Tom's Sons Opens Its Pleating Workshop in NYC's Garment District for OHNY Weekend

On October 17, 2026, Tom's Sons International Pleating, a family-owned textile pleating business in New York's Garment District, opened its workshop as part of Open House New York's annual festival.

OHNY Weekend ran October 16 to 18 and spread more than 300 destinations across the city over three days. The festival is built around access: visitors get into buildings, studios and working spaces that are normally closed to the public. Tom's Sons was one of those stops, and its program centered on pleating, the trade of folding fabric into permanent, regular creases, shown in the place where the work is done.

The photograph on the official listing gives a sense of the setting. Two men stand in a storeroom lined with shelves of rolled cardboard tubes and paper rolls. One of them holds up a length of salmon-orange pleated material, fanned out in a wide arc so that the fine, even folds radiate from a single point. It is a simple image of what the business makes.

The Garment District was long the center of New York's apparel trade, and many of the specialist trades that supported designers and manufacturers worked there. A small, family-run pleating firm is the kind of supplier that rarely appears in front of the public, so an open house was a rare chance to see the step that happens between a bolt of cloth and a finished garment.

For Japanese readers, pleating is a familiar part of the fashion vocabulary, and seeing how a New York shop approaches the same craft may be of interest. The visit was a single-day program on October 17 and has now ended.