fixtures: These Flowers Have Been Growing for 103 Years

The showroom and factory of M & S Schmalberg is in a soot-gray building in Manhattan’s garment district, seven stories above a street-level women’s apparel wholesaler called Belma Fashions.

On a recent morning, the firm’s 61-year-old president, Warren Brand, was leading a tour there for a group of fashion students from Mississippi State University. They had come to see a unicorn, a scrappy holdout, a working museum of old-fashioned artisanship that somehow had to turn a modern-day profit.

Schmalberg, a fourth-generation family business founded in 1916, makes artificial flowers from silk and other fabrics for clients including milliners, theatrical costume designers, fashion stylists, bridal houses and designer labels like Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs.

The flowers adorned the Thom Browne hybrid suit-dress that Zazie Beetz wore to the Met Gala, and they have decorated the angel wings of a Victoria’s Secret runway model and the uniforms of Marriott employees, who wear leather camellias pinned to their suits. One year, Schmalberg made 200,000 tiny silk petals for Vera Wang to stitch into its dresses. More recently, the firm created leather leaves for the display windows of the jeweler Harry Winston’s Paris boutique.

But in the age of fast fashion and offshoring, the business of Manhattan fabric flora is not exactly bustling. Michael Kaback, a retired garment district worker who has become the area’s unofficial historian, said there were once upward of 10 artificial flower firms plying their trade. Now, Schmalberg is the only survivor.

Mr. Brand gathered the students in the factory’s assembly area, where five women were seated around two tables, painstakingly layering fabric petals together with wire and craft glue. Delicate purple flowers were strung on tiny wire lines; finished flowers are hung like clothes to dry.

“What Carmen is doing here is she’s making buds,” Mr. Brand said, describing the work of Carmen Garcia. He picked up a loose petal made of python. “If you look at this and fold it up, it becomes a bud. Then you put another piece behind it.”

A big-bellied man who wears beachy clothes in all seasons, Mr. Brand refers to himself as “the flower guy.” He has worked in the fabric flower trade since his teens and remains, he said, “obsessed about it.” Sometimes he lies in bed at night and thinks up new shapes to make with the firm’s hundreds of flower molds.

He called the students’ attention to a printed photo of an old man taped to a nearby wall: his late father, Harold Brand, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland.

“He had two brothers, a sister, a mom and dad. They all got perished,” Mr. Brand said, explaining how Harold emigrated to America after the war and worked at Schmalberg, which was started by his uncles. Harold eventually bought the business and ran it until the 1980s, when Warren and his sister, Debra, took over.

“Years ago, when I was a kid,” Mr. Brand told the students, “we sold thousands of flowers to children’s companies for little girls’ dresses. And then all that big industry of children’s garments stopped being made in America.”

The family used to have a street-level store on 35th Street. “Next door to us was a button man. The other side was a thread man. And a zipper guy,” he said. “Now you walk the streets and everything’s coming in a box, off a boat, made in La-La Land.”

Warren’s son, Adam Brand, who is 35 and began working with his father nine years ago, watched from the sidelines. Among his many duties, the younger Mr. Brand handles marketing and social media, essential for finding new, younger clients to replace the lost accounts.

The responsibility weighs on him. “I feel a lot of pressure,” he said. “And sometimes I don’t know what the heck to do.”

Sensing the students’ disinterest in matters of global trade, Adam asked them, “Do any of you watch ‘Say Yes to the Dress’?”

Excited murmurs.

“In a minute,” he said, “one of the producers is coming up here to talk to us about possibly making flowers for them.”

Though his father sometimes dolefully tells tour groups to “bring home a souvenir — we’ll give it to you less than wholesale,” Warren ended the tour on a hopeful note. “Anything can put us back on the map,” he said. “We need to keep up the positive vibes. We’re O.K. today.”

‘An American Atelier’

When Suzy Benzinger, a costume designer who has worked on a number of Woody Allen films, was working on the director’s 2016 release, “Café Society,” which is set in the 1930s, she went straight to Schmalberg.

