New York Fashion Week begins next week, and the city will host over 100 fashion shows and presentations. These events will feature hundreds of items of clothes, samples actually, many of which were sewn by people working in local factories. The garment industry needs people who can sew but that population continues to shrink. Libby Mattern, production director, swimwear and ready-to-wear at Malia Mills, a company that manufactures its collections in New York and Los Angeles, knows the trend all too well and wants to change it. She established the nonprofit Course of Trade, at Malia Mills’ Brooklyn headquarters, to train people in sewing and get them jobs. “I’m always in and out of factories, working hand-in-hand and talking with factory owners. Once our production ramped up, or if they got a new client, finding ways to expand their workforce was always a challenge,” Mattern explained. “They would end up having to slow down production because they could not find people to fill the void or they would turn away customers because they knew they could not meet the demand.” Mattern, who earned a bachelor of science in fiber science and apparel design from Cornell University, the same degree as her boss Malia
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