On the morning of March 20th, the thirty-four-year-old fashion designer Christian Siriano sat in the living room of his country house, in Danbury, Connecticut, watching the must-see TV of the moment: the daily press briefings of Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, about the state’s battle against the coronavirus pandemic. Cuomo was asked, by one reporter, whether he wished that President Trump would invoke the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force companies in other industries to begin manufacturing desperately needed medical supplies, including ventilators and P.P.E., or personal protective equipment, like masks and goggles. “Look, if I had a New York State Defense Production Act I would use it,” Cuomo answered, adding, “If you’re making clothing, figure out if you can make masks. I’ll fund it.”
Siriano, a former “Project Runway” winner who has dressed the likes of Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift, realized that he was in a position to help. He had closed his atelier a week earlier, as the outbreak in New York City was accelerating. But his team of eight sewers had brought their machines with them. Siriano had intended to keep them busy—and on the payroll—with client orders for wedding dresses and gowns for fall galas. At noon, he tweeted at the governor: “If @NYGovCuomo says we need masks my team will help make some. I have a full sewing team still on staff working from home that can help.” Within an hour, a representative from Cuomo’s office had slid into Siriano’s direct messages and accepted his offer.
The governor’s office sent Siriano a stock pattern. The mask was not a medical-grade N-95, which requires special materials, such as non-woven polypropylene, to filter microscopic particles. It was a cloth surgical mask, with three pleats, elastic ear bands, and a small metal strip that could be molded to fit the nose. Siriano had a suitable polyblend fabric in his atelier, which he had delivered to each sewer’s home. For two days, the team worked remotely. (Siriano, who does not have a sewing machine in Connecticut, served as a kind of virtual Rosie the Riveter.) But, with each sewer working on her own, they were only able to make around fifty masks a day. So Siriano asked Cuomo’s office for permission to reopen his atelier as an “essential” business. He returned to the city and gathered the team under one roof (six feet apart, of course), where they could form an assembly line. In the first week, they produced almost two thousand masks. The first box they shipped went directly to the new field hospital at the Javits Center.
On March 25th, as the mask-making was in full swing, Siriano took me on a FaceTime tour of his atelier, which occupies a prewar Beaux-Arts town house on Fifty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. It sits on what, during New York’s Gilded Age, was the site of St. Luke’s Hospital, and in the nineteen-forties served as an office for the Victory Clothing Collection for Overseas Relief, a service that gathered warm clothes from civilians to send to soldiers in need. “At one point, I’m sure similar things were being made here,” he said.
A willowy sprite with a shiny acorn cap of black hair and chunky glasses, Siriano was wearing a tight black T-shirt and slim black jeans. In a hallway on the third floor, he squeezed past a rack of several dozen sequinned ball gowns. He entered a bright, airy room full of white sewing tables that looked much like a set from “Project Runway,” and zoomed in on a half-finished wedding dress, with a kelly-green bodice and a cascading skirt of black-and-white tulle. It sat on a mannequin next to a table where a woman was attaching elastic cording to the back of one mask after another.
Siriano stressed that staff participation in the effort was entirely voluntary. The first day back in the office, after he explained the plan via a group text, around twenty people showed up to help: cutters, sewers, designers, even the building’s doorman. Now, on any given day, around ten report for duty. Each morning, private cars shuttle them from their homes to the town house. A caterer provides lunch so that no one has to leave the office and risk exposure. Twice a day, every day, the employees stop for a temperature check. American officials have advised the public against wearing masks for their own protection against the coronavirus, in part because of the dire shortage of supplies needed for health-care workers. But studies suggest that they are a worthwhile precaution. While working their stations, each staff member wears a House of Siriano mask.
In normal times, Siriano is known as the rare designer with an inclusive vision of high fashion; when the comedian Leslie Jones complained on Twitter, in 2016, that no designers would outfit her for the “Ghostbusters” première, Siriano answered the call with a regal scarlet gown. He said that he sees making masks now as an extension of his mission, which is to use his resources to help those in need—even if the need now is far more urgent than, say, a red-carpet appearance.
“Fashion is amazing. And it is beautiful,” he said. “And I think we change a lot of people's lives. But it is a luxury. It’s very surreal, to push aside, like, our ten-thousand-dollar gowns, and they just go in the corner.” It was disconcerting, he said, that a company like his was even in a position to pitch in. “It’s like wait, how is there not enough product? How was there no preparation at all? In one way, it feels good we have something to do. On the flip side, we get e-mails every day from hospitals being, like, ‘We have nothing.’ It’s a mess. It’s horrible.”
During his first week of quarantine, Siriano had spent his free time working on a series of paintings. Each showed a female figure done in the sparse, fluid style of the midcentury Vogue illustrator René Bouët-Willaumez, wearing a wispy gown and a matching face mask. On Instagram, Siriano posted a photograph of himself posing with three of the paintings. “I guess this is what my collections will be for a while now,” he wrote in the caption. “A tulle gown and mask to complete the look.”
Siriano sold the paintings and funnelled the proceeds into his mask operation—all the work he’s done so far has been pro bono. In recent days, companies much larger than his have volunteered to begin producing P.P.E. On Monday, Brooks Brothers announced that it would use its menswear factories to make a hundred and fifty thousand masks a day. Siriano says that he will keep his new operation churning as long as his supplies are needed, but he won’t mind when his staff can return to embellishing ball gowns. “I mean, my sewers are couture sewers,” he said. “Now they are making masks, which is great. But they’re not really using their talents.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
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