I stopped dead on Broadway, in the middle of the sidewalk, and stared, not up at the beautiful wrought-iron SoHo buildings, as would befit someone who’d moved to New York in the past month, but at an ordinary sign advertising a small clothing shop. The logo, a casual cursive scrawl with both E's capitalized, jumped out at me like a beacon from a lighthouse somewhere deep in the back of my brain. That was the logo emblazoned on my baby clothes, the logo my great-grandfather created. It was, I thought, forgotten family history, the factories having shut down shortly after I was born in the '80s. After a moment I took out my phone and called my mom and asked her what the hell was going on.
The author sporting Madewell baby denim.
Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family.
She’d heard something about this. Madewell was back, somehow, but she wasn’t sure exactly how or why. I wandered inside the store. It was all women’s clothing — expensive women’s clothing. I found a clerk and said, in some jumbled, excited, confused way, that this was my shop, that Madewell was my family’s business. I think she thought I was angling for a discount. After politely and professionally feigning interest while I struggled to explain a history I didn’t even really know, the clerk stopped me. “We don’t sell men’s clothes,” she said.
Over the next four years, I saw Madewell everywhere. Today there are three stores in Manhattan alone, and 77 throughout the country. On bags on the subway, on tags of clothes worn by friends, I am constantly bombarded with totems of my family history.
Asking my family yielded the basics: Madewell as it stands today began in 2004. That's when Millard "Mickey" Drexler, now the CEO of J.Crew, acquired the logo and the trademark of the company my great-grandfather founded in 1937. Dhani Mau, a senior editor at Fashionista, said, “J.Crew considers it their younger sister brand,” though she said it’s not necessarily for younger sisters. Pressed to pick out a celebrity who might typify the Madewell girl, Mau chose Kate Bosworth and Rachel Bilson. This does not entirely jibe with my mental picture of my tough immigrant great-grandfather selling stiff denim overalls to New England dockworkers.
Still, Madewell will not let you forget the date 1937. The store could originally be found online at madewell1937.com, and the year is prominent on the site and on some of the clothing. The company's Instagram and Twitter handles are both still @Madewell1937, and its LinkedIn page says, "Madewell was started in 1937 as a workwear company, and we're always looking to the brand's roots for inspiration."
This is, to put it mildly, baloney. Madewell as it stands today has almost nothing at all to do with the company founded by my great-grandfather almost 80 years ago. How many vintage labels out there have similar stories? How many corporations are out there rifling through the defunct brands of America’s past like a bin of used records, looking for something, anything, that will give them that soft Edison-bulb glow of authenticity?
Madewell’s story — my story — leading up to that moment in SoHo began over a century ago, half a world away. It traces the evolution of how Americans shop, and how Americans shop heavily informs how Americans see themselves; we, as a country, are what we buy. Mickey Drexler, in creating J.Crew’s new womenswear stores, shrewdly read the market and realized that stocking nice clothes wouldn’t be enough: He’d have to tell a story along with them. Drexler didn’t have any stories, so he bought ours.
A view from the Madewell store in NYC's Soho.
Flickr: Ludovic Bertron / Creative Commons (CC BY 2-0) / Via Flickr: 23912576@N05
Julius Kivowitz was born in Russia in 1889 or thereabouts. His name was not Julius Kivowitz at the time — it was Beham.
At the turn of the century, the Russian Empire required that all males, starting at age 20, serve in the army, and Julius seemed to be not very taken with this prospect. The Beham family was fairly well-off and managed to secure a sponsor for Julius in the U.S., in a prosperous Massachusetts port city near Providence called New Bedford. There was only one problem: Any attempt by Julius to leave under his own name would have exposed him as a draft dodger. (Some in my family, including his youngest daughter, referred to him as a "conscientious objector." Whether he objected to war or merely his own participation in the war isn't clear.) My cousin Judy told me that Julius invented his new last name by going to a cemetery and picking out the name of someone who, had he lived, would have been about the same age.
A young Julius Kivowitz seated in the center.
Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz
It was a good time for a Jew to leave Europe. By 1906, pogroms — huge, brutal, bloodthirsty, anti-Jewish riots — were commonplace in the Russian Empire. Mobs of Russians burned and sacked entire Jewish towns, murdering men, women, and children, with the implicit permission or even participation of police. Many Jews fled, the newly renamed Julius Kivowitz and his fiancée, Fannie, among them. (It was somewhat scandalous and also a bit romantic that the two fled together before they were married.) He landed at Ellis Island at age 19, stayed in New York for a few years, moved north to Connecticut, and then went further eastward up the Atlantic coast to New Bedford.
