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Aaron McGill, a Nashville tailor and owner of Only One Tailoring, and a team of tailors and sewers are working together to produce medical face masks, following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Vanderbilt Medical Center.
The idea to help local doctors and nurses came as a no-brainer for McGill.
“It was an obvious need as people of authority kept speaking out and saying that [they] were going to have a shortage in the medical field for masks,” he says.
McGill received a phone call from Nashville producer Ashleigh Prince one night just as the pandemic began to unfold. Prince wanted to help out in some way, but after speaking for about an hour, the pair “didn’t come up with anything that didn’t end with bankruptcy [while] trying to make masks. Overnight I had an epiphany that made it possible to make the masks while not straining the people making them.”
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McGill shared his idea with Prince the next day, and from there, the plan “just fell into place.” They quickly pulled together a team of displaced tailors who are currently without income, including McGill’s team at Only One Tailoring.
“My existing team of tailors that normally handle alterations were dying to keep sewing and saw what I wanted to do as a cause they supported as well,” he says.
The team began making masks that very same day.
So far, masks made by the team have gone to hospitals around town including St. Thomas Hospital, Skyline Medical Center, and Vanderbilt Medical Center. Two hundred masks also went to nursing facilities in Western Kentucky.
The team’s goal is to raise enough money to manufacture 10,000 masks. It costs $6 to make one mask, and currently $20,000 has been raised to make a total of 3,300 masks. A website for donations has been created and also includes updates on where the masks are going, and a breakdown on how the six-dollar donation is being used. The donations go toward not just producing the face masks, but also provide income for the tailors and sewers who would otherwise be out of work.
Some of the cause’s early supporters include Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Jake Owen, and Bobby Bones.
As long as the need for masks continues and funding is available, McGill and the team will keep making masks.
“I’ve heard it said that this is like the days when the USA was at war, and skilled and unskilled people took up a hammer and started building. I’m a believer that if we all move in the same direction as a people, we’ll always exceed our goals,” McGill says.