Heather Chaplin

On Valentines Day, the final day of New York’s Fashion Week 2003, about 40 blocks south of the Whitney, the Alabama Project, an underground chic fashion house — which is the best kind of chic — is getting underway. There are anxious-looking assistants in headsets with clipboards, reed-thin models, paparazzi.

The clothes on show, which sell for between $300 and $4,000 at places like Barneys, Maxfield and Jeffrey New York, are handmade from old T-shirts bought in bulk from thrift stores and sewn by women who look like they’d be more comfortable at Wal-Mart than Bloomingdale’s. They sit in circles on their porches or in their living rooms sewing together disparate, throwaway pieces of fabric, just like the ladies of Gee’s Bend.

The clothes are exquisite. They’re rough, intricate, bright. Each garment has an outer layer of soft cotton jersey with patterned cutouts revealing a different-toned jersey sewn from inside, in what’s called a reverse appliqué. Thread-ends halo the appliqués, and are reminiscent of the tufts of yarn that protrude from so many quilt tops. The clothes are somehow both challengingly original and comforting.

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Chanin, or Alabama, as everyone in the fashion world calls her, was born in the tiny town of Lovelace Crossroads, Ala., population 60, just outside the city of Florence, a four-hour drive from Gee’s Bend. She had a baby boy, Zachariah, when she was 20, studied textile design in North Carolina, and then got as far away from Lovelace Crossroads as she could.

After 10 years in Vienna, Austria, where she worked as a costume designer, she returned to the States, taking a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Alabama, 41, who resembles a 1940s heroine with her weathered good looks of high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and platinum hair, soon started hand-making T-shirts for herself and her friends. She realized that she was using the old sewing techniques her grandmother had taught her, fancy stitches like the herringbone, the snail trail, and the feather. What she was producing reminded her of the quilts that had come out of her grandmother’s sewing circle.

She’d been wanting to ramp up production and start selling the shirts to more than just a few friends. There was no way she could afford to have them made in New York, however. Although she hadn’t lived there in 22 years, she knew where to go. To make her clothes she would have to reinstate the sewing circle back home in Lovelace Crossing.

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The party takes place at the Bowlmor Lanes bowling alley in Greenwich Village. This being underground fashion, the models — young girls, old women, muscle-bound men, skinny men — are cavorting about on the bowling lanes instead of a catwalk. They’re all wearing bowling shoes. The head waitress from the 2nd Ave. Deli is one of the models. She must be 70 years old. She stares, deadpan, into the popping of the fashion press’s bulbs, in a deep-red jacket with red cutouts, her beehive intact. An Asian girl with a shaved head and a chest as narrow as a boy’s dances to Sir Mix-A-Lot, and flashes the ice-pink Alabama short shorts she’s got on under her dress to the jostling press corps.

The party doesn’t have quite the hoopla factor of some Fashion Week parties — “It” boy of the moment, Zac Posen, for example, is across town at the Four Seasons dancing on a bed of Swarovski crystals — but it’s got its own offbeat thing going on. The place is packed, the music is loud, the press is everywhere, the guests are gorgeous. Isaac Mizrahi is answering questions while cameras flash. Debby Harry holds court on Lane 4.

The clothes on display — this is Alabama’s sixth season — are mostly T-shirts, fitted to the body and often beaded as well. This season the colors are ice blue, ice pink and double-dyed navy, as well as the company’s signature color, “Alabama Red.” Besides T-shirts, there are corsets, with tiny hooks and eyes up the back, three-quarter coats, long skirts. For men, there are tight-fitting, long-sleeved T-shirts, patterned with skull and crossbones, bull horns and old Chevy cars.

Each piece, not surprisingly considering their origins, is as comfortable as your favorite old, worn-soft shirt. Project Alabama uses the techniques of the time-honored Southern sewing circle, and her motifs — flowers, snowflakes, eagles and hearts — certainly play on being old-fashioned; but the clothes are far too individualistic to be quaint. There’s a bit of a punk aesthetic thrown in. They seem as if they were made by someone with a great sense of humor.

