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New York City, U.S.A
Since 2015, Custom Collaborative has worked with women from low- to no-income, BIPOC and immigrant communities in New York City to help them build careers in sustainable fashion. Training programs focus on design, fabrication, and business, sparked by founder Ngozi Okaro’s own experience working with a custom dressmaker, whose skills and experience should have been earning her far more.
Kept afloat throughout the pandemic by making masks with dead stock material, they have since been recognized by the likes of the CFDA, the Fashion Impact Fund, the United Nations, and the Fondation Chanel, with clients that range from a company making bandanas for dogs to a special project with retail giant Uniqlo.
Recently Ngozi paired with model Cameron Russell (who is now an advisor to Custom Collaborative), and photographer Camila Falquez for a photoshoot of the Custom Collaborative community and their work, supported by North Six. We catch up with them for their first conversation after the shoot.
CF:
How did Custom Collaborative start? I don't even know.
N:
You see, I was trying to ask the first question so I wouldn't have to answer any questions. [Chuckles]
The reader wouldn’t know this, but I'm tall, and so it's relatively challenging to get clothes I like off the rack, without getting them altered. I was working with a dressmaker who was from Guinea, and she'd make these really great clothes for me and charge me way less than she should. In fact, I would try to pay her more than what she charged me because she wasn't charging me enough.
But, people loved the clothes that she made for me and would stop me on the street or in the park or wherever and ask where I got them. It was too challenging for people, the steps that I went through.
I did a little bit of market research, and a focus group, and people were willing to pay $400, $500 for a dress that they could wear to work and to dinner. Mariama was charging me $65. I was just like, no, there's such a gap that this woman and her family and the community need to close. Then that's basically where the idea for the Custom Collaborative came.
CF:
Thank God you're like that.
N:
[Laughs] Thank you.
CF:
It's a blessing and a curse, but definitely a blessing.
N:
Yes, you should see for the people who have to live with me how much of a curse it might be.
CR:
What I love about what Custom Collaborative is doing, is that you're thinking about sustainability both of people and sustainability of the planet and you're marrying those two in a way that I think a lot of the fashion industry hasn't figured out yet. They really keep those conversations almost separate – as if they're separate, which they obviously are not.
I wonder, when you started, were you already thinking about sustainability of the planet? Because it sounds like the real first impetus was income sustainability.
N:
When I first started, the idea was like. “Okay, how to get people like Mariama more money?” But two weeks after, I realized this needs to involve sustainability and to incorporate that.
CR:
If you really appreciate fashion as culture, not as just capitalism – to make as much, extract as much as possible – but truly as culture, then that is about celebrating and caring for people and caring for our culture and caring for our histories and our identities and our bodies.
Why I thought to bring you into this project, Camila, is that I see that so much in your work, and though it’s coming from a different angle, it has, I think, the same intention that Ngozi and Custom Collaborative have.
I was reading the other day that the primary purpose of clothing was originally warmth, and it's what allowed humans to move further, once they could protect themselves with clothes—
CF:
I'll say more because I've been thinking about this, coincidentally – it's not that the clothing is warm, clothing doesn’t have a temperature. Clothing keeps human temperature. It's like: you are the heat, you are the heat source and there's certain clothing that sustains what you already have inside.
CR:
I love that thought. What clothing as an art form does, is that it cares for our bodies.
N:
Exactly. I was struck by what you said, Camila, about clothing keeping our heat in. It made me also think about culturally how clothing keeps us “in” and connected. I was born here, my mother is from Indiana, my father is from Nigeria, but when my dad comes and visits, he's almost always wearing some Nigerian clothing.
I like to as well, and my husband will as well. My husband's honorary Nigerian, from New Jersey. But it made me reflect on how if people come here to the US wearing their clothes, they’re still encapsulating their culture, and so you're able to walk around knowing that you're a part of something, even if you're rejected, or that is rejected here.
You have your community wrapping around you, keeping your heat, and keeping your identity within you which helps you stand up straighter.
CR:
That's so beautiful.
CF:
Cameron and I have been on many, many, many sets, and I tend to always have really beautiful sets to shoot. I cater the energy, I cater love, I'm in it. I'll say that the shoot we had the other day is one of the most beautiful, worth it, and validating shoots of my life. The amount of hugging, crying, kids, and just beautiful women. It makes my work worth it to see that people react like that to it. I'm going to say we did one of the biggest fashion shoots of all times.
CR:
That's right, in terms of heart. [Chuckles]
What I see Custom Collaborative doing is not just, like, "Hey, this is an industry that should sustain people and the planet." That's obvious. But actually, here is really tangibly how we do the work. Here we have done these 10 cohorts. Here are the actual women who are doing this work. It's very material and tangible, it is a group of women in an industry that employs one in four women in the entire world. One in four women in the formal economy work in fashion. Most don't make a livable wage. Most are women of color. Most are not in positions of power. Most are in countries that are going to be feeling and are feeling the effects of climate change first as the industry contributes to that.
Then we have this opportunity to vision a future that when you see these photographs, you think, "This is fashion. This is possible. This is the fashion industry that is right now. It's so possible." In doing that, photography allows us to pull those visions so much closer, to pull that dream so much closer.
CF:
There is a performer and writer I really admire called Alok Vaid-Menon, and they have this sentence that I've adopted to try to explain what we do, and what photography does for me, which is “manifesting the impossible.” What they say is ‘impossible,’ photography shows you as a reality. It is not an impossible, it's here. Now reality needs to catch up to something we're showing you already exists.
CR:
That's right.
N:
I love this because I never thought about that, but you're right. My barber had said to me “I saw this really great haircut on the street – this girl had this haircut, but there was a guy with her, and so I didn't want to stare because I knew that something would happen,” but with a photograph, you can actually stare. It's a real person and you can get to know them and just see all the details.
CR:
I think that the word "intimacy" is very right. What photography also does, it says we are intimate, and we are interconnected.
N:
Camila, when we looked at your project “Gods That Walk Among Us,” it was so clear that with people who we've marginalized, you saw them and photographed them as they were and not as caricatures and characters. I was like, "Yes, this lady gets it. She can take pictures of us and present us as who we are with dignity and personhood, even though we're fat and short and tall and immigrant and non-native English speakers and nervous and old and reluctant," all of those things, you could do that.
It was so good for, I think, our fellows to see themselves and to see each other in a different light. I feel like they were able to see themselves as I see them, and not how they internally see themselves.
