Temple of Cloth
At Dallas' Apparel Mart they'll sell the shirt off their back, but not without some balyhoo and only at a good price. Whoever buys it will sell it again, probably to you.
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"Many buyers think anything in New York is great and the manufacturer's word is god, not the little salesman in the regional markets. They [the buyers] get wined and dined and taken out to do the town. They think it's big stuff," one salesman comments.
Wining and dining aside, Anna Jane Runner of the Back Door in Wichita, Kansas, insists she needs New York. "I go to New York to see manufacturers I need to see. Also to see good lines that are not shown here." Most established lines are shown in Dallas, but innovative new lines which have not gained financial momentum often cannot afford the additional sales force needed to show at regional markets.
Although almost 100 manufacturers are based in Dallas and there are well over 500 throughout Texas, most major manufacturers are located on the East or West coasts. Manufacturers based in Texas are seldom "trendy" or faddish and cater to the Southwest where they do 90 per cent of their business.
Promoters of the Dallas Apparel Mart are optimistic and envision continued progress, perhaps even with Dallas becoming the dominant place to shop, but few go so far as to say Dallas will overshadow New York. Dallas is fighting two very fundamental problems. First, the city is not an industrial center. The monumental tasks of establishing the milling industry in Texas and attracting Easterners and Westerners to move their vast manufacturing plants to Dallas would be prerequisites of Dallas ever taking over where New York leaves off.
Texas, however, is the number one cotton producing state in the nation. Texas exports the raw materials necessary for fabric production to other states and then must import the finished fabric for supply to her own clothing manufacturers. The main problem standing between Texas and developing this intermediate milling process is a shortage of contract labor. The Governor's Office, through the Texas Industrial Development Commission and the Natural Fibers and Food Protein Committee of Texas, has set out to attract the fabric-producing industry.
It is difficult to predict what effect this windfall might have on the apparel industry within Texas in the next ten years. Manufacturers throughout the Southwest do not have a sales problem; they can book more orders than they can fill. Ellen Lee, general manager for Peter Thousand, a manufacturing company in business only a year, says that there has been no problem with sales but rather with getting contract labor and piece goods—precisely the two areas which Texas aims to bring under control.
According to Loren Feldman, executive director of Southwest Apparel Manufacturers, the push to develop the industry is based primarily on economy. "This type of industry soaks up the secondary labor force...it can transmute agrarian based economies to a broader base, taking the industrial burden from the cities....Decentralization is occurring by necessity primarily because of labor, and let's face it, tax benefits."
"In Dallas there's a 2.6 per cent unemployment rate, you know, you've got to go to the cemetery and dig 'em up to get people to work." Apparel is the third largest employer in the Dallas area. Working conditions aren't bad and there are reasonable employee benefits. Starting pay is $2 to $2.10 per hour and average pay, including trainees and experienced operators, is $2.49 per hour. Some companies allow work at home."
Another Texas manufacturer, Harry Cohen, vice president of Tres Petite agrees, "The people here...most of them don't want to work. Like we're busy now, we want them to work overtime on Saturday —they won't work. You want to fire 'em, fire 'em, they don't care."
"Dallas ultimately can become number one if it continues its present progress. The only thing that makes one number one and the other number two is numbers [of buyers in attendance]," Robert R. Michlin, chairman of the Apparel Mart Board of Governors and president of Robert R. Michlin Inc. (manufacturer), says. As long as Dallas is not open continuously 52 weeks a year, without the appeal of being able to deal directly with manufacturers, without large scale migration of manufacturing facilities which would lend design leadership and trendsetters to Dallas, these numbers simply cannot be achieved.
Making clothes is one thing. What is made is another. The second drawback to the growth of the Dallas mart beyond its natural regional borders is conservatism. A city whose men still thrill to whether or not a woman will go without a bra is just not ripe to become a Paris, a New York, or even an L.A.
IN TEXAS THE FASHION INDUSTRY is built on mediocrity. "Most Texas resources [manufacturers] sell well only in the five-state region. They're designed for the middle road. There is no exceptional sportswear line in Texas, if you're a good designer you head for New York or L.A.," John Christy, regional sales manager for Hubba Hubba and San Francisco Gold (clothing lines), says.
His colleague Paul Hart, salesman for Très Petite, admits that his line may not look like the height of fashion, "but it sells and it makes me a lot of money."
It's true. Dallas perennially misses the boat as a design capital. No Halstons or Oscar de la Rentas settle in Dallas for inspiration. Southwest manufacturers deny that there is any shortage in design talent or difficulty in keeping it, but design in the Southwest is much different from design in Vogue. Al Galvani, owner of Donovan-Galvani (clothing manufacturer), says most Southwest manufacturers own their own factories and cannot afford to risk producing anything but merchandise they already know their customers will buy. There is little experimentation except with color. Galvani adheres to the conservative definition of his consumer and selects the retailers to whom he sells.
Southwest manufacturers satisfy retail stores in the South and Midwest where customers must still be convinced that halter tops are not immoral, ankle length not too long, and knee length not too short. This system makes Dallas' moderately priced labels financial success stories, but denies the city fashion in the artistic sense.
In the final analysis, the status of the apparel industry in Texas can be narrowed down to something as simple as human nature and the characteristic Texas twang. For the most part, life slides by gracefully here; business is accomplished more leisurely than in other areas. Whether or not one style of doing things is better than another, it's nice to have a choice. Unfortunately, sideways glances from Eastern and Western neighbors breed a sense of inferiority in Texans who hope to compete on an equal basis. Essentially, the Apparel Mart lets it all hang out and hangs in there at third place; the manufacturers, too, stay on safe ground. The former is held back by being too indulgent, the latter by not being indulgent enough.
The most recent example is also the most pointed. The current world-wide rage for Western clothes was not satisfied by Southwest manufacturers. The Apparel Mart had to bring in East and West coast line to fill the demand. So, people in New York and L.A. willing to take a chance have made millions marketing what real Texans have been wearing for generations.
No matter how hot the fashion world becomes, the Apparel Mart still moves like a glacier—steady, slowly, predictably. It will always have a market this way, and it will always make money, providing that the tastes of middle America don't somehow race ahead of it.
To become number one Dallas would have to cease being what it is. And what it is, is a solid center for a solid business. There is nothing wrong with doing $1.5 billion a year in trade, nothing at all. The insecurity is in not being satisfied with that, in hankering after East and West Coast sophistication in a region which has always lagged behind, or which, and how much more palatable is this explanation, has set its own character.
Supply and demand, that's the name of the game. What we get to buy with our demand, however, more often is an echo than a choice. And that's how the Apparel Mart works.
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