If only the salwar had pockets. Am working on this.

Merry

http://www.merrystahel.com/author/MyFavoriteCharities.htm

* As opposed to, say, Union Carbide in India, or the various lumber companies that are de facto running northern Burma, or (perhaps) Hong Kong companies and their factories on the mainland. Or any of a myriad other corporation-as-local-government stories, really.

I do think your list needs:

8. Someone to let them know about 1 - 7, and provide advice on presentation.

Colby Cosh has a column on this here. An excerpt:

"The MFA was a GATT side agreement -- actually a complicated web of bilateral treaties -- that was enacted in 1974 with the goal of slowing trade liberalization with respect to clothing and textiles. This is a polite way of saying that the rag trades in rich countries felt particularly vulnerable to all this free-trade chatter that was going around, and wanted protection for as long as possible. So Western governments adopted a system of import quotas, agreeing, essentially, to divvy up the world's textile production and enforce the division by fiat. The original agreement was meant to last only five years, but was renewed five times. This year, after a process of phase-out that began in 1995, it was finally permitted to lapse."

Ulrika, you say you're "working on it" re pockets. Aftermarket, or negotiating with the vendor to have them included?

I know which one bugs me more. But I also know which one can me measured, aggregated into spreadsheets, and quoted in statistics.

I'd also add another couple of points to your list:
9. A computer with internet access (and all the "piping" that goes with it - power, telecoms)
10. A language in common

Or, alternatively, someone who can mediate for you in that language.

I agree with regard to 9. but I would also note that a shop needn't have their own computer to do this. I don't know how things are in India but the American practice of individual ownership is not in place everywhere. Some people have learned how to share. And whole nations have connected through Sattelite uplinks without ever getting strung with wires.

You sure they're not dyeing?

Short blonde lady who loves purple and lives in Washington.

Items like that coin purse are purchased on one kind of impulse or other -- either an adult who has suddenly decided she needs one (possibly through Sudden Catastrophic Coinpurse Failure) or for/by a child who just wants something from the store, doesn't much matter what, and has already been told, No Candy. It's a niche of two-dollar items. If they carried a craft-quality beaded item, it would be in a different price category entirely, and would be stored in a case requiring staff assistance for purchase. It's possible that the net profit of a few such sales would equal that of the cheap goods, but that's by no means certain. For most customers, a handful of two-buck znatchky isn't a substitute for a single more expensive item; they either buy the cheap stuff or nothing, or they add the handful to the major purchase as giveaways for the people at home, adult or child, who are pleased to have been brought something.

The shop at the Metropolitan sells craft jewelry by some outstanding artists, at appropriate prices, (must remember to remind Elise of this), and they sell injection-molded plastic keychains that don't pretend to be art of any kind, though they may have a hot-stamped legend on the order of "I asked for a Warhol. I guess I should be happy."

Or is it too colorful?

The seller, MysticLotus, is an ongoing fundraising project for the K-12 Kalachandji School in Dallas. The clothes they sell are donated by wealthy Indian families, and they're fabulous beyond anything else you're going to find on eBay: beautifully designed bespoke garments--many, I suspect, are one of a kind--in luxury fabrics, with top-quality handwork and all kinds of lovely details. I just want someone my size to start donating to their cause.

I'm sure I've encountered things too colorful for me, but I can't call one to mind off hand. You should see the lovely purple, fuschia, green, gold, and black jacket I had made recently..

MKK

Of course, you could always pull a "buy it now" with this, then ask Alka how much IndiaShop would charge to make it up for you.

*falls over* Their aqua/butterscotch sari set is ... *wow*. Gorgeous. I want it. Except it would not in a million years fit in the bust, and even if it did I don't know where the heck I'd wear it. But wow, *gorgeous*. Thanks for the link!

Well I bid on that one because I really liked the colors. So I guess it's very me -- only natural you'd think of me.

Catie Murphy: You need to go to cons. To quote my friend Kathleen, "Being a science fiction fan means never having to say, 'But where would I wear that?'"
MKK

Just start thinking about it as a long length of extremely gorgeous fabric, and go from there.

If you really want to wear it and the sari blouse that goes with it is made up in a smaller size, find out if there is an Indian clothing store in your area. They will carry off-the-rack sari blouses and petticoats in a variety of sizes and colors. The blouse won't be quite as wonderful as the one that is made off of the sari's (original) hem, but it will enable you to wear your gorgeous length of fabric (and its plainness will be hidden by the end of the sari draping across the bodice)!

