Kevin A. Roberts
Susan Sherman, one of the driving forces behind the fashion incubator Saint Louis Fashion Fund, wants to make sewing sexy. That’s not how most of us would describe sewing, but the setting is helping. A group has gathered for wine and a tour of Evolution St. Louis, a high-tech flat-knitting factory in Grand Center, which launched in 2019, for an announcement from Sherman and the Fashion Fund. Soon, we’ll take a tour of the 32,000-square-foot facility and watch the Stoll knitting machines—oblong behemoths from Germany that can conjure just about anything out of yarn—whir to life. But first, Sherman’s announcement: The Fashion Fund is starting an aggressive effort to meet a new goal. By 2030, it wants to turn St. Louis’ fashion sector into a $6 billion industry. Sherman and the Fashion Fund helped recruit Evolution to St. Louis. To grow, Sherman and her associates are focused on recruiting more new businesses—and finding people who can sew, too.
In 2014, as more fashion incubators were popping up across the country, Sherman and a group of others decided to launch one here. They ran two cohorts of designers through the Saint Louis Fashion Fund, but then COVID-19 hit. Their downtown space on Washington Avenue was expensive, and the pandemic killed a lot of the foot traffic. “We really took a hard look at ourselves as an organization: Should we even be here?” Sherman says. “But our board unanimously said, ‘Yes, but maybe not in the same way that we have been.’” It moved its headquarters to Grand Center and changed its focus to jobs, manufacturing, and “enticing all kinds of fashion businesses to St. Louis,” Sherman says.
This is not the first time in the city’s history that someone has tried to put St. Louis on the map for fashion.
In and Out of Fashion
George Warren Brown, a traveling salesman for shoe firm Hamilton-Brown & Company, had a lot of time to think on the road. In the 1870s Hamilton-Brown & Company sold shoes produced on the East Coast—then considered the country’s shoe capital—and shipped them to the Midwest. What was puzzling was that no one made shoes in the Midwest, even though most of the supplies for them were shipped to the East Coast from the West. As Valerie Battle Kienzle writes in her book Ready to Wear: A History of the Footwear and Garment Industries in St. Louis, “St. Louis’ central location provided ready access to such supplies.” Brown had an idea.
Brown eventually found two partners—A. L. Bryan and Jerome B. Desnoyers—and with $12,000 and five shoe workers from the East Coast started a shoe manufacturing facility in 1878 in St. Louis. Bryan, Brown & Company was the city’s first shoe manufacturer, Kienzle writes. In 1893, Brown bought his partners out and changed the name to Brown Shoe Company.
As Kienzle writes in Ready to Wear, “Brown’s continued success triggered the establishment of additional shoe manufacturers in St. Louis.” In 1911, Roberts, Johnson & Rand Shoe Company merged with Peters Shoe Company, and another big shoe producer, International Shoe Company, was born. Clothing manufacturing exploded, too. In 1913, Curlee Clothing Company and Schwab Clothing Company—two of the biggest clothing manufacturers in St. Louis—merged and created a business with nine factories, 2,500 employees, and $2 million in capital. By the 1920s, the Garment District covered 15 city blocks. The city also had a hand in the invention of junior dress sizes. As detailed in a past St. Louis Magazine article, in 1929, Irving Sorger, a merchandising manager for Kline’s in St. Louis, tapped Washington University fashion-design students for ideas for dresses for young women. In 1938, Retailers Market News declared St. Louis the leading manufacturer for juniors in the country. By 1949, sales were more than $85 million.
But after World War II, companies began to move production overseas. “American consumers embraced imported shoes from countries such as Taiwan and South Korea as cheaper alternatives to American-made footwear,” Kienzle writes. By the mid-1960s, both International Shoe Company and Brown Shoe Company had ceased making footwear in St. Louis.
But Brown Shoe Company lives on—now it’s known as Caleres and headquartered in Clayton. Today, if you survey St. Louis’ fashion players, you might also note Levine Hats, Arch Apparel, Weissman, and The Normal Brand, among others—and the Fashion Fund, with its goal of making St. Louis a leader in the industry once again.
Models Wanted
How have similar cities succeeded in creating fashion capitals?
