Outrageous Crimes of Fashion: Breaking All The Rules of Fashion

By Rita Lewkowicz

OUTRAGEOUS CRIMES OF FASHION is a hilarious and authentic rags-to-riches memoir set in the crime-ridden streets of New York City in the late 1970s. It follows a naïve and penniless young woman as she hysterically navigates through a cast of unsavory characters, meeting every disaster imaginable with guts, determination, wit, and ultimately, incredible success. This story resonates with readers of all generations as an encouraging tale for the aspiring entrepreneur. It is a bible for survival in a man’s world and a must read for absolutely anyone who wears clothing.

“In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.”
Elsa Schiaparelli

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662903977

Book preview

The Million Dollar Skirt Heist

LONDON, ENGLAND, 1978

The heist of my lifetime was completely unexpected when I stole that million-dollar skirt. The best design of my career wasn’t my own, but a copied, plagiarized one. I am not remorseful, repentant, or even a bit regretful that I pilfered this amazing garment.

I found my denim skirt during a casual saunter in London’s famous Petticoat Lane, amid trash and treasures. I went to spend an afternoon scavenger hunting for bargains and inspiration to bring back home, as all tourists do. Wandering the crowded streets lined with stalls, I was accosted by a plethora of unique and strange things on display. It was confusing, mind-boggling, and absolutely exhilarating. There were old and new clothes sprinkled with household goods, trinkets, jewelry and even used pots. The outdoor market had everything displayed en masse.

Petticoat Lane is an exciting phenomenon, and high on the list as a must-see in London. It had a bazaar-like atmosphere, like an American flea market on steroids—bargains, beauty and junk on an epic scale. It is located in the heart of London’s East End on long cramped streets overflowing with people and wares. Over four hundred years ago, immigrants sold petticoats and lace here, and the smell of its history remained.

There were over a thousand stalls offering their merchandise to bargain hunters in droves. There was also the energized din of audible and animated haggling going on everywhere. The crowded streets struck me as a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes that were in constant movement. This marvelous place rivaled souks in Morocco with its profusion of sounds, strange mingling odors, and visual curiosities. It lacked only the monkeys.

I was astounded by the quantities of the old, the new, and the odd displayed in the very same place. The clash of new and old everywhere worked to amaze and entice the buyer. There was no rhyme and reason to the maze of stalls, and there were things for sale that I was certain could not be found anywhere else on earth in the same place. I saw used toilet seats, and tools at least a hundred years old, rusted and undistinguishable, displayed next to a red rotary telephone and an old beat-up guitar that had been someone’s trash. Nothing was sacred. It was a tangle of absurdities, and each insatiably, magnificently fascinating.

The street vendors selling food added to the colorfully crowded scene, as they submerged the street in strange aromas that were both heady and nauseating. I smelled what I thought was history and what I soon found out were mixtures of smoked haddock with Scotch eggs, all kinds of English pies, custard tarts, and fried fish with vinegary fries, melding with the fragrant exotic Indian spices of turmeric, cumin, and curry. In some places it was mouthwatering and in other corners painful to inhale, so pungent were the overwhelming odors of fish and meat. It was a cornucopia of strangled noises, mixed sights and overpowering smells. It was London awash in aromas and visual explosions.

I met the skirt next to a pork pie vendor and knew immediately that every single customer I had would go absolutely crazy for it. I felt my heart skip several beats in my excitement, and a smile I couldn’t conceal hit me like a bolt of sunshine, even though it was a typical dreary day in London. The weather didn’t matter, nothing did. The moment I saw it, I never let it go. My hand clutched it with steady determination as I haggled with the salesman. If he only knew that I would have paid any price for that used and dirty skirt.

I haggled only because that’s what was expected of you in a flea market. I asked him many questions just to hide my eagerness. He swore it was his last one and he didn’t even know what size it was, or even where he got it from. I told him it wasn’t my size and I would have to put strategic patches in the waist and hips to make it fit me, and I was taking a chance even at that. I told him to look at my fat ass and we both laughed that the skirt would never fit me. I insisted he needed to reduce the price. The skirt was twenty pounds and he would only budge on the price by lowering it to sixteen pounds. I knew that in haggling you never take the first deal. You can always push a bit more. I dug into my wallet and pulled out some bills. The vendor’s eyes lit up at the cash and he immediately accepted what I had in my hand. He counted and found it to be only twelve pounds and relented. I pretended, with the smile of the Cheshire Cat, that the discount wasn’t even enough. I think he just wanted to get rid of me. He grabbed the money and threw in a bandana to wear with it. This guy had street style. Everyone in London did in the 1970s. I bid him goodbye and blew him a kiss. Looking back, there were very few times in my life I would ever be happier than at that search and discovery moment.

