one day while they were here, and I was teaching her how to sew, and John was picking on the guitar, and it was just a lovely day. So I never imagined that the song would come out of it and that she would go on to win Grammys for the song, the album, the performance. Obviously, there's a lot of magic wrapped up in this.

Dana Thomas: Also, music is very important in the whole Florence, Alabama area. Every year until the pandemic, Billy Reid hosted a shindig in which you also participated, with a fundraising dinner every year for the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Natalie Chanin: That's right.

Dana Thomas: And Billy would have all this great music, he'd have Jack White, and he'd have beautiful singer-songwriter John Paul White, and he'd have the Texas Playboys, and there'd be a softball game with great fun. It gets people really into Florence, Alabama in a nice way, and shows that it's also a fashion capital with a runway show and with your dinner and tours of the factory. Why is Florence such a fashion capital? Was it always a fashion capital, and we just didn't realize it?

Natalie Chanin: The whole community has a really interesting history. The music goes so much further back than us today.

Dana Thomas: Of course, with the famous Fame studios and all the recording in the Muscle Shoals region. But even deeper, farther back?

Natalie Chanin: Yes. W. C. Handy, who's considered the father of the blues, was born here. There's a really beautiful documentary about Muscle Shoals. Our friend Tom Hendricks is in the movie talking about the river and how the river was really a beautiful part of the creation story of the Yuchi Indians and their healing arts. And Helen Keller is from Tuscumbia, and wrote a lot about beauty. There's this real sense of appreciation for beauty, healing–songs have a deep history in our community. So...

Dana Thomas: All around the beautiful river. And you also hold a conference every year called Project Threadways where you continue this idea that's the subject of the book, threads and stories, about sewing and about how this is part of our culture and part of our lives and part of our history. Can you tell us a little bit about your Project Threadways Symposium?

Natalie Chanin: NAFTA became enacted in 1995. And before that time this little community had been known as the T-shirt capital of the world. And it was a vertical operation, so the cotton was grown, ginned, spun, knit, cut, sewn, shipped, and all of these great musicians were recording in Muscle Shoals–they were going on tours around the country, around the world, and a lot of those T-shirts were being made six miles from the recording studio in the building where we are. And so after NAFTA was signed, the industry just fell apart in our community.

Dana Thomas: All those jobs moved offshore, or at least out of the United States. Much of it to Mexico and Central America, but then it went to Southeast Asia. In the big move of globalization, which we thought was great, but it was kind of gutting communities across America, especially across the South.

Natalie Chanin: That's right. And so when I came back, a lot of the people I was working with had worked in the textile industry, and at some point it occurred to me these people were getting older, they all had their stories to tell about the heyday. And so we started collecting oral histories in 2003 of textile workers, farmers, everybody who had worked in and around the community. And as we began to collect the stories, and as my business started to grow, there's always this question of being in Alabama, and working in cotton, and there's a lot of history and a lot of questions around that. Honestly, I felt like I didn't have the words to be able to have these big, hard conversations. And so Project Threadways grew out of this desire to be able to look unflinchingly at that past and what that means. And there's so much that had not been documented and we're really lucky in our community to have a strong public history program at the university here. And we were able to partner with historians and start to crack these things open.

Dana Thomas: And it's not just there, it was all over the South. I Remember I drove to see you from Nashville to Florence and I just kept driving through all these towns that you could see were once thriving economically, and we're now just down at the heel. And it was heartbreaking to see. You could really feel the impact of the NAFTA legislation. Now we have a lot of reshoring going on and jobs are coming back to the United States and to Europe that fled offshore during the 1990s and early 2000s. Do you see a return happening in Florence as well? You're doing your thing, and Billy Reid, of course, is there. Is there other movement in the area in the garment industry?

Natalie Chanin: Absolutely. I mean all across the south there are factories that are reopening and some old…

Dana Thomas: A renaissance of sorts...

Natalie Chanin: Correct, correct..

