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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gladwell didn't coin that phrase, he found it in a 1950s sociology journal. the people who deserve the quarter are probably no longer with us, but malcolm's been very good about giving them credit and wouldn't take your money, anyhow.
That is comic. I'm all for shopping local, but there's a reason we have global trade!
I must say, if you buy the lovely Hebridian Harris Tweed, you will be helping local industry as well, just not your own. A hundred-mile regime for perishable foodstuffs is one thing, but for textiles that can travel by ship its less important.
.. I don't mean to be pessimistic but is that a picture of the suit? Don't accuse me of being vain either the purpose of wearing a suit is to look good and that thing does not fulfill that purpose at all.
I think that its a noble idea though. Also its completely possible with the right support. I guess this could be considered a proof of concept.
Dork alert.
Maybe if the model had more of a hipster look to him as opposed to the "Grizzly Adams" thing this model has going on then people might look at this as a more fashionable statement rather than a purely experimental project. As is, it mostly says "just don't go there".
Hmmm? Perhaps you could drive just one more mile and buy a better looking suit. Yikes!!!
I *know* I am not seeing people on *this* website objecting to reducing carbon emissions and using resources more wisely. I also hope I'm not seeing people dismissing the idea of a 100-mile suit just because this one happened to not turn out to be aesthetically pleasing. The appearance of the suit is less a testimony to the feasibility of locally-made textiles and more a testimony to how much of First-World textile infrastructure has been utterly obliterated by globalization.
The 100-mile diet, incidentally, is less about the transportation of perishables and more about how unsustainable it is to buy a strawberry grown in Chile when I can as easily get one from a pot under a grow light in my house. We're using up precious oil reserves on, let's face it, utter stupidity and shortsightedness. This is just more of the same. Anywhere you live in the world you can make clothing out of *something* and we've decided to relocate much of our clothing manufacture to facilities in Southeast Asia, where the garments they turn out are lucky to last a year. If you think this suit is ugly (and I do too), you haven't shopped a chain store lately.
Uglier yet is the loss of wages in the First World because the range of possible jobs available to us here has narrowed considerably; those of us who can't hack it in the professional or blue-collar worlds for one reason or another are stuck in dead-end customer service jobs without living wages. We used to have things like textile manufacture as additional options, and now they're gone. But hey, if you like not being able to make more than ten bucks an hour and not having benefits or union help, more power to you.
Love the Suit ! Love the Concept. Sometimes I wonder what I can do to help the environment and often it is just what I can do at home... change lightbulbs, recycle, etc. This project is a reminder that changes big and small can happen in every industry, and I must strive to make changes at my own job.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Keep on Truckin' NOT!