The Hundred Mile Suit
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 04. 2.07
If the world were fair, Malcolm Gladwell would get a quarter every time someone used the phrase Tipping Point and Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon would get one as well when anyone used the Hundred Mile Something. Today we present the 100 Mile Suit, a project by designer Kelly Cobb to make a man's suit from materials produced within 100 miles of her home in Philadelphia. It took 20 artisans several months to produce and Ralph Lauren it's not.
"It was a huge undertaking, assembled on half a shoestring," Cobb said at the suit's unveiling one recent afternoon at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. "Every piece of the suit took three to five pairs of hands to make," Cobb added. "Every garment you wear took three to five pairs of hands to make too, but you don't know whose hands or where."
Local sheep, local spinners, knitted underwear, local brain-tanned buckskin leather for the shoes, the outfit is 92% local. "If we worked on it for a year and a half," Cobb says, "I think we could have eliminated that 8 percent." ::100 Mile Suit via ::Wired
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