Dana Thomas: Which of course is perfect since Florence is a city in Italy that is the home of the Renaissance and now we're having a hot renaissance in Florence, Alabama.

Natalie Chanin: Well, it's all across the region. It's great to see all these young people coming up and coming home and building up industry for their communities.

Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency, from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and its select stores.

This episode is also sponsored by Phlox, a personal style consultancy and high fashion vintage retailer where responsible fashion meets creativity, individuality and beauty. Developing your own personal style and buying what's "you" is the key to sustainability. Phlox presents timeless, modern, vintage clothes with a heavy dose of glamor to shop and learn about available services, visit Phlox, that's P H L O X.com or follow them on Instagram at @phloxslowfashion.

If you’re enjoying this episode of The Green Dream, check out my interview with Oliver Jeffers, a Northern Irish artist and an award-winning author of children’s books, including Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, which was a number one New York bestseller published by HarperCollins.

Now, back to my guest Natalie Chanin, founder and head of Alabama Chanin, a slow-fashion brand in Florence, Alabama that proves it is possible to make beautiful clothes with integrity and with respect for humanity and the planet. In celebration of Alabama Chanin’s 21st anniversary, Natalie Chanin has written a new book called Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making, published by Abrams.

Dana Thomas: Now, speaking of home, let's talk about how you got to moving back. As you said, you returned home and you started this Slow Fashion company and you did this 21 years ago, or a bit more now. Can you tell us your path to get to this epiphany where you needed to go home and do things the old fashioned way? You actually belonged to the industrial fashion business for a long time, didn't you? You were a part of the machine.

Natalie Chanin: Yes. When I graduated university, I went to work in the junior sportswear industry, and worked in that industry for quite a while. And then...

Dana Thomas: You were on Seventh Avenue, we used to say.

Natalie Chanin: Seventh Avenue and we sold at Macy's on the third floor, and then I sort of switched and I turned to the other side. I worked as a stylist for 10 years, sort of selling the clothes that were being made faster and faster. This was sort of the beginning of the fast fashion movement. And so, I took a sabbatical, and came back to New York and started sewing things by hand myself, and was looking for manufacturers in the New York fashion industry, the Garment District, and really couldn't find anyone to help.

Dana Thomas: And this was when the Garment District was already starting to fall apart itself, with all the offshoring following NAFTA because it wasn't just Florence and the Carolinas that got wounded by that legislation and during the whole globalization movement, but the New York garment industry shrank dramatically.

Natalie Chanin: Yeah, we talk a lot about that in Threadways, how quickly a region becomes global. So, cotton may be grown here, but it immediately goes outside of our region, and even goes globally. So all of these stories that happened here are mirrored in New York, and all over the world. It's a lot of fluctuations. But anyway, I was sewing all these things by hand and couldn't really find anyone to help do this work in New York. And I just had this epiphany that this was like a quilting stitch that really was from my past, learned by my grandmothers, and was still practiced in this community. And so I had this idea that to do this work, I would need to come home. And I saw it as just a little project–that I was coming home for a month or two, and I was going to do this project and then I was going to move on and back to my life and styling and film and I'm still here.

Dana Thomas: And there is a great tradition of quilting there. Talk about the bees, aren't there some famous quilting bees in the area?

Natalie Chanin: That was the original thought that I had. My grandmother used to quilt at this little community center, which is, I'm sort of out close to where the magic wall was. It's very close to that region. And so that was my idea that I was going to work with these women who were friends of my grandmothers, and who had quilted with my grandmothers, and see if they could help me sew these T-shirts I was making. And so I came home, and interviewed them. I made a little documentary film about old time quilting circles, and talked to them about this project I wanted, and I was like, "This is fashion, we're gonna send this up to New York." And they were not interested at all. But I ran a little tiny ad in the newspaper that was just three lines that said: "Part-time, hand sewing and quilting," and had a phone number to the little house I had rented. And we got about 60 calls and about 20 women stuck, and did the hand sewing and we've never stopped. We've kept on since that time.