The standard-bearer for fashion incubators might be the one that started it all: Toronto Fashion Incubator, or TFI, which launched in 1987. More than 30 fashion incubators around the world are modeled off of TFI, which offers several programs to designers including a resident program with a private studio and production space.
TFI only had about 30 members when it brought on executive director Susan Langdon five years after its launch. In another five years, Langdon—the first executive director with a fashion background—grew that number to 700. In July 2020, TFI sent a survey to the 10,000-plus newsletter subscribers. Langdon was shocked that 50 percent of respondents said they have been following TFI for 20–30 years.
Langdon credits her own background as a designer, someone who can relate to new designers and entrepreneurs and understands their needs, as being critical to TFI’s growth and longevity. Important too is the cadre of mentors who work with up-and-comers. But another key ingredient has been the continued cooperation of the City of Toronto. Laurie Belzak is the sector development officer for fashion/apparel and design for the City of Toronto and works closely with Langdon.
The City of Toronto started working with the fashion industry in the mid-1980s as the Canadian government began negotiating a free trade agreement, Belzak says. “The industry got together and came to the city and said that they needed some help,” she says. “They wanted to work together, and they wanted the city to support them. There was a sense at that point that this sector was potentially being negotiated away.” One of the first things they did was to create the incubator.
“The belief was that you help the startups get established, and then they would remain here. They would keep their businesses here, and it would keep the industry going,” Langdon says. “For the most part, that's what we've been doing. Our mandate is really to help people establish their businesses here, and we lead them to local contractors, sample makers, and fabric suppliers.”
In 2014, 1,000 Nashville-area fashion workers were sent a survey and asked what they thought the industry needed in order to grow. The Nashville Business Journal reported that participation was low—only 97 people responded—but those people identified networking opportunities as the top need. “The formation of a fashion council that could serve as a single source of information for the community, similar to the Nashville Health Care Council or Nashville Technology Council, was identified as a first step to increase networking opportunities, but more data and research is needed to determine what that would look like,” the paper reported.
A year later, the Nashville Fashion Alliance launched with a mission of “building a sustainable and globally recognized fashion industry through advocacy, economic development, resources and education.” The Business Journal reported that the newly formed group planned to partner with the Nashville Chamber of Commerce to explore economic clustering to grow industry development. Two years after its launch, in 2017, the NFA reported that fashion contributed $5.9 billion and 16,200 jobs to the local economy and forecasted that those numbers could reach $9.5 billion and 25,000 by 2025. The report also stated that, outside of New York City and Los Angeles, Nashville now had the largest concentration of fashion companies per capita in the country. But the NFA dissolved in 2019. The NFA’s CEO, Van Tucker, told trade publication Sourcing Journal, “I know our fashion industry will continue to thrive even though access to business resources and connections might be a little tougher to access.”
In 2017, the same year that Nashville announced it was the country’s third largest fashion city, The New York Times ran this headline: “We Settle a Big Fashion Rivalry: Nashville vs. Columbus.” The Times considered eight categories to judge which city was the country’s fashion capital beyond New York and L.A. One of the criteria was “Fashion Jobs.”
Of Nashville, the Times wrote, “Does working at Singer Sewing Company count as a fashion job? What about in a distribution facility for Under Armour?” Of Columbus, the paper wrote, “For the job seeker, this city resembles a fashion version of Field of Dreams” and declared it the winner of that category (though it ultimately called Nashville the winner overall). That’s largely because of Les Wexner, who opened a clothing store called The Limited in Upper Arlington, Ohio, in 1963 and who went on to either develop or acquire the brands Express, Victoria’s Secret, Lane Bryant, Henri Bendel, and Abercrombie & Fitch. The Times described the Abercrombie & Fitch headquarters in nearby New Albany, Ohio, as a group of “modern shedlike buildings spread across 500 meadowed acres, with stylish young employees zooming on Razor scooters toward the mess hall.”
In 2016, Columbus Monthly did a deep dive on the city’s apparel industry after a study by labor market research company EMSI stated, “Central Ohio employs more fashion designers than any U.S. metro area outside of New York City and Los Angeles.” Columbus Monthly also noted the rise in “industry offshoots”—distribution and fulfillment services, supply chain management—relocating to Central Ohio. More than 8,300 people worked for Central Ohio’s apparel companies, according to the economic development organization Columbus 2020.
