Nearly every presidential candidate since Ross Perot has made reviving US manufacturing part of their platform. But few have leaned on that promise as heavily as Donald Trump. Part of his plan to “make America great again” is making more stuff here.
Since Trump’s 2016 victory, many Americans have asked why we aren’t doing that for so many basic goods, such as clothing. Apparel and textile factories have shed roughly 81 percent of their jobs since 1979, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The political reflex has been to blame immigrants and impose tariffs, but the prospect of reshoring manufacturing, at least in apparel, faces a more fundamental hurdle.
In the 1960s the average US household spent 10 percent of its annual income on clothes and shoes, according to the BLS and the American Apparel and Footwear Association, and roughly 95 percent of those items were made domestically. Today it spends 4 percent, and nearly 97 percent is made abroad. Americans have more to wear than ever, thanks to our addiction to cheap clothing. And our modestly sized wardrobes of padded suits and pleated dresses have turned into walk-in closets full of T-shirts and jeans. Garments this simple to make are at greater risk of commodification. Producers today compete mainly on price, leaving them with razor-thin margins, which in turn puts downward pressure on wages.
Manufacturing $10 T-shirts and $30 jeans is not a reliable path for US workers to achieve upward economic mobility. With the artificial intelligence robotics revolution around the corner, it’s unclear if these jobs will even be around in the future. In a 2017 study, economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo found that robots significantly reduced employment and wages for manufacturing workers while creating few jobs elsewhere to offset losses.
The US should chart a different course: use industrial policy to move its garment industry upstream. Although they transitioned into post-industrial economies long ago, countries such as Italy, France and Japan have held on to parts of their garment-manufacturing sectors. Italians make luxurious knitwear and beautifully tailored suits; in France, it’s hand-sewn leather goods; in Japan, there’s artisanal denim, which is turned into vintage-style jeans.
The US can do the same with tailoring, outerwear, knitwear and footwear — products that reward craftsmanship and protect workers from the downward wage pressure of commodification and job displacement from automation. The US is already home to many brands with the requisite credibility to do so. To name a few: shoemakers Alden, Rancourt & Co. and Quoddy; C.C. Filson Co., which is known for outdoor wear; Schott NYC, which makes leather jackets; and Rochester Tailored Clothing and Oxxford Clothes, which specialise in suits and sport coats.
To do this, the government needs to invest in job-training programs — supplementing existing ones at schools such as New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology and starting others in fields where the US lags behind, such as the art of assembling fine leather goods. (Although the Trump administration has spoken favourably about trade schools, its proposed cuts to Pell Grants and federal work-study would reduce aid for many low-income students enrolled in community colleges and vocational programs that serve as entry points into skilled trades.) After all, the robust garment-manufacturing sector of the mid-20th century was only possible thanks to government-funded initiatives such as home economics courses, 4-H clubs, Works Progress Administration sewing rooms and the US Department of Agriculture’s education outreach. These programs taught Americans how to sew, which let them go from high school straight to the garment factories.
These programs withered in the postwar period — partly because funding for home ec was redirected to computer and keyboard classes, reflecting a pivot toward a digital and service-driven economy. We don’t need to revive those old education systems completely, but some investment is necessary if we want to make more clothes in the US. At Chicago Waldorf School, the privately held Italian luxury company Kiton has already created a curriculum for young people interested in learning tailoring, design and marketing. The government should start similar programs, though doing so will require Republicans to recognise that its spending isn’t always a drain but an investment in America’s future. Or at the very least, the US should offer financial incentives for businesses to follow in Kiton’s footsteps.
Similarly, the government must rebuild parts of the domestic supply chain that have eroded over time. In Pennsylvania, Jacob Hurwitz and David Neill founded American Trench on the premise that it’s possible to produce raincoats in the US that match the quality of midcentury British classics. Since its founding in 2012, the company has expanded to socks, hoodies and tailored blazers, all made domestically. However, Hurwitz notes that he sometimes runs up against the limits of what the current US manufacturing ecosystem can support. “Lots of things have disappeared,” he says, naming yarn spinners, dye houses and specialised machinery. In some cases, the problem is simple absence; in others, it’s a mismatch of scale. For instance, there’s no commercial American Merino wool program with a stock yarn service. And even where infrastructure exists, it’s often built for a much larger industry with far bigger production runs. As Hurwitz puts it, “It’s not right-sized for smaller, modern brands, which makes it expensive or impossible for smaller companies to produce their batches.” Getting the right machinery here would require the Trump administration to lower its tariffs.
Reducing tariffs would also make US brands more competitive globally, as they’re currently being squeezed by rising costs at home and retaliatory trade barriers abroad. “You can’t make midpriced clothes in the US anymore — the costs push you into premium or luxury,” Hurwitz says. For US companies to make luxury goods, they need to import certain materials, such as Scottish cashmere yarns and Chinese silks. Comparable fabrics are difficult or uneconomical to source domestically at scale, reflecting decades of disinvestment in textile production.