Dana Thomas: And you were selling these T-shirts then at places like Barney’s?

Natalie Chanin: Yes. That first season we sold to seven stores around the world, and very quickly it just kept going, and the collection grew and 22 years later, we're still hand sewing. And then, I mentioned that Florence had been known as the T-shirt capital of the world and the man who had the largest of those industries here, we rent a space from him that is, was...

Dana Thomas: It's like a warehouse. It's a big, long, low, metal corrugated-sided, kind of building.

Natalie Chanin: It was the largest of the sewing facilities in our community. And so we are now in the space where all of those T-shirts would've been sewn. And so he approached me about putting some machines back in, and seeing if we could figure out how to make a T-shirt like the one you have on again in America. So we did. It was a challenge.

Dana Thomas: I love that you put an ad in the local newspaper. What's the local newspaper called?

Natalie Chanin: The Times Daily.

Dana Thomas: Times Daily. Back when we did things like that. Feels so analog compared to our lives now. So you gave up Seventh Avenue and what did you find to be the benefits of moving back to Florence beyond having your quilters of course versus working in New York for example, or having this company in New York? How did this benefit your company, your ambitions, and your life?

Natalie Chanin: I didn't come home thinking I'm going to start a sustainable brand. I thought of this as a one-off project, and the more I was home, I started looking at things really through a microscope. I always say I came to this through food. I was really shocked, after having lived in Europe, how different the food was in the community. And so as you start to investigate, you see how much the farming and Big Food had changed the food that was available in my community and...

Dana Thomas: And how people eat.

Natalie Chanin: How people eat. And as I began to look at that, I began to look at the cotton, and think about the waste, and it really informed all the decisions I started making, like how can we make clothing more like the Slow Food movement? How can we treat employees better? What can we do to live, work, and exist in this community and try to contribute to the community to make it a better place?

Dana Thomas: And the other advantage of being in Florence of course is that it costs less to run your company, right? That your rent isn't what it would be if you were in New York City or in Manhattan or even Brooklyn. What you're paying your employees is much lower because their cost of living is so much lower. Every time I come see you, there are lots of really hip folks working for you, so you clearly can recruit people to come live and work in Florence, Alabama. Is that part of the allure too, that it's a more affordable life, and just a less insane one?

Natalie Chanin: As we all know, there's definitely been a movement away from larger cities, and back to smaller, more manageable regions, and we've definitely seen the benefit of this movement. Sometimes you miss part of being part of that industry by not being in New York, but there's benefits to both sides, I think.

Dana Thomas: Absolutely. Plus you have Bunyan's Bar-B-Que down the street.

Natalie Chanin: Yeah, we have a great food culture here.

Dana Thomas: Very good food culture, and microbreweries, and a recording company that John Paul White has. So it's actually kind of a bustling, somewhat cosmopolitan town, now.

Natalie Chanin: It is. We have a lot going on here. The music industry, different kinds of creative industries have moved in, and so that's definitely given us a young culture, which we all love.

Dana Thomas: Now, in my book Fashionopolis, I profile your life and your business in Muscle Shoals, and all of it, to talk about the Slow Fashion movement. And one of the quotes that is more quoted, I think, than any other line in the whole book is when you said you were at a dinner party one time and somebody started complaining about how expensive your clothes were, and you said, "Yes they are maybe," with an expletive mixed in. "They absolutely are and they should be because I pay my people right." And I think that that's something that comes up all the time when I'm talking at conferences or I'm talking at book signings or I'm talking anywhere or I'm doing radio call-ins or people say, "But I can't afford this," or, "Why is sustainable fashion so expensive? It's beyond my means." To which I say, "But part of the reason it's beyond your means is because you are not paid what you are worth either."