“I went in there and I was floored,” Ms. Benzinger said. “Not that there were beautiful flowers, but that there were women at tables making them. Are you kidding me? We’re talking 2019 in New York. I mean, this doesn’t exist.”

Designers for Marchesa, a company specializing in formal and bridal wear, have for years hired Schmalberg to make custom floral embellishments, including for Anne Hathaway’s memorable 2008 Oscar dress with its shoulder strap of red silk roses. Anna Holvik, the brand’s design director, compared the company to a specialized French atelier like Maison Lesage, the embroidery house in Paris.

“In fashion today, or any creative industry for that matter, things are changing and moving so quickly that age-old techniques are often forgotten,” Ms. Holvik said. “To work with people who have dedicated their lives to keeping the craft alive, it’s really an honor.”

Ms. Holvik called Schmalberg’s headquarters “a place of wonder,” and said she loves to roam the shelves of ready-made flowers, which are stored in long cardboard boxes. Labeled “Peony” or “Black Clusters” or “Assorted White Petals,” the flowers are grouped by color, with samples stapled to the box fronts, and the visual effect, as Ms. Holvik put it, is of flowers “literally dripping off the walls.”

Beyond the stockroom are shelves lined with molds, some dating back 100 years: heavy steel casts, the size of a palm, called “five pours” or “three pours” for the number of petals they stamp out.

To make artificial flowers first requires industrial brawn. Typically, clients provide the material, such as silk satin-faced organza or thick velvet, which gets dunked in a plastic bucket of fabric stiffener and hung on a wooden rack to dry. The stiffened fabric is placed under a cutting machine that stamps down on the mold to make flower shapes, as a cookie-cutter cuts dough.

The resulting petals have no detail beyond what is on the fabric. To emboss floral-like veining onto them, a hydraulic press applies heat and pressure. The finished petals are then hand assembled into tulips, carnations or other varieties — though, as Warren Brand said, “Not everything is horticulturally on the money here.”

Alex Nelson, 63 and a Bronx resident, runs the cutting machine and sings along to WCBS classic hits radio as he works. He came to Schmalberg in 1984.

Alvaro Davila, 63, who operates the hydraulic press, once worked at a competitor, Dulken and Derrick. When Mr. Davila was laid off, Schmalberg gave him a job.

Miriam Baez, 70, who oversees the flower assemblers, started at Schmalberg in 1979, after the flower factory on 14th Street where she worked relocated to Florida. A crafting wiz, Ms. Baez is the one who helps fashion designers realize their ideas. One day, she worked with a designer from Vera Wang to construct flowers with 10-inch petals, the fabric a gorgeous soft blue and mint green, the petals delicate and floppy yet still structured.

“I did retire once, but I’m still here,” Ms. Baez said. “I don’t want to stay home. Every day here I’m doing new things.”

Being able to collaborate face to face with skilled workers like Ms. Baez, and to have something made quickly without dealing with overseas manufacturers and customs, has made Schmalberg a favored resource for local designers like Ms. Benzinger, who envisioned a bolero of silk leaves for Kristen Stewart’s character to wear in a nightclub scene in “Cafe Society.”

“I gave Schmalberg the fabric, they made the leaves and put the bolero together in no time,” Ms. Benzinger said. “You can say, ‘I need to recreate this rose from this 1930s painting,’ and they will do it. They make one flower or 500.”

Petals and the City

Mr. Brand has never known a life without M & S Schmalberg. On Saturdays as a boy in Massapequa, on Long Island, Harold would “throw me out of bed” and father and son would take the train into the city to work at the 35th Street store.

Even then, Mr. Brand said, the artificial flower business was up and down. Schmalberg stayed afloat because his father, who had labored in a woodworking factory run by the Nazis, lived conservatively (“He wasn’t driving a Caddy or anything,” Mr. Brand said), and was resourceful during lean times.

