♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (piano music) STUART WEITZMAN: When we buy something like a shoe or a shirt, we're only thinking of its future-- when we're going to wear, where we're going to wear it, what we're going to wear it with.

But a product like a handmade garment has a past.

ROBERT PINSKY: "Shirt."

The back, the yoke, the yardage.

Lapped seams, the nearly invisible stitches along the collar turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians, Gossiping over tea or noodles on their break.

Or talking money or politics while one fitted this armpiece with its overseam to the band of cuff I button at my wrist.

GREGORY LEVINE-ROZENVAYN: I can see the similarities between creating the shirt and creating a poem.

ANNA PHILIPS: What I think is unique about fashion, of all product design, is that it's touched by hand the whole time.

There's somebody sewing every single seam, there's somebody attaching every single button.

Picking the button, picking the size, picking the thread, picking the stitches per inch.

JOHNSON HARTIG: All of us, every day, put on these shirts, and don't think anything about the process or the people that went into making it.

WEITZMAN: The whole poem is about human beings.

That to me is the common thread.

NEW: Just as the whole history of garment making is in this poem, the whole literary history... - I hope the history of verse making.

♪ ♪ (cars passing) ELISA NEW: In order to explore what goes into your shirt, I traveled to New York City during fashion week.

♪ ♪ I asked the designers of two iconic brands-- the shoe designer Stuart Weitzman and Johnson Hartig, creator of Libertine-- to meet me at Bergdorf Goodman, where our hostess would be Betty Halbreich, the store's legendary personal shopper.

I also went to the Parsons School of Design at the New School to talk to some young designers and their teacher, as well as two young poets.

Back in Boston, U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky was ready to turn his "Shirt"-- his poem-- inside out for me.

- The consonants are defining those and slicing those.

NEW: The poem begins, really, with a list.

And there are many lists that occur throughout the poem.

Here's the first of them.

"The back, the yoke, the yardage.

Lapped seams."

WEITZMAN: When you read those terms, if you look at your shirt, you can see them.

Even if you can't relate the yoke, which is traditionally the word that ties animals together with a wooden harness of sorts.

It ties the shirt together by the piece that's in the back to hold the shoulders together and the sleeves.

BORNBAUM: Sometimes I really wonder how many people actually know what a yoke on a shirt is.

They don't know what that little square, rectangle, or triangle piece of fabric that some designers spend time thinking about where it's going to go and how it's going to be stitched in, and how close to the seam that stitch needs to be in order to make it look clean.

And are they going to use two lines of stitches or one, and what kind of machine are they going to use in order to make that happen?

(machinery running) PINSKY: The presser, the cutter, the wringer, the mangle.

The needle, the union, the treadle, the bobbin.

There's all kinds of words.

But I like the language of trades.

A nature poet knows the names of birds and plants, and says, "Oh, that leaf has a dendritic pattern."

WEITZMAN: In the shoe business, we have our drafters, our cutters, our skivers, our lasters.

It's precise.

(piano music) HALBREICH: If you come in and find a dress, and you love it, it doesn't fit... And I'm just saying that very loosely.

What do I do about it?

What do you about it?

I get a lot of whining.

"I really want this dress-- can you really do something?"

Down comes a woman, and they come with their pincushion.

They're all from Slovakia or Hungary or Russia.

(machinery running) MAN: There are a lot of Asians, but also, like, Mexicans, and a lot of South Americans.

WOMAN: My grandmother used to work in the clothing factory, too, when she was a young girl.

WEITZMAN: 180 workers to make a shoe.

And every one of them is a family.

I mean, I... 50 years, I get to know them.

Their sons worked for me, now, their grandsons and granddaughters work in the factories.

People ask me if I did research for this poem.

Heck no.

My mother and father considered themselves glamorous people, stylish people, so that shopping had a certain pride to it.

So I know what a yoke is on a shirt.

A placket?

Yeah, sure.

WOMAN: The placket, it's the double layer where they have the buttons.

WEITZMAN: "The presser, the cutter, the wringer."

Does he mean the presser the person, or the presser the machine?

Does he mean the cutter the machine, or the cutter the person?

I think he means both.

I think I was aware when I put those words together it was partly playing with the names of the skills-- presser, cutter, all those "E-R" words.

But also that, as well as having a beauty to it, there's a dehumanizing quality to labor as well.

Merging of the person and the equipment, and replacing a person by equipment, remain very intense social, political, economic issues.

(machinery running) "The treadle, the bobbin.

The code.

The infamous blaze at the Triangle Factory in 1911."

LEVINE-ROZENVAYN: The last line of every stanza raises the stakes.

The beauty of the last lines are that they propel us to the next stanza.

It's like the lens is zooming in.

It starts pretty broad, with the components of a shirt, and starts narrowing down to a physical space, the sweatshop.

In the third stanza, the last line, "the infamous blaze," we've now zoomed in so close that we're talking about a specific moment in 1911.

(people screaming) PINSKY: "146 died in the flames on the ninth floor.

No hydrants, no fire escapes."

No one knows why it started, and it could have been pencils or shoes.

