Stitch by Stitch

In small-town Alabama, designer Natalie Chanin is keeping alive the region's rich textile and manufacturing history, one handsewn garment at a time.

- By Rima Suqi

Natalie Chanin in one of the fields where she sources organic cotton for her clothing line Inset: An Alabama Chanin artisan hand-sews a garment

NATALIE CHANIN WAS STANDING on a corner in New York City's Garment District in the summer of 2000, frustrated that she couldn't find anyone to help her sew a collection of T-shirts she'd intended to show the following year at Fashion Week. The designs were at once simple and complex, based on a T-shirt that Chanin had cut apart and sewn back together, by hand, using a specific stitch. On that day, on that corner, the then 38-year-old had an epiphany that would alter the course of her life: The elusive stitch was a quilting stitch, and the people who truly excelled at it lived in her hometown of Florence, perched on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. She temporarily moved to Lovelace Crossroads, the neighborhood where she was born and raised, placed an ad in the local paper for "part-time hand-sewing and quilting," assembled a team from the dozens of responses, created the collection in her childhood home, then went back to NYC and showed the inaugural Project Alabama collection in her apartment-showroom in the Hotel Chelsea. "I thought I was doing a one-off project," she recalls. "But the project took over my life and changed my life."