Vintage Style Reinterpreted
New York, "Even though I live in the city, I didn't grow up here," stated Cooper Jones. "And since I spend a lot of time at my country house, I'm around the working folks out there. Slick-looking stuff doesn't cut it with that crowd. I needed some clothes that I could wear tromping around in the woods as well as around the city with my jeans. That's why we use these washes and dyeing treatments on our designs. They just make the stuff look broken-in right away."
Cooper is also noted for his use of reinforced stitching details, which are created by special machine applications. He says, "With the kind of wear you put on a garment out in the country, a normal seam has to be made stronger. So we have come up with a lot of ways to topstitch the seams. After we dye the garments, each one gets its own unique look depending on how the seaming accepts the color. So it's kind of cool that every garment is different."
Old Formulas Discovered for Cloth Dyeing
New York, The Kingsbury & Peck Industrial House, home to vintage garment stocks discovered by Cooper Jones, offered another surprise. In an ancient six-foot tall safe located in the far southwest office, dyeing formulas were filed, specific to customers around the country. The formulas were clearly used in creating the unique colors required by industrial businesses for their workmen's uniforms. In perusing the files, Jones discovered hundreds of colors, including brighter ones added during the 1942-45 period in response to the emergence of women workers in wartime industries.
Each formula was surprisingly specific in its requirements for time cycles, water temperature and agitation. In the recipes themselves, Jones found that they called for long-discontinued minerals and fixatives. Examining the pages of fabric swatches attached to each formula, he marveled at the depth of color and the residual fiber softness. Well-versed in dyeing techniques, he wondered if such techniques could be re-created using these old formulas with the precision of modern equipment. With that, he began. He wound his way through a maze of family businesses that had long ago sold to larger corporations, traced his way back to the old supply houses, and found that there were a handful of retired technicians in the Deep South that knew how to assemble his list of requirements. To this day, they still advise him.
Supply Found In Building
New York, Late Thursday, the door to the long-closed Kingsbury & Peck Industrial House was unbolted, marking an end to the longest-ever probate of real estate in the United States. In a bizarre case, supposed heirs to the Kingsbury estate cropped up for an entire generation, leaving tax authorities to untangle a mess of claims and counter-claims. It is believed that all eight attorneys for the estate financed the cost of eastern Long Island vacation houses and Ivy League school educations for their nineteen children from these proceedings. In the end, a sole heir was identified by DNA testing.
Apparently, Malcolm Kingsbury had not only accumulated a wealthy estate, but had donated his body to science, and samples of his genome were still available at Columbia Medical School. "I was surprised as I could be," stated Cooper Jones. "We had lost track of the family tree a long time ago, although I heard that my great-great-grandfather may have entered the country through Ellis Island. My father came west during the Depression, hoping to find work. A few months ago, The Family History Library in Salt Lake contacted me and asked about my ancestors. Shortly after that, these New York lawyers asked me to take a DNA test. Now I own this old building, and all this stuff inside."