Teaching the Garment District

Helping designers DIY.

OLUWOLE OLOSUNDE, a 25-year-old emergency-room nurse and designer, is also a teacher who demystifies how fashion is made in New York. In the spring, he debuted a daylong class, How to Make It in the Garment District.

The class includes a field trip. He takes students to fabric suppliers, trimmings shops, patternmakers, and sampling experts. He points out the durable zippers he prefers for jeans and where he found a great deal on corduroy. “This entire area, and everything I’ve shown you so far, is a network,” he says to the class.

His students, who pay $750 for the day, are often young people with jobs in media or retail. Most make clothes at home, sewing from scratch or altering pants and jackets with patches and embroidery. While almost everybody already has a “brand,” what each might not have is the advantage of a fancy fashionschool degree or family connections. (Olosunde grew up in Brooklyn; he learned to sew at a tailor’s shop while studying for his nursing degree at the University at Buffalo.)

One lesson Olosunde teaches his students is that they don’t need to be able to sew or sketch well to have a sample made. A conversation, and a point of reference, can suffice.

His syllabus covers runway shows and magazines like Vogue primarily as resources for research rather than ways to get noticed. Department stores get only a passing mention. Instead, he debates the merits of different brands of “blanks”—the plain T-shirts that serve as essential canvases for graphics and logos—and praises Telfar’s “Bag Security” madeto-order strategy. “He’s the preorder god,” Olosunde tells the students.

Meeluhn Blanc, 27, says she was too intimidated to venture into the Garment District before attending Olosunde’s class. She has been sewing her first collection at home while working at a gym. “I was thinking there’s a secret code to go by,” she says. Olosunde showed her there isn’t.