It didn't... it wasn't because it was garments.

It was down in Greenwich Village-- I think the building's still there.

And the three top floors caught on fire.

In those days, workers were not well thought of, so to keep them in and make sure they weren't out smoking for 15 minutes, but get their job done, everything was locked.

I mean, it wasn't just that there were no fire escapes, or hydrants-- you couldn't even get out.

They had them locked.

Wow-- I mean, gosh.

Imagine, these girls can't get out of... you know, there's-there's no door... there's no door.

It's just unreal.

And they're young girls, they're young girls.

HALBREICH: His thrust is the people in that factory.

Not the window and not the fire, and whatever.

It's every individual that worked at every machine.

(fire crackling) PINSKY: "The witness in the building across the street who watched how a young man helped a girl to step up to the windowsill, then held her out, away from the masonry wall, and let her drop.

"And then another.

"As if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, "and not eternity.

"A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck "and kissed him.

Then he held her into space and dropped her."

(flames roaring) LEVINE-ROZENVAYN: If there wasn't beauty, it would be very depressing to get through that really painful moment.

Umm... poets find beauty in everything.

LAUREN ROUTT: That longing as human beings that we have to connect with someone even as we're facing death or facing something perilous, that we still are eager for that human connection.

And so, I just...

I thought that was beautiful.

Wanting to feel love, or wanting to feel touch.

NEW: The kiss is especially beautiful, because there's a kind of romance, like a ten-second romance.

And, being a young girl, it could have been the only kiss that she ever had in her whole life, so she had... she had a little romance before she fell to her death.

NEW: With great ceremony and a kind of chivalry, this last girl puts her arms around... - And kissed him.

There's a mutual kindness and ceremony, so that it may include a sexual meaning, but it also has a meaning of mutual comfort and reassurance.

"Almost at once, he stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared and fluttered up from his shirt "as he came down.

"Air filling up the legs of his grey trousers, "like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, 'shrill shirt ballooning.'"

A great American poet is Hart Crane, and his poem to Brooklyn Bridge, a poem very important to me.

And that moment when he says "A Bedlamite falls, shrill shirt ballooning," it's a great phrase, in my opinion.

Shrill, the whiteness of his shirt.

There's almost a tragicomic whistle that we hear in that shrill shirt ballooning.

♪ ♪ I was speaking to someone yesterday, and I showed her this poem.

She's a lawyer.

And we started to talk about it, and she said, "Betty, I know you don't remember Frances Perkins."

I said, "Of course I remember Frances Perkins."

She was Franklin Roosevelt's first woman Secretary of Labor.

She live in New York, and when he was governor, she had passed this factory when it was on fire, so the story goes, and thought that... the people they were throwing out, she thought were bales of fabric.

WENDY ODUOR: This happened, and it's not right, you know?

And people were hurt, and the reason they were hurt is because of poor conditions.

ROUTT: This incident actually caused a change in our American fabric.

We are now able to have breaks if we're working in a factory.

Like, we can have fire hydrants, we can have escape routes.

We sort of cleaned that up in America.

We... we've evolved, and we have sane workplaces.

But you know what we haven't evolved into?

We don't even think about where we moved those sweatshops, because they are still on this planet.

♪ ♪ HARTIG: Being very conscientious about how we make things, it's devastatingly sad to think that people have, you know, lost their lives making these things that we put on and don't think anything about.

PINSKY: "Wonderful, how the pattern matches perfectly "across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme, or a major chord."

NEW: You've begun to allow us to think both about the making of a garment and the making of a poem.

These two crafts as they speak to each other.

- There are some useful words that, involve, you know, material, fabric, texture, pattern.

(piano and strings playing) NEW: Pinsky has chosen unrhymed iambic pentameter, with its regular alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables for this poem's metrical baseline.

But only loosely.

Like poets before him, he lets the irregularity of natural speech pull against the theoretical form, like the imperfections in a hand-loomed fabric.

Playful shadings of image and sound add even more texture.

♪ ♪ PHILIPS: Bar-tacking is a little, little stitch.

It's just like a quarter of an inch of stitches really, really close that hold something in place, like the edge of a pocket.

Bar-tacks could be on different angles.

A lot of people use them and add a little color.

PINSKY: "Wonderful, how the pattern matches perfectly "across the placket, and over the twin bar-tacked corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme, or a major chord."

(major chord plays) NEW: Strict rhymes, with their alternating patterns of sound, strengthen the form of a poem, not unlike the way major chords do in music.

♪ ♪ But both, too, depend on shadings and variations that lend complexity.

The pattern is made out of matching and symmetry.

And the pleasure of that crosses art forms.

HARTIG: Yes.

- From fashion to poetry to... To the universe is patterns and repetitions.

NEW: I think that's houndstooth you have on there.

- Yeah, it is.

This is houndstooth.

NEW: Let's see, let's see.

Yeah, you have houndstooth cuffs.

XUEYUAN JIAN: The way we draw it is we draw a little square, black, and then we draw the other square black, and then we connect two squares with a diagonal line.

It requires a lot of diligence in the cutting.