Every designer, in couture fashion or street fashion, searches for their holy grail, a hit style that will make their career. I easily reasoned that copying designs was done every day without conscience in the rag business. I was the one who found that skirt surrounded by garbage, and that was part of the creative process, I rationalized. My marvelous new skirt was simply an old used pair of jeans with the legs cut off in a V shape. Attached to the top of the jeans was white lace fabric where the legs used to be. The pants had magically morphed into a skirt. Ingenious! A whole new life and existence for a pair of old, ripped, unusable jeans. It was recycling at its absolute most creative.

I was ahead of my time as a recycler. Recycled clothing is now a multi-billion dollar industry. I never even gave it a second thought. The moment I set my eyes on it, I knew it was a winner and moneymaker. I just didn’t realize how much. Some anonymous genius patched together their old jeans into a skirt and then threw it out. I saw the wonder in this trashed treasure. Copying designs made fashion trends. In the fashion industry, people have been known to sell their own mother for a buck. There were no rules and there were no scruples. I could never sell my mother—I loved her too much and would never have done that—but I had no qualms about stealing this idea that would enter me into the bonafide world of fashion. My search for inspiration was made that day in the street of that London flea market, and that original sample smelled of pork pie forever. I would always know where it was hanging in the showroom.

I didn’t know then, at the beginning, how much time I would end up spending on the streets, and what a huge role it would play in my life as I created my line of streetwear fashions.

The next day, flush with inspiration, I flew to my New York showroom and sewed my label into the waist of the skirt by hand. I made it mine and hung her up for Market Week on a silver gleaming hanger. She was ready for her debut.

The first buyer to see it was obsessed and wrote a huge order. The buyer was a young pretty thing from some Midwest city and had only a few boutiques. She oohed and aahed, and she and even insisted on trying it on. She commented that it smelled funny. I said it must be the breakfast the sales team was putting out as a buffet for the buyers. The buyer looked sensational in it, and took thirty-six pieces for her six stores. That was a good beginning, but I wasn’t sure I had hit on that million-dollar skirt till the next buyer from a huge chain of stores called Merry-Go-Round went crazy for it. This was a seasoned buyer who bought for a huge chain, with twelve hundred stores across the country and in every mall in the USA. He was as impressed with the skirt as the small boutique owner was, and gave me the biggest order of my life. That order confirmed I really did have that 6th sense, and knew what people wanted to buy. I now believed I had a bit of a Midas touch, and nothing is as strong or powerful as your belief to make things happen. I was golden.

The skirt excitement continued all day, and the next morning I had people in line out the door to order it. I had hit on something incredible—and if I didn’t produce it fast, someone else would plagiarize me.

The true insanity was that I was selling something that I had no inkling how to produce. Where was I going to get old jeans? How would I get the denim to look old if I couldn’t procure used ones? Who was going to cut thousands of units? How would I attach fabric to the pant legs? After much frantic research, I had a few answers. As it turns out, there were places that sold old jeans in bales. I was afraid to ask where they came from, but I did. They came from prisons and old clothing recyclers, and they came dirty and used and smelly. Perfect, I could recreate the skirt with the smell even attached to it.

I welcomed those bales of smelly old denim with open arms. They were trucked in at one thousand pounds a bale. I had never seen a bale before and was horrified at their size and weight and stature. The bales resembled fully grown elephants, and filled the room with a stench like elephants, dung and all. The bales were hoisted into the parking lot next to my building by trucks with claws like giant, life-sized Transformer toys. This was all new to me and didn’t resemble any manufacturing I had ever experienced before. This was recycling, a unique and very laborious thing to do. No one in their right mind was in this business yet.

I had the immense bales of denim plopped in the parking lot, where I cut the metal wires so I could slowly peel the jeans out of their compacted, extremely compressed condition. Disgusting. They stayed in the parking lot for days, blocking access, till I could extricate each stinky pair. I eventually took over the entire downstairs space, after the tenant left due to the smell and constant blockage of his access to the premises. I needed that space now anyway.

