My customers tell me about their grandmothers more than about almost anything else. Not what they cooked, usually. What they could make. A christening dress. A winter coat cut down from an uncle's. A hem let out, taken in, let out again over thirty years.
October is Italian American Heritage Month, and every year it makes me think about those women. Because what they could make did not stay in their own homes. For a while, it was a good part of what America wore.
A month on the calendar since 1989
Congress first designated October as Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month in 1989, and the President's proclamation that year honored the contributions of Americans of Italian descent in business, the arts, education, government and more. October was chosen to line up with Columbus Day, then observed on the 12th.
Most celebrations focus on food, family and famous names, and they should. But there is a quieter chapter that I think about every time I pick up a garment and look at the inside of it.
At the turn of the last century, New York was the center of the American garment industry, and a large share of the people sewing in it were young immigrant women, most of them Italian or Jewish.
Sewing was the respectable way to earn
For many Italian families, it made sense. Girls had grown up sewing at home, and needlework was considered a respectable way for a woman to earn — for a single woman, a way to build a dowry, and for a married one, a way to bring money into the house without leaving the family behind. Historians of the period describe Italian women turning to the garment trade in large numbers for exactly those reasons.
The work was hard, the hours long and the pay low. The chapter everyone knows is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 1911, which killed 146 garment workers in New York, most of them young Italian and Jewish immigrant women, some only fourteen. It changed American workplace safety law, and it is still remembered every spring.
But alongside that history is another one, quieter and longer: generations of women who carried a trade across an ocean and made a living with it, and then taught it to their daughters at the kitchen table.
What's still in the closet
I buy from small Italian houses, and on almost every trip someone shows me a detail that exists only because a person with trained hands decided it should. A seam finished a little more carefully than it needed to be. A collar that sits right. Flowers worked onto the surface of a sheer blouse, like the one in these photos, made in Italy, where you can feel the detail under your fingers as well as see it.
None of that is nostalgia on my part. It is simply how good clothes still get made: by people who learned from someone, who learned from someone else. The chain is long, and in a surprising number of Italian workshops it is still a family one.
That skill is the same one those women brought with them. It did not disappear when they arrived. It went into American closets, American shops, American families — and some of it is still being practiced, in the same country it came from.
So this month, if you have a grandmother who sewed, take something she made out of the drawer and look at the inside of it. And when you want something new that was made with the same care, you'll find a few in the blouses.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
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Why Your Grandmother's Jewelry Looks Right Again
