cotton road 棉花之路

After a week hiatus to travel to Hong Kong and Macau with the other Fulbright Fellows, I am finally back to work this week on Cotton Road 棉花之路.  On Tuesday 桢 李 and I had a very good first shoot and introductory meeting with Mrs. Jiang, the General Manager of Yuan Tian High Fashion Clothing Company.  When I arrived at the factory location I was uncertain if I was in the right place.  Yuan Tian is located in what feels like a mostly residential area of Shanghai; I did see signs of light industry, but the streets around the factory are populated with small shops and low-rise houses.  Yuan Tian is in a 6 story building and occupies the top 3 floors for clothing production. A former shoe factory, the building was constructed in the 1960s.  It has very large windows (great for shooting / no flicker from off-ballast lights). Yuan Tian employs around 70 people and a lot of the workers are from Shanghai, but some come from other provinces.  The workers live nearby, but they have their meals in the factory– both lunch and dinner.  Because Yuan Tian is somewhat small in size, the feeling inside was very personable and the workers clearly knew each other well. 

Mrs. Jiang is a new entrepreneur.  She knows textiles and clothing production very well, though, because most of her work life has been spent at a state-owned yarn and textile company. When her work unit closed down, she took her years of accumulated knowledge and partnered with workers from her work unit to open Yuan Tian.  Right now Yuan Tian manufactures very high quality clothing for companies in Canada, the U.S., and Germany and orders continue to come in, even new orders from smaller companies in the U.S. (despite the economic situation). I didn’t recognize any of the brands that were being produced during our visit; a few of the labels had “Los Angeles” printed on them, so perhaps they are small designers. Yuan Tian can handle orders in size from several hundred pieces to 20,000 pieces. From the time the fabric is chosen at the textile factory to the time the product is finished takes about 20 days.  

Mrs. Jiang toured us through the factory’s different rooms, each devoted to a different process.  First, there is a room where patterns are made from a sample that is sent from the company that has placed the order. The original sample is a guide for the cutting of cardboard patterns; the cardboard patterns are then placed on top of the chosen fabric and traced.  Next door to this room there is a small room with about 4 sewing machines where the sample is produced.  Then, the sample is brought to the production floor where the workers learn how to make it.  Instruction takes about an hour.  Each sewer is responsible for one step–  for example, attaching the front and back piece, or adding the zipper, or finishing the hem. All along the way there are quality checks– both of the textile fabric and of the finished product. In a room at the end of the production line, each piece of finished clothing is ironed and then meticulously measured and checked again for quality.  Price tags are attached, and the finished product is packaged for shipment. The high fashion t-shirts we saw being packaged today were priced at $69.99.

Mrs. Jiang understands the goals of the film quite clearly, and as we were working with her today I realized that the work she does to make high quality clothing is very much like the work needed to make a film.  It is technical, aesthetic, and it takes time.  I shared this with her and she agreed. She noted, too, that I am interested in details. And there are so many to take in, especially at Yuan Tian.