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When Alabama returned home in December 2000 she rented a three-bedroom ranch-style house to use as an office. (Lovelace Crossroads is a verysmall town: Her landlord is her aunt.) From the back windows, Alabama can see the home where she grew up. When she was a child, Florence was a city of textile workers, but those jobs have gone to Mexico, decimating the town’s economy.

When Alabama put the word out that she was looking for women to form sewing circles for a new clothing company, she had 150 replies within three weeks. The women who poured in, like Alabama herself, had grown up sewing with their moms, grandmas, aunts and cousins. Florence was never a rich city, and every scrap of fabric that fell to the floor from one pattern was held onto and used for another. Scraps weren’t waste, but rather an excuse to tell a story to the lady beside you as you cross-stitched it into a quilt.

Today, Alabama has 120 women working for her, from ambitious 18-year-olds to 75-year-olds earning spending money. (She pays as much as $15 an hour.) What they all have in common is a culture of sewing. They come to the three-bedroom house and pick up the patterns and appliqués, and they form sewing circles that produce the shirts and skirts and little corsets that make New York’s fashion elite ooh and aah one cold Valentine’s Day during Fashion Week.

Diane Hall, Alabama’s master seamstress, is up from Florence for the show. She refers to the ways of the sewing circle as a “dying art.” She sits in the back room where the “girls” change, her eyes, framed by metal-rimmed glasses, fixed on the fabric in her hands. Compared to the giggling models flitting about her, Diane is a bastion of steadiness. Even as she answers questions, even as the mayhem around her escalates, her eyes stay focused on her needle as it sews a fabric star onto a bustle. Diane was a seamstress for 30 years before business got so bad she gave it up and went to work at a travel agency. Sewing was so much a part of her growing up, though, that she remembers how old she was the first time she bought a store-bought dress: 18. As soon as she saw Alabama’s clothes, she knew it was time to pick up her needle again. “If you sew and you see something like this,” she says, gesturing with her fabric to the rack of models’ outfits, “you know how much work went into it. You know how special it is.”

Indeed, Alabama’s pieces take anywhere from five to 65 hours to complete.

As for the dizzying heights of New York’s Fashion Week, Diane is unfazed. The people aren’t so friendly, but what can you expect in such a big town.

One thing Alabama is coming to expect, or at least appreciate, is the admiration this big town has for her work. The Alabama Project has yet to make a profit — making it as a small fashion house is about as hard as hitting a 95-mile-an-hour fastball — but it did break even last year, bringing in around $1 million in sales. And the following she’s attracted is cultlike and growing. Cindy Crawford is a fan. So is Woody Harrelson. Alabama now sells in more than 52 stores in nine countries.

Project Alabama pieces are not only beautiful — every show during Fashion Week contained beauty — but also oddly unique and personal. And one has to assume that at least part of what makes a curator see art in a poor person’s blanket is the search for the unique and the personal in an age when so much seems generic and indifferent.

“It’s a disjointed time,” Alabama says in her lovely drawl, “and a quilt is taking disjointed pieces and putting them back together into something beautiful. That’s a comforting thing these days.”

“Oh, thank God!” croaked Joan, as first one and then another Hollywood actress stepped out of a limo revealing a bit of leg, some shimmering chiffon, a rustle of taffeta. “Thank God!” Joan was almost beside herself. “We didn’t know if it was going to be glamorous or not! But here it is, people are looking good! Oh, thank God!”

The controversy over what to wear to this year’s Oscars has loomed over Hollywood like its usual haze of smog since the moment President Bush stared into the camera last Monday and told the American people he was giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to give up power or face war.

The town swirled with dilemmas moral and practical: Would it be unseemly to cavort about on a red carpet, bejeweled and bedecked, as our military dropped bombs on another country?

After the World Trade Center collapsed in September 2001, the Emmys were postponed twice and actresses and actors were urged to dress in business attire rather than in cleavage-bearing gowns.

In 1942, at the first Oscars after the United States entered World War II, the academy actually put a ban on evening gowns — a ban gossip columnist Hedda Hopper urged actresses to break — and asked women to give the money they would have spent on orchids, the diamonds of the 1940s, to the Red Cross.

