As I rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor I briefly allowed myself to dream about the possibility of the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. We had made the cover a few times over the years, but this was my very last chance, the last fashion week before my retirement. I had a good feeling about one of the dresses. From the moment our designer handed me the sketch I knew I had something special to work with. Through the heavy glass door I could see that the paper had been shoved through our mail slot as on any other morning. As I zeroed in on it I felt my heart skip a beat. There it was! This year’s little black dress was mine. Worn perfectly by some doe-eyed model who looked like it was her very first trip down the runway. I made that dress with my own two hands. The dress of the season! It will arrive in stores around August, a few months from now, and by the time its last reorder sells out it will be December and I will be celebrating my retirement. It feels good to be going out on top.
I am the first one in to the Max Hammer showroom every morning, at six a.m. Even today, as the last snow of the year dusts the Manhattan streets, I am still on time. On my time, that is. No one else will arrive for hours. I unlock the heavy glass door and pull it open, feeling victorious as I do. Pretty good for a ninety-year-old man. The words Max Hammer Ltd. are written in gold script across it. They have been there for seventy-five years. That is how long I have been pulling this door open, at first with the strength of a single index finger, now with two hands and a triumphant “Oy!”
Max has been gone for eight years now. Before that he was the first one in. Sometimes I thought maybe he slept here. Not me: in at six, home at six. I never missed dinner with my wife, Mathilda, and our daughter, Sarah. She is in her sixties now, with two sons of her own. My younger grandson, Lucas, is an emergency room doctor; the older, Henry, plays cello for the New York Philharmonic. Max had two boys. The younger, Andrew, runs the business now, though in his fifties he’s not exactly young, I guess. He is a smart boy, Andrew. Smart enough to know that unlike his parents, he has no eye for fashion. But he wanted into the family business anyway. So he went to Wharton and took over the day-to-day from his father when he and Dorothy finally retired around twenty years ago. Within a year of his arrival, Max Hammer went from the knockoff king of Seventh Avenue to just the king, all without changing the name on the door. And I’ve been here, making the patterns, all along.
I met Max Hammer on the boat to America that left the Polish port of Gdynia in the summer of 1939. It was my older cousin Morris’s ticket, and my father brought me with him to see Morris off. It was a week before my bar mitzvah, and I was sad that my cousin would miss it. When we picked him up that morning he was ill. Very ill, burning up with a fever. His mother, though worried, insisted he get on the boat to America. We looked alike, Morris and I. Though he was sixteen, he was small, and though I was nearly thirteen, I was big. People often mistook us for twins. His father had died years before, and he’d grown up with me almost as a brother. My father was a dressmaker and taught us both everything he knew, from how to make a pattern from a sketch to how to make buttonholes without a machine.
When we arrived at the boat they would not let Morris on. By that point he had a rash covering half his body—you could almost see the heat coming off him. Now that I have seen nearly every childhood illness, I would guess it was roseola. The stewards turned him away, yelling that he would take down the whole ship.
My father took Morris’s ticket, bag, and papers and led us around to the other gangplank. I assumed we were just trying a different entrance for Morris, but at the last minute my father gave me all the money in his pocket, all the money in Morris’s pocket, and his gold wedding band. He kissed me on the head and told me to get on the ship. I cried, I begged, I pleaded. I tried warning him of the scene he would face at the house when he went home to my mother without her only son a week before his bar mitzvah. I looked down, embarrassed by my tears, and by the time I looked up he and my cousin were gone. I never saw my father or Morris again. Max Hammer, who was about six years older than I, witnessed the whole thing. He pulled me onto the boat by my sleeve and told me that my father had just saved my life.
It was three days before I could speak, and by then Max had told me his whole life story—even the part that had not happened yet. The first thing he said he would do when we landed in America was find his girl, Dorothy, who had arrived months before, and ask her to wait for him. They had already been waiting quite a while. He said he had known she was the one from the first time she smiled at him through the window of his father’s dress shop in Kraków. They were barely twelve years old at the time. He said that he would make the start of his fortune, then marry her and make the rest. Even in steerage on a rat-infested boat with barely a loaf of bread between us, I believed every word he said. He was larger than life.
I told him that I was to become a bar mitzvah on Saturday, and he arranged it that I did. I recited my Torah portion, and by the time we were halfway across the Atlantic the Germans had invaded Poland from nearly every direction. I endlessly worried about whether I would ever see my family or my homeland again. I went onto that boat a boy, but I landed in America a man. And not just because I was bar mitzvahed. I assumed my cousin’s name, Morris Siegel, along with his age, nearly seventeen. I knew no one but Max Hammer, but I had a feeling that knowing him would be enough. Everything he had said would happen happened. Though not exactly in the order he predicted.