I have 2 saris - I have only tried on one at one time (my Indian friend who gave it to me went with me to an Indian clothing shop and helped me buy a blouse and petticoat, then we went home and had a fashion show - talk about squeee!). My dad bought me the other when he was in India a few months ago. It is beautiful, but heavy, slippery silk: I may have it made up into something else, as I have been warned (by people who know from long years' experience) that such saris can be truly difficult to wear!

(*) Janice Gelb reported on her blog recently that she was told "salwar kameez" is both singular and plural.

Mary Kay, this has been one of my most pleasant surprises about fandom: that it is filled with people who appreciate both ends of the spectrum of my taste in clothing. I can get compliments on a really geeky T-shirt or a cute little skirt and a killer pair of stockings or whatever else beyond. I started telling people, "Conventions are the girliest thing I do all year." Strange in a good way.

Indian stuff is pretty ok, but seriously, I see the same skirt I bought for $5USD selling at $40USD online.

What's with that?

The clothing industry has always had bespoke tailoring, and maybe the entrenched mass-product side of the industry isn't going into RIAA-mode because they don't see this sort of trading as new, or as a threat. And they might be doing the right thing by mistake.

As a man, I'm just wondering how much scope I have for "getting away with" unconventional fashion. This isn't the same as the tailor in Hong Kong, whose prices are low enough to make a trip half-around the world worthwhile.

Whatever did happen to Adam and the Ants. Doctor Who is back, but this time around he just doesn't have the same style.

(Living with someone who can't tolerate synthetics, I've become a Fabric Snob of my own: cotton, silk, linen, and very occassionally -- hey, I live in the desert! -- wool.)

I concur: "And it's not just women who sometimes like to wear their better stuff to conventions."

For many years I wore my very conservative Brooks Brothers black pinstriped suit to cons. It was, of course, a costume -- made me look as if writing earned me serious money.

The late Allen Ginsberg once told me: "the most subversive costume for a poet is a three-piece suit." After he earned a $100,000 advance on his Collected Poems, he did indeed wear such a suit to, for instance, the ABA in L.A.

OTOH, this can be combined with radically weird vests (Robert Forward) or neckties (David Hartwell).

I can't quite fit into that Brooks Brother suit, but my 16-year-old looks fabulous in it!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12587-2005Mar30

They had more pictures in the paper version, I don't know why they don't put those online.

Jill--my mom's a fantastic seamstress. I'm thinking I should email the seller and see if they could tell me if there's enough seam to be able to let the bodice out some, but even if that's not possible, I bet you're right and I could find something local that'd go well enough to allow me to wear the rest of the ensemble.

*beam* Thanks for suggestions. :)

Dave Bell: This isn't the same as the tailor in Hong Kong, whose prices are low enough to make a trip half-around the world worthwhile.

My folks referred a NYC friend of ours to our then-local tailor when he came to visit. We estimate that he must have bought something like a dozen quality, (literally) tailor-made items like suits, shirts and the like; must've spent thousands of USD. When I asked about it, I was told the same thing as you just said: the amount our friend saved on that clothing was something like three times the cost of his plane ticket. Nice work if you can get it.

::beams:: Glad I could be of help! I'm always willing to act as an Indian-textiles enabler....

Going on from that thought, it seems to me that, historically speaking, liberty is one of those things like happiness that comes along better as a side effect rather than a goal. Liberty often seems to develop as a side effect of people having choices, and specifically economic choices. You see liberty bursting out like primroses whenever there are more jobs than people and people are allowed to move about. To use a couple of US examples, look at Franklin, and, more recently, the way that during the tech boom, techies weren't required to wear corporate drag, or do other things most people accept as indivisible from getting a well-paid job.

MKK

Interestingly, that's more or less what Colin Powell was talking about on NPR this morning in his "I believe..." segment.

Huzzay! Teresa for President!

Oh wait. If you're off being president, who's going to find new books for me to read? Never mind....(and BTW, from here it looks like the new meds are working.)

There's an excellent book by a educated-hands archaeologist on the history of labor in cloth: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by E. Barber.

I would like to know that I wasn't patronizing local sweatshops... although I hope that local makers will be more able to disintermediate close aggregation than far. Maybe not true at family-scale.

The problem with the Southern mill owners is that, whether they win or lose, the fallout will hit their employees--the people sitting at the sewing machines. I'm not saying we should therefore preserve tariffs and stop buying from Pakistan, but seems to me "should we have tariffs?" is not the question; "how can we help people displaced when a propped-up industry collapses?" is.

Of course, that usually involves gov'ment money, which is not something the administation likes to spend on the little guy. You Must Be At Least This Wealthy To Ride the Ride.

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