In March 2003, however, the academy, the stylists, and the fashionistas of Hollywood said no to any such measure. They decried the very notion that outside events — even a war — should affect how one chooses to dress. It was a mess of last-minute adjustments, indecision, orders for jewels, cancellations of orders of jewels, and controversy over things like whether it was too controversial to wear a pin that was a gold abstract representation of a dove.

Somehow, like a group of squirming molecules that suddenly became a single cell, Hollywood showed a remarkably unified fashion front last night. The look: subdued glamour.

The war in Iraq just might be the best thing to happen to Oscar fashion since television.

Coco Chanel once said a woman should always take one item off before leaving the house. She would have been pleased last night. Gone were the ropes of Harry Winston diamonds — except in the case of Queen Latifah, who borrowed $4 million worth — heavy makeup, and miles of bright, thick, satin trains that had come to typify the Oscars of the ’90s. The night was (almost) faux pas free.

In were draped sheaths, Victorianesque silhouettes, neutral colors, basic black, soft chignons and lipstick as an accessory.

The standout of the evening was Julianne Moore, in a deep-green, strapless gown, drawn together in the front and back with cascading ruffles. Her pale red hair was pulled back into a low, loose chignon slightly off to the side of her neck. And, except for a pair of drooping green chandelier earrings, there was no other adornment marring the expanse of white skin from the top of her breast to the tip of her forehead, which stood out as her finest accessory.

Many other actresses wore black. Nicole Kidman, who has dazzled in the past in chartreuse-embroidered John Galliano and frilly pink Chanel, accepted her Oscar for best actress in floor-length black chiffon with off-the-shoulder ropes of fabric instead of sleeves and an asymmetrical, low-hanging back. Like many of the dresses seen last night, there was a distinctly Grecian feel to its soft folds, twists and turns of fabric, and draping.

Other actresses who wore black included Jennifer Connelly, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Angelica Huston, Barbra Streisand and Susan Sarandon.

Connelly in particular looked stunning with a simple low ponytail and red lipstick as her only adornment.

Even when there was bright color, it had a certain restrained quality to it. Renée Zellweger wore a raspberry-colored dress from Caroline Herrera with spaghetti straps and an intricate lace and beadwork torso. But the appliqué was the same color as the rest of the dress, which created a sort of simplicity that belied the intricacy of the design. The toned-down effect was also accentuated by her simple chin-length bob and lack of jewelry.

In fact, the motif of same-color appliqués and fancy beadworks was replayed all through the night, whether on the black bustier peaking out from beneath Barbra Streisand’s fitted jacket, or the silver corset-style top of Queen Latifah’s Halston gown, or the champagne-colored beading on Halle Berry’s Elie Saab dress. It was a way to be formal and festive yet (for Hollywood, at least) restrained.

Of course, there were those about whom you couldn’t help but wonder: With an army of stylists and personal shoppers and hair and makeup people, this is what you came up with?

Marcia Gay Hayden, who drew rave reviews for her siren red old-Hollywood satin dress two years ago when she won best supporting actress for her role in “Pollock,” looked like an overgrown bridesmaid this year in a one-shouldered Eric Gaskins gown of aqua chiffon. Hilary Swank wore a bright pink dress with an ombré effect (when the color subtly shifts into a deeper shade) and a jewel in the center of her abdomen with the overlay of tulle emanating out from it. Normally sophisticated, Swank looked like an aberrant member of the ballet corps.

And, while Jennifer Lopez’s sea foam green Valentino gown added nicely to the Grecian theme so prevalent last night, it was noticeably ill-suited to her, reminding one of Mrs. Roper of “Three’s Company” running amok in a billowing muumuu.

As for the men, only Sean Connery really made a fool of himself, in a ruffled white shirt front that, sadly, looked more like a bib than a proud old Scottish tradition. Perhaps if he’d gone all the way and worn a kilt he could have gotten away with it, but as it was, he only induced host Steve Martin to quip that he’d come to the ceremonies all the way from Red Lobster.

Daniel Day-Lewis looked sharp in a gray iridescent suit and a shaved head, but Adrien Brody stole more than the best actor statuette from him. Even before winning, Brody was looking good in a narrow charcoal-gray suit and same-color patterned tie, his hair dark and lank, and looking (fashionably) as if he’d cut it himself.