The very first thing we did was head to Brooklyn to find Dorothy. The photo she had sent was taken in front of a street sign at the crossroads of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. We waited all day in front of the sign. Max had shown me her photo so many times on the boat that I was the one who spotted her first. Their reunion was like nothing I had ever seen—I was too young to have had a girlfriend, and I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to feel that way about a girl. The kissing and the tears. They both cried. I had never seen a man cry like that before. It wasn’t just that tears filled his eyes, they ran down his cheeks relentlessly. Dorothy took us to a little dairy restaurant and we ate like we hadn’t eaten in a month, which we barely had. I miss those dairy restaurants—they were once as prevalent as Starbucks in the old Jewish neighborhoods. Warm blintzes and cold waiters. Max told her of his plan to wait to get married until he’d gotten his business going. Then she told him of her plan—she didn’t care that he hadn’t any money, she wasn’t letting him out of her sight again. They were married that week. She was really the boss, from the very beginning.
I was able to make contact with a distant cousin in Jersey City who owned a dress factory, and I began to work there. As a pattern-maker’s apprentice I fit perfectly into Max’s grand plan, and I was happy to be working toward a rightful place in it. More than that too: the little we heard from home was not good, and doing the same work as my father helped me feel connected to him. The pattern-maker took me under his wing and I learned his way of making patterns, though I liked my father’s way better. By the next year Max had convinced my cousin to back him in a dress house on Seventh Avenue. Besides lending him the money, my cousin lent him me, and in the blink of an eye the label Max Hammer was off and running.
The early days were my favorite. At that point I could make a pattern for any style. While the dress houses around us had fancy designers making original creations, Max had a different idea. He would send me to the newsstand every day to buy copies of Hollywood magazines: Film, Photoplay, and Motion Picture. If Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis was wearing it, we would knock it off. He had an incredible eye and could pick out just which dresses would look good on the average American woman while making her feel like a movie star. While most other pattern-makers needed the dress to produce a copy, I could usually do it from just the photo.
We weren’t trying to fool anyone or anything. During Market Week, when the buyers came, we would leave the movie stars’ pictures right out on the showroom tables. Our first line was even named for the actresses. Dorothy was a perfect sample size, and when she came out wearing the Greta Garbo or the Loretta Young, the buyers would break out the heavy pencils, as Max called it when they placed large orders. We were a big success, and by the next season other dress houses were copying our MO. But we were the first, and quite honestly the best. Before long Max moved his now pregnant bride from Coney Island to Central Park West. By that time neither of them looked like they had ever set foot in a Polish shtetl, let alone grown up in one. Dorothy now shopped at the finest stores on Fifth Avenue and the Ladies’ Mile, where she bought the latest fashions from Paris and Milan. This meant I had more than photos to work from. I would take apart her beautiful dresses, study the handiwork, make a pattern, and put them back together. We were a dream team before the term even existed.
I found love as well. I fell in love with my Mathilda the minute I saw her on the L train headed home for Brooklyn. She was carrying fabric remnants that her boss had let her take home, and after sixteen stops I finally convinced her to let me carry them for her. She was almost a first-generation American; she’d been born on the boat—her parents had fled from Austria—and liked to say she was from nowhere and everywhere. Her parents welcomed me, and being part of a family again somewhat helped to ease my heartache. It was the summer of 1945 and the war had finally ended. People had brought back news of my family in bits and pieces over the years, and any hope I had of seeing them again slipped away with each horrific report. I knew that to honor them I had to live a full life, a life big enough for all of us. Soon Mathilda and I were married and had a child of our own.
There have been a lot of changes in the garment center over the years, but I have basically remained the same. Fashions come and go, but a pattern is a pattern. The shoulder pads of the forties and fifties were tossed out for the strapless numbers of the sixties and seventies. Unlike me, Max did change with the times. In the seventies he invested in discos, and he and Dorothy would dance their nights away. At least that’s what I imagined—I never set foot in a disco. In the eighties they got into harness racing. They bought trotters and had their picture taken in the winner’s box. They had a big life. Bigger than the shoulder pads that came back again in the eighties. I had a smaller life but wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Eventually Max retired and he and Dorothy moved to Palm Beach. That’s when his son Andrew took over the business. Max had lived the life he had mapped out on the boat for me all those years ago—his American dream. The only wrinkle was, he hated Palm Beach. Said everyone walked around in the same damn dress, the Lilly Pulitzer. He made his son promise never to knock it off. It wasn’t worthy of a Hammer knockoff, he joked. But Andrew did not intend to knock off Lilly Pulitzer, or anyone else for that matter. Like his father, he too had a plan. His was to take Max Hammer to a whole new level by putting the craftsmanship and quality that we were known for into original designs. He went to FIT and RISD and interviewed designers and assembled his own dream team. They would hand me a sketch and I would create their vision. We worked well together, and I think it was the excitement of creating true fashion that kept me from retiring years ago.
The pattern-maker who comes in after me will never make a pattern the way I do. I’m one of the last in the business to do things entirely by hand. I drape muslin on a mannequin and then draw the pattern onto cardboard. I take the designer’s inspiration and make it come to life—my hands, my work. The patterns are all done on a computer these days. Some pattern-makers don’t see an actual dress until a fitting. But whenever they do, one hopes they treat it with the respect it deserves. The right dress has a bit of magic in it. The right dressmaker is like the magician.
I imagine those shoulder pads from the eighties will come back again, but I will not be here to place them. This is my last fall line. I looked again at the photo of my dress on the cover of WWD. It has been a good ride.