The film features rare archival footage and interviews with Miami tailors and fashion designers who clothed American presidents’ wives, famous athletes, legendary coaches, as well as iconic fashion models, actors and television stars. The industry’s golden years as a successful post-World War II industry, expansion through the 1980s and struggles amid shifting trade policies of the 1990s reflect a scaled-down garment business that endures despite challenges and labor shortages.
The special screening at the Savor Theater, funded in part by the Florida Humanities Council with Broward Cultural Division and The Community Foundation of Broward, features a panel with Miami historian, Dr. Paul George; Hollywood and Broadway Actor , Avi Hoffman, who is also a Jewish Culture Archivist; with garment and fashion industry veterans and the filmmakers.
The era in which the garment industry launched was a period of time when everybody took the opportunity to make things with their hands. Making clothing essentials for a booming Florida, manufacturing took place in factories of all sizes. Women across the U.S. made clothing with commercial patterns on sewing machines found in many American homes.
Wynwood transitioned from a white middle-class neighborhood beginning in the 1930’s to a commercial district bustling with small businesses full of immigrant workers by the 1950’s.
Entire families fled Europe for a better life in the U.S. with the trades they were forced to work as Jewish people. Clothiers and jewelers made beautiful things for a new nation and prospered. “Schmatta,” the Yiddish term for rags, is part of business jargon even today.
The Varat and Horenstein families hired Cubans and many other immigrants like them who fled persecution and civil wars in their home countries. Women and men from South American nations, despite their college training, made clothing in order to start-over in Miami.
Young men also came to America, children of tailors from the Middle East as battles broke out in Lebanon and Syria in the 1970’s, to establish shops that persist even today.
The talented elders now teach a new generation the trade of creating and tailoring clothing in the remaining ateliers and studios in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. They are adjunct professors in professional schools, like Miami Dade College’s Fashion Institute, established with the first waves of immigrants.
Labor struggles, foreign competition, federal trade and immigration policies, changing American tastes, and generational wealth impacted the clothing industry – not unlike many blue-collar and manufacturing sectors in America.
A new smaller industry emerges in Florida with an eye towards innovation and supporting local workers. Interviews suggest A.I. and robotic assembly lines may not be able to supplant human-centric sewing at this time…but time will tell.