>> JIAN: It is pretty elegant, but it's hard to actually be made into a garment, because you have to match up all the, like, prints.

It's delicate, it's intricate, it's very difficult.

I don't need people to notice that the poem is in iambic pentameter-- it's in unrhymed blank verse.

NEW: It's invisible stitching.

- I hope they don't notice-- I hope it just somehow sounds good, or feels good.

I know that I did the stitching to make it come out in what I hope is subtle, muted blank verse.

(sewing machine humming) "Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras."

NEW: Madras comes from India.

The trade is global for economic reasons, but also because these textiles give us the look of faraway places.

- Exactly.

You know, the curiosity cabinet, the exotic, the unknown, the new, and the wonderful.

ODUOR: When I think of the prints, the plaids, it makes me think of the beauty of, you know, the variety that we have as designers to make into a cloth.

PHILIPS: Plaids and stuff come from Scotland and England.

I think a lot of it comes from England, to be honest.

Houndstooth are old English fabrics that the huntsmen's jackets were made out of.

NEW: Particular plaids were associated with different regions in the Scottish Highlands, and people wore these clothes as, in a way, uniforms, and declarations of identity, and now they come down to us, and we have... when we wear certain kinds of plaid, we feel like we're being Scots.

WEITZMAN: Or outdoorsmen.

♪ ♪ HARTIG: It certainly does conjure up these really nostalgic, romantic images.

You know, clan plaids.

I guess I imagine these heather fields in Scotland and castles.

It's all just pure romance.

(train horn blowing) I honestly didn't know that mill owners in Scotland just made up these clan names.

"The clan tartans invented by mill owners, "inspired by the hoax of Ossian, to control their savage "Scottish workers, tamed by a fabricated heraldry: "MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin.

"The kilt devised for workers to wear among the dusty clattering looms."

You know, we always sentimentalize people we feel guilty about.

The kilt is a bit like that.

They really practiced a kind of extermination on the Highland Scots, the English and the Lowland Scots did.

So out of a kind of mixture of guilt and recompense and denial, they started... NEW: They gave them a romantic... - Oh, the tartans and the kilts and so forth.

♪ ♪ NEW: You have the history of colonialism that takes the English to Scotland, to India, to the United States, where slaves in calico head rags sweated.

(loom clacking) PINKSY: "Weavers, carders, spinners.

"The loader, the docker, the navvy.

"The planter, the picker, the sorter sweating "at her machine in a litter of cotton as slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields."

HARTIG: So the shirt is a product of slavery, and there's just no getting away from that.

"George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady "in South Carolina, her name is Irma, and she inspected my shirt."

NEW: Is George Herbert part of the history of colonialism?

Of course.

That's why I'm speaking the same language that he did.

At the risk of asking a poet to explain his allusions, I wonder if you could talk about the allusions to other poets.

- Well, Ralph Ellison says you choose your ancestors.

At some point, I chose Hart Crane, and I chose George Herbert.

George Herbert is my great-great-great-great- great-grandfather.

Not really.

Your poetic... he's your poetic ancestor?

- I love his poems.

They're made so beautifully.

The invisible stitches are very well handled.

I marvel that I am his descendant in art.

"George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady "in South Carolina, her name is Irma, "and she inspected my shirt.

"Its color and fit and feel and its clean smell have satisfied both her and me."

So, who's Irma?

You know, South Carolina.

I imagine, you know, Irma working in a very hot factory, and she's tired, and she's, you know, inspecting these shirts.

ROUTT: The fact that he capitalized black and he capitalized lady, that says to me that even though this history of slavery existed, she still deserves a name, and her name is Irma.

JIAN: When I see something that is perfectly stitched, or perfectly designed, I usually find the tag.

That makes me wonder, like, where and how?

I remember, even as a kid, being fascinated by those numbers in the back of a collar.

I always wondered what they were there for, and who did them.

I remember Laura Signorelli.

Inspected by?

She changed it and said... can we use this?

"I'm the last person to inspect your shoes.

I hope you enjoy them and are satisfied with them as I am."

And she signed her full name.

She's sort of in charge of this shirt at this moment, and she's kind of taking ownership of that.

And she wants to make sure that he looks good.

And so, once again, it creates that human connection that we see in the beginning of the poem.

♪ ♪ NEW: You want to feel something has been handed to you by another human being, which takes me back to that kiss.

That there is an intimate moment of connection when you buy a garment that was made by a person's hands.

That's what I said.

The human being in every line of this poem is what ties it together.

I think it's sort of a nice way to end the poem.

It's kind of kind, and telling you that it is really what he feels in his heart.

I think this is very heartfelt, this poem.

PINSKY: I hope the poem is trying to meditate through what is right next to my skin-- all the history, good and bad and in between and unthinkable and weird and beautiful, all history.

I put it on every day.

And I may complain or moralize, but I also say, "Oh, I hope I look good."

"We have culled its cost and quality "down to the buttons of simulated bone.

"The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters "printed in black on neckband and tail.

"The shape, the label, the labor, the color, the shade.

The shirt."

♪ ♪