CHRIS JOHNSON
communications specialist
A Script for a Press Conference
When Michelle Feinberg, the owner of New York Embroidery Studio first contacted me about helping her with a script for her remarks at the podium she would be sharing with NYC Mayor DeBlasio and Fashion World Mayor (AKA President of the Council of Fashion Designers of America) Diane von Furstenberg, I didn't think anything about it. These were very familiar waters. Even though I had been living in Georgia for over a decade, my ties to the New York fashion world and the city itself were still deep and strong. I have known and worked with Michelle, owner of the last-standing finishing factory in the ghost of the Garment District, since she was a sophomore at F.I.T., and know there is nowhere she's more at home than surrounded by New Yorkers, and she would be sharing the podium with two of the most New York New Yorkers imaginable doing what they do best: Celebrating New York. I put together a love letter for the love fest, the Mayor's office signed off with no corrections, suggestions, or edits, and the thing went off without a hitch.
It was only really notable because it put Michelle somewhere she rarely is: the spotlight. Prior to the pandemic, Michelle had no real presence on the internet or in media generally. It isn't that she avoids the spotlight, she's just generally too busy for it. Every designer in New York for a generation has known her (or her work) and many, like Anna Sui and Thom Browne, have worked with her closely on everything from one-off gowns for the Academy Awards (and the cover of Vanity Fair) to whole collections. She doesn't mind her name not being known because until a certain pandemic, she had all the work she and her 100 employees could handle. And then, when she reached out to me in March 2020 to help her come up with a plan for getting her studio open again and making masks and gowns (then desperately needed), our laser-targeted Tweets to New York state legislators (city officials being beyond the reach of even the president, in that moment) were only able to substantiate Michelle's credentials with the aid of two well-known New Yorkers she had shared a podium with a couple years back.
New York Embroidery Studio was the first factory in the city to get authorization to reopen and begin production of PPE. The public notice we wrote was going out at a very precarious time, when the scary morgues were visible in the city and the tension of all those movers and shakers sitting still was palpable. The notice was well received by Michelle's email newsletter subscription base, and other manufacturers followed her lead. It was noticed at the national level, and by March of 2022, New York Embroidery Studio was established as a Department of Defense contractor, leasing 80k square feet in the Brooklyn Army Terminal (alongside the Guggenheim Museum and other chic tenants) to manufacture PPE in a state-of-the-art sterile white box factory (among many other projects).
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The thing I love most about New York, and New Yorkers, is that they (we) never stop becoming the next thing we need to be. It isn't about reinventing ourselves, or even doing the 2024 "pivot." It's about always being ready to face whatever is there when you turn the next corner. You know you can do it, because you've done it ten thousand times before, and you know how much potential there is in every corner turned.
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Watch the news conference here
Click to watch.