So the red carpet was truncated, the press were kept in front of their TVs instead of bum-rushing the stars, and Peter Jennings broke in once to say that 15 American Marines were dead. But the Hollywood women and men still managed to have their night of celebration. Fashion watchers everywhere now have only to hope that it won’t always take a war, and the subsequent fear of appearing frivolous, to kindle the kind of subdued elegance on display last night.

“Sound Portraits” tells the tales of society’s most ignored citizens: a freak-show giant; life-without-parole prisoners; children in a Chicago housing project; residents of a New York flop house. And while uncovering hidden corners of American life has become practically a cottage industry in hip media circles, its lack of pretension and the respect shown its subjects sets this show apart. Documentaries like 1993′s “Ghetto Life 101″ or last year’s “The Sunshine Hotel” are examples of “Sound Portraits” at its best — but if you didn’t hear the NPR announcer say so, you wouldn’t know Isay had made them. Not a syllable is heard from his lips in either piece. In fact, his aversion to taking center stage in his work seems so strong, perhaps it’s not so surprising that his offices are unassuming to the point of seeming covert.

It all started, or so the now-familiar anecdote goes, in 1987 when 22-year-old Isay stumbled on two recovering heroin addicts who ran a 12-step store in Manhattan. Unable to stoke the interest of local papers in the pair’s efforts to open a “museum of addiction,” and unwilling to let the story die, Isay reported it himself for New York’s WBAI-FM. The piece caught the ear of Gary Covino, a producer at NPR, who reedited the piece for “Weekend All Things Considered.” With the help of Covino, who still edits “Sound Portraits” Isay began planning his next documentary. The rest, as they say, is history.

While it’s a story to make journalism majors grind their teeth in envy, Isay actually wasn’t looking for a career in radio. In fact, he was a complete stranger to the medium. “When I was in the eighth grade there was a call-in radio show on WELI in New Haven that I used to listen to,” he says, “but that was all I knew.”

Isay’s first full-length documentary was “Remembering Stonewall” in 1989, an ORAL history of the 1969 Greenwich Village riots that helped galvanize the gay-rights movement. Isay gave himself only a few lines in the piece, allotting the bulk of air time to testimonials from riot participants, ranging from drag queens to a public-morals investigator who had policed the Stonewall Inn. Next came “Tossing Away the Keys,” a 1990 piece about life-without-parole prisoners in Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. The documentary was narrated by Wilbert Rideau, the editor of the prison paper, the Angolite. Publicity from the program eventually resulted in the release of one of its featured subjects, Moreese Bickham, who had been wrongly convicted for the murder of two Klansmen and imprisoned for 30 years.

For several years afterward, Isay reverted to a more traditional documentary structure, interspersing his own narration with quotes from his subjects. It wasn’t until “Ghetto Life 101″ that his non-narrative style blossomed in full. For that segment, he turned the recording equipment over to 13-year-old LeAlan Jones and 14-year-old Lloyd Newman to report on their lives in and around the Ida B. Wells housing projects in Chicago’s South Side. The piece won a Livingston Award and the European broadcasting award, the Prix Italia. It also marked a maturation of Isay’s rare sensibility.

“I just don’t think what I have to say is that interesting,” Isay insists. He shrugs off the possibility that opting for a more behind-the-scenes role has diminished his own shot at radio fame (a la “This American Life’s” Ira Glass). “I have no regrets,” he insists.

Regardless, Isay’s approach is effective. To hear Jones’ voice grow husky as he asks the whereabouts of his absent father, or grow shrill as he compares living in his neighborhood to having been in Vietnam, is to get a sense of life in an urban ghetto that traditional reporting rarely captures.

“Sound Portraits’” most recent piece, “The Jewish Giant” is in some ways a departure from its previous work in that it chronicles the life of a legend, rather than a living community. It’s the story of Eddie Carmel, the giant immortalized by the 1970 Diane Arbus photograph. The photo features Carmel crouched in his parents’ living room with them staring up at him, their faces studies in bewilderment and sadness. Suffering from a tumor on his pituitary gland that caused the production of too many growth hormones, Carmel grew to be 9 feet tall and weigh 300 pounds. Unable to live a normal life, he tried his hand in the movies, on radio and as a freak in a sideshow before dying at age 36 of a heart attack, by many accounts a bitter and depressed man.

