Welcome to a fun summer week, if you haven’t checked out the winners of this summer’s Olympic Fashion Week Shows, Dolce and Gabbana has our vote. This week we’re talking about the King of Style book and talent stylists using specialty fashion shops to snag custom deals for clients. It feels like a good topic as Horizon landed a deal for Netflix to produce all 4 parts which feels like an industry win for everyone. Good on Kevin Costner and Netflix. Getting tickets to see it in Raleigh was incredibly difficult as it only played in niche arthouse theaters, probably as marketing for winning the Oscars, so thanks streaming. My 70 year old mother was bummed. We’re holding out hope...
Alright, the industrial sewing classes which we’ve done for a decade plus. Our once a week courses always do much better because it gives people a chance to make real products so that’s our teaching focus this fall. One of the key weaknesses of compressing the industrial sewing course into a single week is it prevents students without prior sewing experience from having enough practice time to catch up with more advanced stitchers. Spreading it out over several weeks should help students have more fun. Class refunds are accepted until 72 hrs before they start. September 15th- October 13th Sundays 2-5 pm Costume Rigging $100/person A hand sewing class for people learning to do theater alterations and costume rigging for quick...
Scale: Non-Union $840/week Union $1080/week Minimum 6-8 weeks for jobs, ideally 6-12 month or 5-10 year contracts Meant to do a post about this, but CMT (cut, make, trim) rates appear to be set through 2027ish and SEAMS just belted out another 100 open bids for the normal job sewing stuff. Non-fashion people may imagine that sewing shops constantly make these crazy over the top art pieces for sale, but that’s two weeks a year for fashion week and an occasional fun client. 98% of the profits are realized via bread and butter accessory sales. Indy shops average $30-60/hr before tax or $18-36/hr billed weekly after taxes. Not millions. Small shops are generally looking for recurring income from corporate clients....
Happy July 4th weekend. Wow, Kevin Costner’s new Western film series Horizon is awesome. The fact that critic shills seems to hate Horizon while fans love it is just a gift to Costner. There’s great fashion and costume shifts going on right now in both the US and Europe. It’s hard to predict where all this will land and we don’t know the future. You can not hold bitterness in your life. There’s a number of people who want to hold onto the Disney imploding without looking to the next door of opportunity. Do you want to look into Apple’s cool new music sessions or follow Spotify down to Shitify with their CEO Daniel Ek? No, we did not expect Spotify to...
This past week got to learn about cigar box banjos and harp guitars. Harp guitars are fantasy and scifi’s coolest baby instrument. It also dovetails into running into long-time Animazement friends who are putting together a show for Space Elf Burlesque. There seems to be a shift from larger scale events to smaller venues. It's fun to watch as summer hits its stride. Along with music tours and vacations are beach reads. Generally into scifi, but wanted to take a moment to stop and talk about my favorite fantasy summer read: The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. The trilogy starts with City of Brass. It's free on Kindle and a fascinating look both into Egyptian culture and Djinn. You can...