The downstairs space had to be converted to make space for the production of this new thing. I had created a monster. It was a living, breathing creature that took over everything. I had a crew sorting the jeans, but had no time even to wash them, another crew cutting Vs, and yet another crew sewing and attaching white lace, woven sheeting, chambray and an endless variety of fabrics to enhance the denim yoke, as the skirt morphed into more styles. After the yokes of the old jeans had been cut, I noticed mounds of pant legs piling up. At first I threw the legs out. Being the resourceful immigrant I am, it hurt me to waste them. I was never good at throwing anything out. I began experimenting, sewing the cleaner, less fragrant pant legs on T-shirts for sleeves, and cutting out pockets, waistbands and patches to embellish an entirely new garment. Now I had matching shirts, cardigans and tank tops to sell along with this marvelous skirt. The entire denim line fleshed out and the skirts were selling nationwide, along with the new T-shirts with the old stinky denim trim. I am sure no one in the history of fashion sold so many smelly recycled items so quickly. If you wanted my skirt, I criminally forced the buyer to purchase the entire line with the tees and sweatshirts.

Merry-Go-Round, the store with the twelve hundred locations, called daily, begging for more goods and offering to pay a premium if I shipped all my production to them first. Money tended to talk to me then. If it talked, believeme, it could lie and sing, and I would listen. I told them I would, but I never sent Merry-Go-Round all my production, because it was too dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. I would pilfer their orders to fill others, and keep a constant stream of customers happy. I still had to turn production into a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week venture.

The resulting calamities of a twenty-four-hour shift were hysterical and painful as well, and became a race against time and sanity.

I continued to ship what seemed to be endlessly, turning my crew and me into walking zombies. I remember sleeping at the factory many nights and neglecting my daughter, sister, and parents. And friends? What friends? At least I had Simon (my then boyfriend and my future husband—but much more on him later) by my side, but I missed him, too. We had no time to talk, eat or sleep. It was fabulous.

I realized through my exhaustion that this was not a sustainable lifestyle. I had created a machine that could not be satiated or stopped. I would have to farm out the orders, and hired other factories to sew most of my skirts for me. I made less profit, but there was no way I could keep up with all this. If I snoozed for a minute, someone else would make that order. Everyone knows that in this industry, or any, if you snooze you lose. The smelly bales now went directly to numerous locations and arrived as skirts in the blink of an eye—sore eyes, tired eyes, but they arrived for shipping on time nonetheless.

Shipping was an excruciating ordeal. If Merry-Go- Round wanted twelve units apiece shipped to twelve hundred stores, they had to be shipped separately to each and every single store location. They didn’t have a distribution center. I would learn all about those useful centers later. The boxes that stacked up during shipping were somehow bigger than those fourteen-foot bales of old jeans, and soon there was no more room to walk in the factory. Now, even if the skirts were ready for shipment, that didn’t mean we had room to ship them. Nothing went smoothly or easily. There were breakdowns and problems that needed solving every hour. There were quality control issues, zipper problems, button calamities and fabric hold-ups.

Everything was a tribulation. Working with recycled jeans meant some zippers were broken or nonexistent, and there were holes in the craziest places. We became adept at fixing these strange things in wildly creative ways. Sewing machines weren’t always cooperative, and a hangnail or an employee headache could bring down the day’s entire production. After the garment was sewn and ready for shipment, labels and hangtags had to be manually sewn and apportioned. The skirts had to be put on hangers and covered with plastic, then shoved into waiting boxes per purchase orders. How hard could that be? It was so hard.

There was never a day that went by without something going disastrously wrong. Every single thing that could go wrong did so, with much flair and flourish. There were constant shitstorms, fires to put out, and hair being torn daily. It was just the way things were. It all felt so personal. My name, my career—all of it—depended on this endless manufacturing and shipping.

As the space seemed to shrink, our employee pool grew exponentially. Employees brought their siblings, uncles, and cousins to work. There were eleven Josés and they were all in one family. Maria brought in her adult kids and there were now seven Marias, all with three names each. When we worked nights, they brought their neighbors, cousins, aunts and uncles to help. I was the queen of emergency day labor. The work never ended.