Dana Thomas: And so this is all of a piece and that we should all be demanding to be paid what we're worth and then we can afford to do things properly, and pay what we should be paying for clothes, and making sure that the people who made them are paid right. And I always thought that that was just a really important and strong message that you put out through Alabama Chanin. That if you're going to buy something that's made of organic cotton, that it's either entirely or partially hand-sewn, that it's made-to-order, that it's made in America, that the workers are paid right, that they're treated right, that they live a good life, they're not living in shanties in Bangladesh, and their kids are sleeping under the worktables and they're working two jobs, and they have no benefits, and they have no vacation. That we don't wanna treat our fellow citizens that way.

Dana Thomas: So then we need to pay for the goods as we should and to make sure that they're well taken care of and respected as well. And I've always found that very admirable for you and I love how you just defend it like, "Well yeah, of course?" Do you think that that is the way it should be, that sustainable fashion will always be more expensive? Or do you see the prices coming down now that it's becoming more mainstream?

Natalie Chanin: Well, I think, during the pandemic, what we've seen is sort of the opposite. We are paying what it actually costs to make a garment, and you've seen other prices rise up to meet ours more closely. As supply chains get fragile, and the costs rise, we still have this kind of unbroken system that we've invested in. And, I say to people, "Really, all you have to do is start at the price and work backwards." If you find a $10 T-shirt, for example, you just cut the price in half because whoever's selling it, they have to make money. Everybody along the way has to make money and thrive in a positive way for the supply chain to stay solid, right? And so if you start to work back on some things, you get back to something costing a quarter.

Natalie Chanin: And, if you begin to think about what that takes–to grow the cotton, to gin it, to spin it, to knit it, to cut it, to sew it, to ship it, to package it.

Dana Thomas: The whole kit.

Natalie Chanin: This is the most basic thing, with no bells and whistles or any kind of design added into it, you pretty soon get to a point where you can't really justify, or understand, who's making that quarter, or how much is the human involved getting from that quarter. And so when you begin to think about things that way, our prices are really not that... And I do think you have to think about price per wear. Is this something you're going to have in your closet for a decade?

Dana Thomas: Forever. Like my T-shirt.

Natalie Chanin: Yeah. And then you break...

Dana Thomas: Already, I've got this T-shirt from you in 2016, we're 2022, that's six years for a life of a T-shirt that is worn all the time, and it's showing nowhere, it's only getting softer. So clearly I'm getting a good price-per-wear.

Natalie Chanin: We do strive for that, that we make garments that are here for life.

Dana Thomas: For life. That's it. That's part of the whole message that we have here at The Green Dream of buy less, buy better, which I think is a core tenant of the Slow Fashion movement.

Natalie Chanin: It's wonderful.

Dana Thomas: Well, thank you so much, Natalie Chanin, for taking the time to speak with us today on The Green Dream, and to tell us about your book, Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making, and about the Project Threadways symposium, which we can attend in Florence, Alabama. Or we can listen to it online when it comes around every April. Thank you so much. It's just been a delight to have you on the program.

Natalie Chanin: Thank you Dana. I love seeing you, as always.

This episode is also sponsored by Phlox, a personal style consultancy and high fashion vintage retailer where responsible fashion meets creativity, individuality, and beauty. Developing your own personal style and buying what's "you" is the key to sustainability. Phlox presents timeless, modern, vintage clothes with a heavy dose of glamor to shop and learn about available services, visit Phlox, that's P H L O X.com or follow them on Instagram at @phloxslowfashion.

New episodes of The Green Dream come out the first and third Tuesday of the month, so we’ll be back in two weeks with Vanessa Nakate, the award-winning, 25-year-old Ugandan climate activist and author of A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, a manifesto and memoir about how to build a livable future for all. The paperback will be published by One Boat this month. We hope you’ll join us.

This episode of The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions, with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Dana Thomas, the European sustainability editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column, also called The Green Dream, in the magazine or online at vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter where my handle for both is @Danathomasparis. Thank you for listening.