Matthew Addonizio lost his job as a woodworker in 2020. Presented with a career crossroads, he chose to deepen his pursuit of a personal passion, and started to make clothes.
“I have just a small handmade clothing line that I make myself, but I was really concerned about where the fabric was coming from and what’s the origin story of the materials that I’m working with,” he said.
In May 2022, Addonizio went to a global textile event called XTANT in Spain to show his work. There, he connected with a textile artist from Calcutta, India, who makes handpainted chintz and owns a weaving company with his wife.
“They’re really great people to work with,” said Addonizio, referring to his friend and his friend’s wife. “I’ve been out in the country to meet the weavers and see the process and how it incorporates into their lives, just being able to see the artistry that they can do.”
Addonizio took another step recently. He opened Approved Textiles, a fabric store with fashion literature, sewing materials, and household items. The store is located in South Philly, and it is the first fabric store to open on Fabric Row in the past 40 years.
Approved Textiles currently carries a variety of fabrics, tote bags, and jewelry from India. That’s not all. It also features fabric from Tanzania and blankets from Mexico and the U.K. Non-textile products include needles, traditional Japanese embroidery patterns, sewing patterns for clothes, vintage buttons, handmade soap from France, and handmade candles.
Addonizio’s main audience is people who are into “slow fashion,” a movement that combats the mass production of inexpensive, trendy clothing by large corporations (ie, “fast fashion”). Selling fabric by the yard, Japanese embroidery products for repairing patches in clothes, and vintage buttons allows people to have new clothes from ethical sources or extend the life of worn-down items.
The rise of fast fashion and mass production coincides with the trend of fabric store closures on South Fourth Street over the past 40 years. Consumer access to mass-produced clothes and textile goods led to a lower demand for custom-made clothes. It transformed the landscape of Fabric Row from predominantly Jewish-owned family businesses that coexisted with other textile stores to a blend of textile stores, restaurants, and shops specializing in other items.
Emily Coleman is a sewing teacher at Butcher’s Sew Shop on Eighth Street. She visited Approved Textiles on Sunday with her co-worker Jessie Stern to admire the rare fabrics.
“I think it’s really hard to sell fabric. You have to have a large inventory of expensive things,” Coleman said. “It’s nice to see that people are still willing and committed to put the time in to make print space like this.”
She also mentioned that Asian fabrics are more accessible at stores on the West Coast, as they pay less for shipping than textile stores on the East Coast.
Coleman and Stern are not the only ones excited about a new space on Fabric Row. Itohan Asemota, founder of the fashion agency HNI Collective, wanted to visit because she can’t “remember the last time a new fabric store opened in the area.”
Others outside of the textile and fashion industries were also eager to visit. Molly Gertenbach is a user-experience designer who picked up sewing and crocheting in her early childhood. She makes clothes as a hobby and perked up when she noticed the sign for Approved Textiles before it opened.
“Fashion has always been my first passion,” Gertenbach said, “so I got really excited when I saw that a new fabric store was opening here, because fabric stores tend to be closing more than they’re opening.”
Even though she had no plans to buy anything, she visited the store after picking up her friend’s dog to decide what to get in the future.
Addonizio and Chief Financial Officer Loran Grishow-Schade brought more community members to the fold by offering sashiko, traditional Japanese embroidery, classes last weekend. Other events for the opening of the store included a gathering for people in the textile industry on Nov. 9 and a fabric and color workshop on Nov. 10.
Addonizio wants to have more classes in December to teach people about stitching techniques and inform them about the fabrics they have in stock. So far, Addonizio and Grishow-Schade are fulfilling the store’s mission of creating an environment that values ethical consumerism and collaboration between textile artists and fabric lovers.