As if there were not enough problems with production, shipping became another monster to conquer. The shipping machine was my enemy. It was dangerous, and attacked me daily. It was a huge mechanism that spewed out with a vengeance a measured, reinforced kind of tape. That piece of tape went on the boxes, and it had thick, sticky glue. You had to be precise, or it would end up on you, or not close the box at all. There was glue tape flying everywhere. I was accosted and swaddled with flying tape that ended up on my body and everywhere else but on those shipping boxes. The cutter was like a guillotine, as it scathed and cut with the cutting blades, and if you weren’t very careful a finger or two were known to disappear. I had high anxiety as I tried to tame this beast. I was known to swear and scream and kick it without conscience. I think I was losing it.

Finally, in desperation we hired a shipping crew. We kept growing at an exponentially rapid rate, and eventually moved to a larger space where things could finally flow more smoothly. I never got near a shipping machine again, and I thought I had made an end to the 24/7 shifts. It lasted for a while with new employees and the larger factory. The new factory was fabulous. It had a kitchen and it felt like home, mostly because I never went home.

Fabulous Criminal Failure

New York City in 1975 was the capital of crime, sex, and drugs. It was cheap, vibrant, and in a deep downward tailspin, compelling in its contradictions. ‘Fear City,’ as the world named it, was on the brink of bankruptcy and economic and moral collapse.

I was young, innocent, and utterly ready for all the corruption and adventure I could possibly find. I arrived armed only with an acceptance letter from New York University’s graduate school, with the idealistic goal of earning a master’s degree. How could anything go wrong with that and the dorm on Fifth Avenue?

Everything went incredibly wrong, but turned out so marvelously right.

I was to learn that nothing in New York was what it seemed. This glittering, alien city I landed in was in financial crisis. It was treacherous and dangerous. Statistics stated that murders had doubled, burglaries had tripled, and robberies had increased tenfold. Crime was everywhere, but I didn’t care. At my age I felt invincible, and was equipped with all the naïve bravado of the young and cluelessly stupid.

Street art and garbage was everywhere. What struck me first were the artists who turned the gritty streets of the city landscapes into their own personal canvases, filled with evocative stinging political and social commentary. It was a magical place where I was bombarded with art and blaring street thought etched illegally everywhere. Even underground, the subways reflected the streets in their dirt and grime, adding to the topography with visual and verbal artistic laments, both aboveground and deep below.

I had never truly communed with graffiti before, as I did in this strange new place. This new and powerful language was sprawled in enigmatic epigrams of angst, love, politics, and so much more. It was tormented hate and joy, intermingled with words and pictures. I felt the heat, the potency and the energy that this city exuded, with its cultural hotbed of street art and the masses of people. The city was awash with explosions of words, pictures, smells, and the brewing and blistering social commentary of anyone who had the guts to paint and deface the concrete landscape. It was hard not be influenced and moved to extreme emotions by it all. I was artistically conversing with the city as I took in the outlandish artwork everywhere.

Through his outrageous street art, I grew to know Jean-Michel Basquiat, the most famous graffiti artist of that time, with his full-blown technicolor visions. I felt inspired everywhere I looked. I was now going to be a part of this city, with its loud voice of annotations and extreme emotions. I was going to make my mark. I was going to give it my voice. I just wasn’t quite sure how.

The streets of Manhattan were thrilling to a naïve young girl from the cushy west side of Los Angeles. It was as if I’d landed on the moon, yet I quickly felt I belonged to this astonishing new wildly defiant moonscape. The crowded gritty streets and the magnitude of humanity were entrancing and dangerous. I knew the drug trade was everywhere, sex and prostitutes were abundant, and crime lurked in every crevice and shadow. I was just going to be a voyeur at first, a college student, as I observed and learned this new adult reality. I was going to student teach in a master’s program.

As always, I tackled my studies with fierce optimism and hard work. I was going to change the world and empower a new generation with innovation, and make a difference. These were all innocent and nascent dreams of a twenty-one-year-old. Nothing was unattainable to me then. I was eager to begin my new venture, and had the best intentions of making a success of myself.

Things don’t always turn out, even with the best laid plans and intentions.

The master’s program quickly threw me into a real-life hands-on situation. I embarked as a student teacher at a place called Bay Ridge High School in Brooklyn. It was like no place I had ever been in. The train ride alone to Brooklyn felt as turbulent and life-threatening as the halls of this dangerous school.