Fannie Kivowitz
Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz
When my great-grandfather arrived there some 90 years ago, New Bedford was just beginning the decline from its status as one of the country’s most bustling, wealthiest port cities. New Bedford had been the whaling capital of the world, one of the settings in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Hundreds of huge, magnificent schooners and clipper ships were built and launched from its port. By 1850, thanks mostly to profits from whale oil, New Bedford was the wealthiest city per capita in the country. But the whale oil industry collapsed, and by the time the wave of immigrants that included my great-grandfather and his young family settled there in the 1920s, the town had pretty much abandoned whaling and turned to fishing and manufacturing.
Julius, like so many of his generation of immigrant Eastern European Jews, was an entrepreneur with no particular passion besides financial success. First he opened a grocery store, earning enough money to, along with a partner from New York, move into textiles. It was a natural move for Julius, as it was for many other Jews, who brought a centuries-long tradition of textile manufacturing with them from Europe. Beginning around the 16th century in Eastern Europe, Russian and Polish Jews began working with wool. By the 1860s, heavily Jewish cities like Lodz and Bialystok were textile-manufacturing centers; more than half of the textile industry in Bialystock was Jewish-owned. This was pretty much stamped out by the 1930s, thanks to decades of violent anti-Semitism perpetrated by independent Poland. But Julius had already fled Eastern Europe and made his home in New Bedford.
In 1936, Julius filed for the Madewell trademark, and in 1937 he opened his first factory. No one seems to know why he picked — or if he himself even did pick — that name. But I don’t think his English was ever all that good, and there’s something very clean and utilitarian about it.
The Kivowitz kids: (from Left) Barbara, Lillian, Beatrice and Haskell.
Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz
There is nobody alive who remembers the earliest chapters of Madewell. The only one of Julius' children still living is my great-aunt Barbara, the youngest of the Kivowitz brood by nine years. Her husband, Aaron, ran the shipping department of Madewell, but didn't come on until 1951. Nobody knows much about that mysterious New York partner who oversaw the factory floor but vanished from the company within a few decades. Nobody knows how many workers — "stitchers," they were called — were employed at first. Nobody, to be frank, seems to know much about Julius. The documents I could find from that era give the date of the company’s founding but not much else; whatever records Madewell kept from its early years are gone. After questioning damn near everybody still alive who ever met him, here are the facts I gathered about my great-grandfather:
1. He spoke mostly a mix of Yiddish, Russian, and English, with a thick accent.
2. He was rarely seen without a cigar.
3. He loved the card game pinochle, and played every week.
4. He didn’t talk much, and I can find exactly no one who can recall him saying a single word about his childhood in Russia.
5. He liked nice things. He built a big house and filled it with expensive appliances and Oriental rugs, which seems to have annoyed his wife Fannie, who did not care much for extravagance.
That's it.
His employees at the time likely included the dominant immigrant groups of New Bedford: Portuguese speakers largely from the Azores and Cape Verde, French Canadians, and possibly some Jews. The company at the onset was designed smartly and specifically to cater to the substantial working class of the community: It made jeans, dungarees (which differ from jeans in that the threads are pre-dyed before weaving), and bib overalls. These were hardy work clothes, intended for use inside the factories and fisheries of New England.
Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family
Madewell was a family operation. Julius' son Haskell and his sons-in-law Aaron and Jerry ran departments (sales, shipping, and manufacturing, respectively) within the company. Various cousins and nephews and nieces and grandchildren worked there during summer vacations from school. Gradually, as Haskell took a larger role in the company, Madewell branched out into other clothes.
By the early 1960s, Haskell's strategy to diversify Madewell’s offerings (and to sell to larger department and discount stores) had kicked into high gear, as it began to make children's and women's clothes. It’s sort of hard to get a sense of what Madewell really was at the time — my great-grandfather had to be cajoled and sometimes tricked into allowing his company to change, but the company seemed built to adapt pragmatically to each era.
Keeping Up With the Kivowitzes
Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family
The company didn't have any particular aesthetic. Most of the clothes were contracted, made by any of several other factories and stamped with the Madewell name. Madewell had lots of partners at other factories — one in Georgia, one in Kentucky, among others — that would take care of the design and manufacturing. If Haskell or Jerry or Julius went to a local department store and saw that corduroy-lined denim jackets were selling well, they'd come back to the factory and tell one of the stitchers to make one. If the stitcher wasn't sure how, they'd buy one of those jackets, tear it apart, and make a pattern out of it, then re-create it. Or if that seemed like too much trouble, they'd call one of their contacts at another factory, say, "Make us a corduroy-lined jacket," stamp their logo on it, and sell that. Madewell’s logo didn’t necessarily indicate who physically created the garment, but simply who was selling it.
