Brooklyn to become a new fashion epicenter in America

The upcoming launch of the Manufacturing Innovation Hub for Apparel, Textiles & Wearable Tech in Brooklyn will make the region a new fashion epicenter in America.

The space aims to support up-and-coming designers, encourage local manufacturing, and create jobs in the fashion industry, which currently makes up almost 6 percent of the city’s workforce. It will be home to 20 to 30 businesses and up to 50 designers, and is expected to create around 300 jobs.

Ole Sondresen Architect, which has designed spaces for Etsy and Kickstarter, will lead the redesign of the 160,000-square-foot headquarters. They’ll be located in currently unoccupied floors of the Liberty View Industrial Plaza in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, an eight-story industrial building on the waterfront.

Construction will begin in February—at the kickoff of New York Fashion Week—and will take around nine months to complete. The investment by the New York city in this project will be to the tune of $3.5 million.

Services offered will range from a small factory specializing in sample-making, to a research-and-development center focused on wearable tech, to a workforce development center.

An incubator space will host 12 private studios, classrooms and conference rooms, a computer lab, an industrial sewing room, and work areas for 50 designers.

Once the entire incubator process is up and running—open to the public will hopefully eliminate the disconnect between the public’s fantasy of fashion and the realities of the industry. At the end of the day, people will know that fashion is a business and they will see every day how your clothes are made.