I had never been on The New York City Subway before. Riding those subway cars daily was daunting. I needed to stay alert and acutely vigilant or I would lose my way and my belongings. If I missed a stop I might land in a place I might never get out of. I was petrified and had a terrible sense of direction underground. I knew nothing about the lower or upper or east and west sides of this new city. I needed to take a few alphabetic A though D trains to get to Brooklyn. I was lost daily. It was even dangerous to ask questions. If you showed confusion or weakness you would become a target and there were no police anywhere. The city didn’t have money to pay their employees, and twenty percent of the police force had been laid off. I felt like I was on my own.

That Brooklyn high school was a place so far removed from my reality that I labeled it Crooklyn. It was filled with juvenile delinquents of all denominations, dimensions, and proportions. My students were anarchists and only interested in pursuing their personal sex education, both on- and off-campus, or lighting up and getting shitfaced.

No one there was in school to learn any little or big thing. These kids already had more experience and knew more about real life than any teachers at the school. The hallways were like war zones with screaming fights, physical threats, verbal hurls, and things flying constantly. These kids wanted nothing to do with regimented learning, and were tough and fearless. These were vicious young adults who were just biding their time to get out and help destroy the world in new and creative ways. School was just a social and sexual place to congregate. Most were immigrant kids from Brooklyn’s ethnic barrios. They all emulated each other in clothing, accents, and tough behavior. They were teenagers with a hardcore veneer, and I was determined to break through their armor.

I tried everything I could think of to entice them to learn. I screamed, I threatened, I cajoled, and I even tried bribing them. Who was I kidding? These kids were in high school, yet were on a third-grade reading level. Nothing I was doing was effective. I got some offers of an exchange, but I was not going to grant sexual favors for them pretending to want to read. Nothing I was doing was going to work here.

I realized I wasn’t as smart or effective as I thought I was. While there, I got my derrière kicked and caressed, my face French kissed, and became an eyewitness to a myriad of campus atrocities that were worthy of incarcerations. I was failing incredibly at this job.

My fluency in Spanish, Italian, and even French, had no effect on these crooks and hooligans. I was lacking in their street vernacular, and no one wanted to talk to me anyway. Much more than linguistic skills was needed here, and I was at a loss to think of anything but putting them in jail. My skill sets were sorely lacking, and any compassion I had at first for these kids was slowing ebbing away. Complaining to my superiors was as useless as my inexperienced efforts.

These kids were a new breed of humanity, tougher than I had ever encountered, or had the skill to deal with. Any bravado I possessed when I started was quickly snuffed out as I was getting my ass threatened and physically manhandled. The last straw was getting cornered and felt up while actually having my face licked. I just couldn’t take anymore.

Who was I to work against these forces of nature? I could not accomplish anything here. That school in southwest Brooklyn was not to be my destiny. Bay Ridge Brooklyn, a mere high school, had officially kicked my ass.

I felt terribly guilty and like a complete failure who had dropped out of my master’s program. My parents paid for the entire year of graduate school in advance, and I was to become a certified NYU master’s dropout after just a few months. To me failure was criminal, but I had no time to dwell on failure or anything else. My botched career aspirations as a motivating teacher, or lawyer, or famous journalist, landed me on a sidewalk stand on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and there I struck gold.

Finding My Kicked Ass on the Street

Student teaching was degrading while I was getting my ass kicked and face licked by high school kids. So, to supplement my kicked ass, I started selling on the street, but not just any street. The street was Orchard Street.

To get into the game of selling, I hocked a silver bracelet off my wrist for two hundred dollars, and parlayed that into something I thought would sell in this thrilling place where the whole world came to get bargains.

Orchard Street was a magical place and looked to me like the closest thing NYC had to a flea market, but on a colossally massive and epic scale. It was strategically located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and could only be described as the ultimate in retail phenomenon. This was a legendary place that got so crowded on weekends that you couldn’t move. On Saturdays and Sundays these eight blocks downtown transformed from a dirty tenement rat-infested few blocks into a jampacked bargain hunter’s paradise, suffused and crawling with humanity. The spectacle defied description with its sea of people. It was like a human zoo. Each and every person became a hunter in the heated