The piece (click here to listen) marks the producing debut of Isay’s associate, Stacy Abramson, and is narrated by Jenny Carchman, Carmel’s cousin. Carchman spent the last two years interviewing relatives and tracking down people who had known Eddie. Although Carchman’s interest in the story was intensely personal — she talks of growing up fearing that touching the Arbus photo would transform her into a giant — the documentary is not so much a journal of personal discovery as a portrait of a man thwarted by circumstances. While the piece doesn’t reach the dramatic heights of last year’s extraordinary “The Sunshine Hotel,” it gently evokes the horror of a man trapped in his own body.

It’s not uncommon for Isay and Abramson to spend six months or even a year on a single work; Abramson first started working on “The Jewish Giant” last October, recording more than 70 hours of tape that they whittled down to a final running time of 21 minutes.

“People would say to me ‘What did you do today?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I had a great day; I cut 10 seconds off Mrs. Carchman today,” Abramson recalls.

Isay and Abramson spend months just gaining access to the worlds they cover. And once such connections have been made, its not unusual for them to find themselves intimately bound with the people encountered. Isay counts Jones and Newman of “Ghetto Life 101″ and Nate Smith, the narrator of “The Sunshine Hotel,” as close friends. Spend five minutes with him and you know this is no cloying publicity-driven stance: His eyes light up when he talks about Newman’s acceptance to Langston University; he talks gruffly about Smith’s battle with colon cancer.

Isay’s involvement in the well-being of his subjects stands to become an increasingly integral part of “Sound Portraits.” Both Abramson and he talk about hiring a social worker and an education outreach coordinator one day. If such efforts threaten journalistic objectivity, he says, then so be it.

“It’s part documentary, part art, part social services. It doesn’t have a name — and I’m comfortable with that.”

“Once Upon a Number” argues that our everyday lives and the formal world of mathematics inform one another. The gulf between “statistics and stories” or “narratives and numbers,” Paulos writes, ought not be so wide. He aims to bridge the gap “between these two fundamental ways of relating to our world,” between the literary and the scientific. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “the chasm between these two cultures persists, each continuing to hold the other in mild contempt.”

Paulos tackles the conflict with enthusiasm and good-natured humor. To read his book is to venture down a road paved with ideas mined from philosophy, information theory, statistics and probability, logic and literary theory. Not surprisingly, “Once Upon a Number” isn’t easy lay reading: There are diagrams, algebraic equations, summaries of scientific and philosophical theories. Like rest areas on a highway, though, funny and even profound examples of how these weighty disciplines figure in our lives and literature liberally dot Paulos’ work. There are enough quirky puzzles, sneaky card tricks and probability-backed schemes to keep readers awake when the going gets tough.

One example, which will surely change my life, is Paulos’ explanation of why Murphy’s Law carries statistical weight. If you bring 10 pairs of socks with you to the laundromat and the dryer eats six of your socks, you’re 100 times more likely to be stuck with six unmated socks and only four complete pairs rather than seven complete pairs. Why? The answer involves something called statistical independence, which Paulos explains in general terms. While I may jump to the conclusion — tell myself the story, in Paulos’ words — that the world is out to get me, in mathematical terms, I am only the victim of a counterintuitive statistical reality. In other words, it’s nothing personal; it’s just math.

“Once Upon a Number” would have been stronger had the thread running through its many sections been stronger. Almost every piece is fascinating — whether critiquing statistics used in the O.J. Simpson trial, describing a scam to bilk sports gamblers or explaining the work of philosopher Saul Kripke. However, too often it’s not evident how these pieces are related. By the end of the book, Paulos’ purpose is clear enough, but the reading would have been smoother had he given the reader a better light by which to navigate. Still, he does an admirable job of making a potentially deadly subject — at least for those of us who aren’t mathematicians, scientists or philosophers — not only readable but actually enjoyable. The idea that the mathematician is essentially concerned with the same questions as the novelist — and for that matter, the secretary and the accountant — is intriguing and strangely comforting. That Paulos pulls it off without veering too far into the technical — or careening into the patronizing — is a testament to the success of his book.