Andrew Chen, co-founder of New York-based 3sixteen, faces this challenge acutely. His company makes premium jeans and T-shirts in Los Angeles, but it can’t always get the right domestically produced materials. 3sixteen makes its heavyweight T-shirts from American-grown cotton when possible, but it primarily uses Japanese denim for its jeans. “The best and most well-known US selvedge denim mill closed down about a decade ago,” Chen explains, adding that the remaining options no longer make denim with the quality and characteristics he needs.
Japanese mills, by contrast, offer variation and know-how — by-products of an industry full of people who are focused on craftsmanship and sustained by Japanese government support. Not only have tariffs raised 3sixteen’s input costs (now it pays the traditional customs and duties on imported goods, plus the 15 percent tax), making it harder to maintain an American-made denim brand, but they’ve also cost the company business overseas. “We’ve actually lost international accounts specifically because customer sentiment toward American brands has soured,” Chen says. Retailers in Canada and the European Union have become more hesitant to carry American goods, he adds. “Retailers have come to market and told us, ‘I don’t know how much I can really spend with American brands right now because customers have come in and said they’re not going to buy US-made goods.’” Having a blustering US president beat his chest and say he’s going to take over Greenland and Canada doesn’t help.
By giving up the global market to focus on a domestic one, the US is losing out on a tremendous opportunity. Luxury clothing is often sold on ideas about what things represent, rather than just how they’re made, and the US is in a unique position to capitalise on one of luxury’s most powerful organising ideas: authenticity. After all, the US authored several global fashion languages, from the patrician look of Ivy Style to the rugged individualism of Levi Strauss’ five-pocket blue jeans, the cornerstone of countercultural fashions from rebels to rockers to hippies. The US also introduced Carhartt Inc. chore coats and Red Wing Shoe Co. work boots, which underpin much of global “heritage” fashion, as well as classic military pieces such as the A-2 bomber and M-65 field jacket, which perennially appear in almost every designer’s collection.
It’s impossible to discuss major menswear trends of the past 15 years — Westernwear, gorpcore, the skinny rocker look — without mentioning staple styles the US created (denim Western shirts, cowboy boots, colourful mountain parkas, leisure shirts, black leather double rider motorcycle jackets). The biggest fashion story of the past few decades is how luxury brands like LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE have used streetwear to stay culturally relevant, often by leaning into the section of streetwear that derives from hip-hop and Black culture. Why are foreign entities usually able to capitalise on American history better than Americans?
The question, then, is whether there’s a real appetite for American-made luxury goods. Culture writer W. David Marx, the author of “Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style,” suggests the answer is yes — kind of. “There is still an interest in Made in USA clothing,” he says. It carries a certain cachet in Japan, Marx argues, because people associate the label with quality and authority over distinctly American styles. But a label alone is not enough. “Brands can cut through the noise by saying something is made in the USA,” Marx says, “but the product has to follow. It has to feel like it really delivers on the mythos. If it doesn’t, then it’s just more expensive.”
The Alden Shoe Co., for example, is a storied American shoe manufacturer founded in 1884 and based in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Its Goodyear-welted calfskin shoes retail for about $1,125 in Japan; shell cordovan sells for a premium of $1,448. And even at these prices, Japanese consumers can’t get enough. “Alden’s production capacity can’t supply as much as Japanese retailers need,” Marx says. “Many retailers have positioned their highest-end merchandise around Alden, which makes them a good example of how quality and American heritage can be a potent mix.”
All of this sits uneasily with the MAGA worldview. Luxury manufacturing depends on global trade and foreign demand, but you can’t build an export-led industry while alienating your customers abroad. People buy Italian suits because they associate Italy with craftsmanship, and French leather goods because they associate France with elegance; the “Made in USA” label carried weight in the postwar period largely because people associated the US with liberal democracy, optimism and youthful confidence. As those ideals are replaced by hostile trade relations, ethno-nationalism and exclusionary rhetoric, American products risk losing the symbolic premium that once set them apart.
This is the central problem with the America First industrial agenda. It’s a form of autarky, the economic fantasy that a nation can produce and consume everything within its own borders. In practice, rebuilding an American industrial middle class would require higher consumer prices, and even MAGA’s most devoted supporters are unwilling to pay them. Just as the average Italian isn’t buying high-end Italian suits, the average American will never be the target market for $1,000 Alden shoes or $5,000 Oxxford suits. The practical effect of the agenda is that a voter can enjoy the moral satisfaction of saying they support US manufacturing without there being any material change for workers. Notably, 10 years after Trump descended on his golden escalator, US manufacturing has not seen a revival. In fact, employment in the sector contracted last year.
To restore US apparel manufacturing, the government should move the industry toward the high end by creating high-skilled vocational training programs, reinvesting in factories, upgrading technology to make these factories easier for small businesses to work with, offering low-interest loans and lowering tariffs so companies can import the materials needed to make luxury goods. We should also burnish America’s image abroad so the “Made in USA” label stands for something admirable again — not bluster or empty nostalgia, but real artistry, integrity and the sense that well-made objects reflect our best national values.
By Derek Guy
