By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – New York’s Garment District is being buried in a cheap Chinese suit. That’s the word from “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” which airs on HBO Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. New York time. The garment industry was New York’s biggest employer in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the documentary. Today, most of those jobs have gone overseas, many of them to China. The schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) trade is very ragged indeed. Yet the 90-minute film is fairly lively, considering it’s basically a long obit for the industry, whose fate is told in this statistic: In 1965, 95% of American clothing was made in the United States. Now, only 5% is made here. The show begins with a look back at District’s origins. It was basically an Italian/Jewish endeavor, says Joe Raico, a fabric cutter and union official with 43 years in the trade. He’s taking a buyout because things have gotten so bad, though in the beginning they were even worse. Lisa Nussbaum tells the story of distant cousin Sadie Nussbaum, who shared a Lower East Side apartment with 11 people. Conditions were “horrendous,” she says: no heat or running water plus long tedious days at very low wages. Director Marc Levin illustrates the era with a still photo of children playing beside a horse lying dead in the street. This isn’t the only corpse we see. Sadie Nussbaum was among 146 women killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A photo of victims’ bodies lined up for identification is heart-rending and finds a modern counterpart near the end of the film. The Triangle fire outraged New Yorkers. Some 100,000 marched in the funeral procession while 400,000 lined the streets. The fire helped spark the modern American labor movement, whose early leaders, including Sidney Hillman, would eventually wield great power in New York and Washington. In its heyday the district was vibrant and raucous, its sidewalks full of fast moving dress racks and its offices full of cigar-smokers and hot-tempered bosses. “I was a screamer,” admits Irving Rousso, who owned sportswear giant Russ Togs. Other featured insiders include Fern Mallis, creator of Fashion Week; designers Isaac Mizrahi and Anna Sui; Julius Stern, first president of Donna Karan Inc., and Sigrid Olsen, whose company was bought in 1999 by Liz Claiborne Inc., who shut it down in 2008 and laid off all its workers, including Olsen. The industry’s decline is blamed on automation, deregulation and “free-trade agreements” championed by Republicans and Democrats. We see Bill Clinton hailing NAFTA as a boon though one U.S. worker has a different take: “How do I compete with someone who makes five dollars a week?” If workers were getting the shaft, designers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Halston became gods, according to Stan Herman, famous as the “People’s Designer” and a five-decade fixture in the industry. Nancy Reagan is hailed as a worshipper in chief. Levin gives the beautiful people plenty of face time but never turns his back on the people who actually make the clothes. He revisits the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, in which Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee accused her of using sweatshop labor to produce her clothing line. “How dare you,” she sputters during a televised rant, though she changed her tune after sweatshop conditions were publicized. This segment features footage of exhausted children asleep at their sewing machines and a chicken that’s even skinnier than a Ralph Lauren model. The film ends with a look back at a 2000 fire at a Bangladesh garment factory that killed over 50 workers, an eerie replay of the Triangle fire. Kernaghan predicts other casualties as outsourcing expands: “Wait till the thirty to forty million white collar jobs start going offshore.”