"We didn't do too much of that designing bullshit," my great-uncle Aaron told me. Aaron is a warm, tough, stocky man whose crushing handshake hasn’t lessened in strength even as he ages into his eighties. As we talked at his kitchen table, looking out on wild turkeys strutting through his backyard in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, he would occasionally sing what I think is a line from “Memory,” from the musical Cats. "The only stuff we did in-house was the rough stuff,” he said. “Denim, brown duck pants, carpenter stuff." During Aaron's tenure, there were only ever around 25 stitchers at Madewell who actually made clothes. I asked Aaron who designed that stuff. "You copy somebody else's!" he laughed. "Come on, 'design.' It was not a fancy place, Dan. No such thing as 'designing.'"
Aaron bristled when I asked if the Madewell clothes were high quality — "Oh, yes, they were very well made," he said — but these weren't exactly pioneering designers crafting original clothing out of a deep passion. They weren't inventors or artists. They looked at what was selling and made some of that to sell. It was a business, and Madewell did what made sense from a business perspective. J.Crew’s Madewell is grasping to emulate some sepia-hued commitment to quality in the original company, some moral or ethical standard from better, more authentic times. But that’s not what motivated my great-grandfather at all — his motivation was profit, and quality was a means to an end.
Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed
New Bedford is one of the last towns you pass through as you drive eastward out to Cape Cod, which hooks out from the East Coast like a flexed arm. It’s located on the coast of Buzzards Bay, which carves a messy notch into the underside of Massachusetts. It would be uncharitable, but not inaccurate, to say that New Bedford is the armpit of Massachusetts.
Despite a cute, gentrified waterfront area and a few museums, the city is today one of the poorest and most dangerous in the state. Big brick factories, either barely used or totally vacant, are everywhere; the unemployment rate hovers above 10%. In the 1990s, the city attempted to rename the area the “South Coast,” because merely the name of New Bedford signifies decay, depression, and loss.
And still, New Bedford looks like a port city in the way that only New England towns can. Trim three- and four-story houses, mostly in sea-weathered gray, line the streets. Every turn seemingly leads to the water, the smell of which is everywhere. Huge stone levees, looking like the organized results of avalanches, do their best to protect the city from the Atlantic's wrath, and roads that cut through these levees are equipped with alarmingly heavy-duty iron gates, up to 20 feet high, that can close if water approaches.
Vintage Madewell jeans at Circa Vintage
Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed
Circa Vintage Wear on 73 Cove St. is airy and industrial, still chilly in the Massachusetts spring. The medium-size, mostly unmarked brick factory, just beside the ocean, smelled of old fabric and dust and wood shavings, a pleasant perfume that changes subtly as you move through the decades upon decades of vintage clothing and accessories. In one corner, a wall of nothing but circular hatboxes reached to the high ceiling. A twentysomething who would later buy a pair of shiny gold dress shoes examined an entire case of bow ties. Semi-broken old mannequins wearing everything from frilly white gowns to what looked like old high school marching band uniforms stood sentry in aisles of clothes from wildly disparate eras. In the racks, jammed up against what must have been dozens of other stories just as rich and as weird as mine, were a few pieces of original Madewell.
There were heavy-duty jumpsuits, which must have dated from the 1940s or 1950s. There was a denim jacket with a striped, sweater-like lining and a corduroy collar. There was a pair of Dickies-like blue chino work pants. There was a pair of bell-bottoms from the 1970s that could have been made by Levi's or Wrangler or lots of other big international brands — but the bell-bottoms, the jumpsuits, the jacket, and the work pants all boasted that label, that great logo, that stopped me dead in my tracks in New York years before.
Chris Duval opened Circa in 1986 and has been pretty much its sole employee ever since. Wearing a pale denim jacket and tough denim work pants, Duval is short and slender and speaks with a thick South Coast accent, which is somewhere between Boston and cartoon pirate, and all of his statements sound like they should end with an exclamation point. He told me that he likes to sit down with the people from whom he buys his wares and learn about the history of each piece.
"When this whole thing came about with J.Crew, I was devastated," he said, in the same tone that a fan of an indie band might have bemoaned signing to a major label in 1995. "When that happened, workwear was just coming back. So I thought, Oh, cool, they're gonna do a workwear line inspired by Madewell. But it has nothing to do with that! It's Chinese crap!"
Duval found the way J.Crew touted its connection to the original Madewell especially galling. "You go to the flagship store in New York and there's a big thing about New Bedford and its heritage, and I'm like, Oh, god, this is so sad!" Duval told me that he liked to put pictures of his original Madewell goods on Instagram and taunt J.Crew about its "Madewell in name only" clothes. "They're using the original brand to push something that has nothing to do with the original brand," he said.
I looked more closely at the flannel-lined denim jacket. It was cool, and vintage, and, being that my great-grandfather’s company made it, I’d have a great story behind it. I tried it on and immediately took it off. I looked like I was wearing a costume. I hadn’t realized how reliant my taste in clothes is on modern shapes; I didn’t at all care for the boxy, un-tailored fit of the jacket, the baggy sleeves, or the too-smooth washed denim. The jacket may have been my birthright, but it wasn’t my style.
Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed
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