Pattern Makers, one dominated by Italian Immigrants, now in decline, are crucial to the Fashion industry, and translate a design sketch, that might be very challenging, to reality for the tailors.

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Thanks to H-ITAM, Dominic Candeloro, Editor

CITY PEOPLE
WATCHING AS THE DRESSES EDDY PAST
New York Times
By Tara Bahrampour
February 1, 2004

WHEN a well-turned-out woman walks past a certain bus shelter on Seventh Avenue at 39th Street, the clutch of men standing there in fine woolen overcoats are likely to pay attention. But it's not just the woman they're noticing.

"We talk about the nice woman," said Victor Pugliano, 67, who on a bright winter day was wearing a camel-colored wool cap and dark sunglasses. "And we talk about the dress she's wearing."

Standing across the street from the giant button-and-needle sculpture that tells tourists they're in the garment district, Mr. Pugliano and his companions are intimately acquainted with many of the outfits that pass by. They are veteran patternmakers, the ones who transform designers' sketches into coherent blueprints for tailors, and they take pride in seeing an Elie Tahari jacket, an Oscar de la Renta dress or a Calvin Klein suit hanging nicely on a pedestrian. Many of those items had earlier incarnations under these men's expert fingertips.

The men, around a dozen of whom congregate on the sidewalk every weekday, are mostly in their 60's; their faces are lined, their hair graying. But when they began working here, in the 1950's and 1960's, they were young immigrants from southern Italy seeking a way to make it in their adopted country. Many had been tailors in their hometowns, starting in after-school apprenticeships at age 6; by the time they were teenagers, they had become highly skilled.

In New York, however, sewing paid less well than the more specialized and demanding craft of patternmaking. They found jobs in that trade along Seventh Avenue, and began to congregate on the sidewalk at midday. Ever since, they have been meeting under the bus shelter in bad weather and out in the open on sunny days to talk and joke and discuss business in Italian. They have done this for more than half their lives, carrying over the daily socializing traditions from their Sicilian and Calabrian villages.

They remember when fashion in the city had strict geographic boundaries. Downtown New York was for men's wear; Broadway was for casuals and petites. Seventh Avenue was high-end women's clothing.

Even buildings had specialties. "The best building for coats was 500 Seventh Avenue," said Mr. Pugliano, who, like his colleagues, still speaks with a heavy accent. "530 was more for dresses. And 550 was more classic, expensive: Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren."

In recent years, many designers have moved their manufacturing operations to cheaper locations overseas - including Italy. But half a century ago, New York's garment district had the world's largest concentration of apparel manufacturers. The Encyclopedia of New York City describes a noontime scene in which "thousands of workers, mostly immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, made their way through the streets to local cafeterias and lingered to smoke and listen to pitchmen before resuming work at one o'clock."

Damiano Sorbara, a 64-year-old patternmaker for Tahari, remembers those days vividly. When he came to New York in 1966, "everybody used to come out," he said, sweeping his hand as if to conjure the crowds that lined the avenue. "There were hundreds of us Italians," he said.

Apart from the fact that they now number in the tens and meet at one o'clock instead of noon, their routine has changed little.

"When we have a little trouble with a pattern, we ask the others," Mr. Pugliano said.

"You see one one time, you see another another time," added Bonaventura DiMeo, another regular.

Meanwhile, the landscape around them has been knocked down, reshaped, and stretched tall. "Over there was the Metropolitan Opera House, the old one," said Mr. Pugliano, pointing across Seventh Avenue at a sleek skyscraper. He smiled. "I saw 'Rigoletto' there, in '53." That was soon after he had arrived as a 17-year-old from a small town in Calabria; it was his first opera.

Like everything about New York in those early days, the production at the Met transported him. "It was beautiful," he said. "I cannot tell you."

Most of the men are grandfathers now, living in the suburbs. Their children have largely gone on to other professions, and immigrants long ago stopped coming from Italy to replace them in the business.

But a few younger men have followed in their wake. Iby Ibrahim, 45, is one of the rare ones among them who is not Italian. A clothing designer by training, when he moved to New York from England seven years ago he realized that there was more money in patternmaking, and a need for experts.

"It's a dying craft," Mr. Ibrahim said, adding that it takes a high level of skill. "You've got to understand construction; you've got to know styling," he said. ("And you've got to love it," Mr. Pugliano murmured.)

"Everybody wants to study design," said Mr. Ibrahim, who has worked for Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. "They don't realize that you can have a beautiful sketch, but you need someone to bring it alive."

Mr. Sorbara is atypical in that his 22-year-old son, Claudio, followed him into the business. The two were standing together on the sidewalk, the younger Mr. Sorbara in a buttery gray leather coat, the father in ocher herringbone lined with mink.

ASKED how long it might take him to make a pattern for the coat he was wearing, the elder Mr. Sorbara grinned and his face lit up. "I made this coat," he said. Pointing at his son, he added, "He made that coat." Then he gestured toward some of the other men in finely cut woolen coats, some with intricate seams. "He made, he made," he said, pointing at each one.

The younger Mr. Sorbara smiled shyly. Raised on Long Island, he speaks Italian with his fellow patternmakers, but his route to the job was through the Fashion Institute of Technology rather than an apprenticeship. Still, he said, "I was always following my father."

But young patternmakers like Mr. Ibrahim and Claudio Sorbara are few. And as its members reach retirement age, the group on the sidewalk is melting away. Most say they will stay in the New York area after they leave their jobs, with occasional visits to Italy.

Marco Palazzo, who arrived four decades ago from Sicily, plans to retire next year. He will continue to visit his friends on the sidewalk as the thoroughfare that once teemed with artisans becomes a little bit quieter and a little bit emptier. "Little by little," he said, "we disappear."

City People: Watching as the Dresses Eddy Past
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/nyregion/thecity/01patt.html