(Photo: Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

In 1957, the West 30s loomed large enough in the national imagination to provide the setting for a film noir called The Garment Jungle (tagline: �Life is cheap in the Garment Jungle�). Today, the union-busting vipers in that B-classic are gone, and the neighborhood that then produced 95 percent of America’s clothing now makes 3 percent. Yet the movie and today’s streets barely look different. Cigarette-clutching immigrants trundle rolling racks down the sidewalks at high speed. Button and trimmings stores � as well as specialists in esoterica like fabric-covered belts � still line the side streets. Fashion shows don’t take place here, but everyone in the industry is around constantly. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor at USC, and her MIT colleague Sarah Williams �recently did a study of the movements of designers and interns and found that even those whose studios were in Brooklyn or Queens made 77 percent of their work-�related trips to the area between 34th and 42nd Streets. �One of the reasons the Garment District still works,� she says, �is that people still use it all the time.� A manufacturer may produce most of its clothing overseas, but for a prototype needed in a few hours, FedEx isn’t fast enough. �You see a lot of interns running down the street carrying multiple rolls of fabric, people carrying patterns,� says Kaelen Haworth, who’s part of the CFDA’s incubator program that backs up-and-coming labels.

You also find a concentration of super-specialized skills. Ask Haworth about her zipper guy: �We don’t know each other’s names, but he’s kind of an institution,� one who always has a quip for her�not to mention the right zipper. The old European immigrants are now mixed with people from China, India, anywhere. But it’s not all start-ups. Anna Sui started her business in the Garment District and stayed. Starting out, Sui says, �when I was kind of stumped for what to do, I would just kind of walk around and look in all the different textile stores to see what they had.�

The landlords might have thrown those stores out long ago, but in 2009, a trade group called Save the Garment Center was able to help thwart a zoning change, keeping the neighborhood devoted to industry. So the button stores remain, and so do the old-school Italian restaurants that serve the garment guys. �They’re like, �Why aren’t you sitting down for like a ten-course lunch?’ � says Haworth with a laugh. �There are still people who do that up here.