American Flannel
How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times journalist Kurutz (Like a Rolling Stone) details in this encouraging report the efforts of entrepreneurs working to bring clothing manufacturing back to the U.S. The percentage of domestically produced clothes in Americans' wardrobes has fallen from 70% in 1980 to 2% today, Kurutz notes. Profiles of individuals attempting to reverse this trend include Bayard Winthrop, who launched the company American Giant in 2012 after becoming disillusioned with the shoddy workmanship he saw in products outsourced to China, and Gina Locklear, who earned the nickname "Sock Queen of Alabama" by transforming her family's north Alabama knitting operation into the organic sock brand Zkano. Exploring the factors that hollowed out American textile manufacturing, Kurutz details how free trade policies, beginning with NAFTA in 1993, eliminated or reduced tariffs on foreign products, igniting a race within the apparel industry to move factories to countries with the cheapest labor. The profiles humanize the machinations of the clothing market, finding in the entrepreneurs' plights an all-American tale of resilience and self-sufficiency in the face of steep odds. Readers will be inspired to look for the Made in America label.