Harold subleased part of the store to a button company. He used the display window to sell Arnold Palmer-style golf sweaters. When the sweaters didn’t take off, he sold holiday Christmas wreaths. When wreaths flopped, he turned to selling fabric remnants. This was profitable.

“Then every few years, flowers would come in,” said Mr. Brand, who graduated from SUNY Cobleskill on a Tuesday in 1977 and went to work for the family business on Wednesday. “We’d be busy again with flowers.”

In October of 1981, Harold tried to break up a fight between two male employees and was shot point-blank in the neck by one of them, the bullet lodging near his spine. Warren, then 23 and newly married, living in Manhattan and going to rock concerts and partying hard, got the call at his apartment midday.

Warren rushed back to the store, where his father was being loaded into an ambulance and taken to the emergency room. The surgeons saved Harold from becoming a paraplegic, but they couldn’t remove the bullet and his recovery was slow and painful. Warren stepped in to run the business, eventually taking over. (Debra, his sister, is retired.)

Whether it expands or (mostly) contracts depends on caprices of fashion and popular culture. In the early 2000s, during the popular run of TV series “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw, the fashion-plate lead character, accessorized her outfits with floral pins and appliqués. Fabric flowers became trendy.

Schmalberg increased staff, and its employees put in workweeks of 60 hours and up to fulfill orders for Talbots and other retailers. “We rode the wave,” and conserved the profits, Mr. Brand said.

Adam Brand came to work for his father during that windfall summer to help out. And, he said, “I started to recognize what we had here.” After graduating from Stony Brook University with a degree in psychology, Adam decided to become, like his grandfather and father, a flower guy.

Camellias on Amazon

At present, Schmalberg is not in the dire position of hawking Arnold Palmer sweaters, or the 21st-century equivalent. Still. …

“Take notice while you’re here how many times the phone is ringing,” Warren Brand said, sitting in his usual spot at a long table in the front showroom, where he greets the customers that in these days of Uniqlo and Supreme, are sparser than during the Bradshaw boom.

He added: “As much as I love it, as much as you’re going to see happiness and excitement, I say it, and Adam doesn’t like me saying it, from an accountant standpoint, it’s very hard.”

No longer able to rely on big orders from American apparel brands, the company sells flowers to anyone it can, in and out of fashion: to brides for wedding bouquets; to Hasidic Jewish women who like to brighten their dark clothing; to the Australian ballet for its costumes; and even on online outlets like Amazon, most notably a camellia brooch similar to one that Chanel sells for $575. Schmalberg’s brooch costs $20 and is an unusual thing in fashion: a cheap knockoff with a high-quality provenance.

And then there is the trickle of independent designers, like Mina Mann, who may stop by Schmalberg for piecework — say, to embroider a wrap.

Ann Claire, a milliner, was there not long ago to get flowers for a hatpin she was making for the HBO adaptation of “The Plot Against America,” a Philip Roth novel.

Ms. Claire moved to New York, she said, because she couldn’t easily find wire, buckram and other supplies for her work elsewhere in the United States. And she could find silk flowers only in the garment district, at Schmalberg. “Everywhere else is in Europe,” she said.

Today Ms. Claire was in search of a bright, dahlia-shaped flower that she would then hand-paint. “I’ve got to find a pale, pink velvet,” she said, rooting through a box of samples in that general shade.

She huddled over some flowers with Lucia Reynoso, a veteran employee, asking, “Can these come higher? What do you think? Bigger or smaller?”

A tremendous amount of time, labor and expense would go into creating one hatpin for one character’s costume in a single fleeting scene. “And probably viewers won’t even notice,” Ms. Claire said ruefully. “It’s such a dying thing. Yet people want that quality. But it gets harder and harder to find it.”

Ms. Claire pulled out her phone, searched YouTube and pulled up a video clip from the 1960s, a documentary about an English firm that laboriously produced hand-painted wallpaper.

“Look at that hand!” the designer said. “When you come into Schmalberg, you can duplicate that handmade quality in this mass-produced fashion society. Aaah! Which is why I don’t ever want Schmalberg to leave — they can’t.”