So while, as the Times noted, Nashville might have more glam, Ohio still has a thriving industry.
The Vision for St. Louis
One big win for St. Louis has been Evolution. Its story could act as a magnet for attracting other companies here.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 95 percent of clothing sold in the United States was made overseas. The profit margins were better. But it came at a cost. As Evolution co-founder Jon Lewis explains, the United States has always excelled at designing and developing products. When production moved overseas, it “took away a lot of the execution of that design innovation that we’re so renowned for,” he says. “When you design, and especially in Asia as a supply chain, you’re conceptualizing your product 18 months out. You’re conceptualizing a season before you’ve gone through the current version of that season—you’re talking about fall before you get to the current fall.”
For a while, it worked. Influencers would forecast the trends, they would end up on the runway, and then those garments would eventually show up in Europe, New York, and trickle out slowly to the Midwest. But now, thanks to technology, you can watch the Paris runway in real-time. People don’t want to wait two years. They want to wear those clothes now.
“The consumer dynamic changed, and the supply chain never caught up with it,” Lewis says. “The supply chain really supported that [forecasting]. When that started not to happen and they couldn’t be innovative, I think the supply chain became irrelevant.” And, Lewis says, “when you’re forecasting that far out, you’re never right.” Brands had to build selling garments at a discount into their business plans. “Initially, that worked when you’re manufacturing in China, because the prices were good,” Lewis says. “But as prices started to squeeze, brands started to de-risk their design and innovation by not taking those chances. What happened is that every brand started to look like every other brand…The consumer revolted. They’re saying, ‘The heck with that. I want brands that I can be authentic with, and I don’t want to wait 18 months, and don’t tell me what’s cool, what to wear.'” COVID-19 and the resulting supply chain disruptions, too, were "like a stick of dynamite.”
Evolution wants to build the supply chain of the future. It works with brands six to eight months out instead of 18. Designers can be more responsive to consumer demand. Maybe they can be more innovative.
Lewis and his partner, John Elmuccio, scrapped plans to open Evolution in Detroit after Sherman cold-called them and persuaded them to come to St. Louis. From its facility, Evolution houses rows and rows of Stoll flat-knitting machines to create everything from sweaters to shoe uppers to automobile textiles. Evolution now has 30 employees, and it hopes to more than double that number. It’s also planning a second facility, for 150–170 workers, set to open in 2023. But there’s a challenge: The company needs to recruit people to sew.
When Lewis and Elmuccio were thinking about starting Evolution, they recognized they’d be in uncharted territory. Lewis has worked in the apparel category his entire career but sees Evolution as a tech company—more Tesla than Tom Ford. “The good news is no one’s doing what we’re doing in the United States,” Lewis says. “The bad news is no one’s doing what we’re doing in the United States. We can’t go to company XYZ and say, ‘Hey, let’s hire away your best people.’” Programming the knitting machines requires knowledge of M1plus software. Stoll, based in Germany, has been sending teams to Evolution to help train workers. For sewing, Evolution is tapping every workforce-development program in the city. “There’s also linking, which is a unique skill to knitting,” Lewis explains. “And there are virtually no linkers in the United States—zero. We have to basically train them from scratch. Once the global pandemic is over, we’ll fly to Turkey and try to bring linkers over if we can.”
For now, Lewis is taking the long view. “I didn’t move here for 32 machines in this building,” he says. “I moved here for a billion-dollar industry sector.” He imagines yarn mills, shoe assembly plants—other factories that could spring up to support what Evolution does.
“It’s creating jobs, too,” he says. “Payroll around here is the biggest thing that I care about, but this is not a tech play where 20 people are going to make a billion dollars. This is about creating a whole community and all of the families who will benefit from it. Hopefully, we can help with a renaissance for the city.”
It’s a renaissance that Sherman envisions, too. “There’s something about it being in a city’s DNA,” she says, referring to St. Louis’ history as a garment and shoe capital. “And it’s like a sleeping giant that could be awakened. We’re on the cusp of something really big, and that’s why I get excited about it. I can see it and feel it. Even with this crazy pandemic, it’s the time—people are rethinking everything.”
