American Flannel
How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home
How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home
“I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 2024.” —Stephen King, bestselling author (and onetime millworker) “American Flannel is a wonderful book--surprising, entertaining, vivid and personal, but also enlightening on the largest questions of America's economic and social future.” —James Fallows, co-author of Our Towns The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States. For decades, clothing manufacture was a pillar of U.S. industry. But beginning in the 1980s, Americans went from wearing 70 percent domestic-made apparel to almost none. Even the very symbol of American freedom and style—blue jeans—got outsourced. With offshoring, the nation lost not only millions of jobs but also crucial expertise and artistry. Dismayed by shoddy imported “fast fashion”—and unable to stop dreaming of re-creating a favorite shirt from his youth—Bayard Winthrop set out to build a new company, American Giant, that would swim against this trend. New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz, in turn, began to follow Winthrop’s journey. He discovered other trailblazers as well, from the “Sock Queen of Alabama” to a pair of father-son shoemakers and a men’s style blogger who almost single-handedly drove a campaign to make “Made in the USA” cool. Eye-opening and inspiring, American Flannel is the story of how a band of visionaries and makers are building a new supply chain on the skeleton of the old and wedding old-fashioned craftsmanship to cutting-edge technology and design to revive an essential American dream.
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In an effort to read more non-fiction, I went over to the shelf Thursday night and just randomly grabbed this. I was into this by the end of the first chapter, and I couldn't figure out why. I'm old enough to remember the “Made in America” labels and the buy American campaigns. I did not grow up in a factory town or have family that worked in manufacturing, but still this idea, it was resonating with something that is deep inside of me. Something that comes out when I look to buy something I need locally and I can't find it (case in point: none of the local stores near me sell woman's tights- I HAD to go to a box store).
This quote, from page 202 by Farhad Manjoo, which I will now paraphrase. He's talking about when covid first landed, how incredibly unprepared the US was to deal with it-because we send so much of our manufacturing overseas. He said, “What a small, shameful way for a strong nation to falter...For want of a seventy-five-cent face mask, the kingdom was lost.”
And now I find myself shopping brands that are produced here in the US and, I'm not going to lie, I'm a civil servant, I can't afford 228 trendy jeans, but I can afford one 115 flannel shirt, if I get years of wear out of it. I can afford a beautiful pair of 20 socks if they will last more than a few weeks.
It's time to change my priorities (let's open the conversation about why American workers would have trouble affording brands made in their own country-both because of their low wages and because of how hard it is to produce textiles here.)
This was a great, well written read.
