Garment Industry Oral History Collection

Interview with Alice Nast Statland
Title
Interview with Alice Nast Statland
Description
Interview with Alice Nast Statland about her husband Nat Nast. She recounts her husband's history, their move to Kansas City, and his desire to go into the sport shirt business, and his later shift to specializing in bowling shirts. She discusses the business's popularity through the 1950s and '60s, and diversified into caps, jackets and other promotional apparel, and was sold by the family in the early '70s. The brand was revived as Nat Nast Luxury Originals menswear line by their daughters several decades later and garnered a lot of media exposure. She also notes that original Nat Nast shirts could command two to three hundred dollars at the time of the interview.
Object Type
Video Recording
Interview with Ann Brownfield
Title
Interview with Ann Brownfield
Description
Interview with Ann Brownfield about her experience as a designer Kansas City and other Midwestern cities. She recalls her start designing shoes in St. Louis, later teaching pattern-making in Grand Island, Nebraska, and working in sportswear, coat, and suit design at Brand and Puritz after moving to Kansas City in 1960. She describes opening her own factory in Kansas City, Kansas, designing and sewing small collections for a variety of clients, including making warm-up suits for the 1972 US Olympic ski team; and her later closure due to the decline of skilled sewing machine operators. She also discusses the decline of the local industry, manufacturing moving overseas, and later working in retail, giving tours of the old garment district, and beginning to collect clothing and other items from local manufacturers.
Date
2005-11-14
Object Type
Video Recording
Interview with Margie Sackin
Title
Interview with Margie Sackin
Description
Interview with Margie Sackin about her family's hardware and tool company, Harry Epstein Company, located in Kansas City's historic Garment District. Her father, Harry Epstein, started the business in 1930 and it served largely as a distributor to regional hardware stores, and continues to sell American-made tools primarily through its website. After Harry Epstein died in 1992, the business was run by her husband, Gene, and their sons, and a grandson. She discusses the social milieu of the garment district, local restaurants, the decline of the garment industry, and describes the operations of Harry Epstein Company, and their specialization in American-made tools, at the time of the interview.
Date
2011-01-27
Object Type
Video Recording