“My friend said, ‘Charge him a lot of money — it’s David Bowie.’ I charged him $100.”
The fall 2013 Rachel Comey show.
Via: Allison Joyce / Getty Images
BuzzFeed Fashion's "How I Made It" column takes a look at how the industry's most influential and successful players rose to the top of the business. Ahead, Rachel Comey, one of New York's most effortlessly cool designers, explains how she turned a few men's shirts into a full-fledged label that receives rave reviews from fashion's toughest critics.
I'm from Connecticut outside of Hartford. I went to University of Vermont, where I studied art and became really interested in materials. I was a sculpture major. I started in fashion when I moved to New York, which was four years after college. My first fashion job was through a friend of mine who worked in fashion-shoot production. The first day I arrived in New York, I was hired to be a production assistant on a photo shoot for Ralph Lauren, which was amazing.
My first job was to pick up a sports car, pick up a model, and bring her upstate to a photo shoot. When I first heard about the job, I was like, Oh my god, this is so much money. (I think it was a couple hundred dollars.) And I said, OK, I'll pick up the model. I was thinking we were in this together, and I picked her up and she didn't speak English and she wanted to go to Niketown, so I had to circle the block for an hour until she was done. I think she also met up with her boyfriend. But I got her to the shoot.
Then I started freelancing every which way. I was doing costume design and styling things here and there. I was making stage outfits for downtown musicians, and that is what kind of parlayed me into doing some manufacturing. I made costumes for this band Gogol Bordello. I was mostly customizing things — like, finding things and cutting them up and sewing them back together and taking off sleeves. Like DIY. (Now, actually, I sell some of my patterns to Vogue Patterns, so you can sew one of our dresses at home.)
The biggest musician I worked with was David Bowie. I was making these kind of pinstriped shirts that I had painted on — they were really photogenic for the stage. A girl who I was friends with was working with him and he wanted these shirts. And my friend said, "Charge him a lot of money — it's David Bowie." I charged him $100 for each of two shirts.
After Bowie, I found a custom shirt factory in New Jersey and I just started a small label. I was very naive — this was 2001 — and I put a runway show together and I had friends model and we just went for it. And a showroom picked me up and we went from there. I showed the two days before fashion week. It was a bummer because it was Sept. 11, and fashion week was canceled, obviously, but I showed before 9/11. That was a really weird time to start a business.
