For someone with a limited connection to American manufacturing or production, I spend a lot of time thinking about what was, is, could be, or should be “made in America,” especially clothing and textiles. While I consider myself a globalist and generally support free trade, I also know that this country can do more to lower regulatory and economic barriers to support home-grown enterprises.

I am thrilled that there are nascent attempts to redevelop the American clothing industry to its former glory.

Dad in the shmata business

My interest in American manufacturing comes from my dad, Richard J. Ellman. My dad spent most of his professional life on Seventh Avenue in the “shmata business.” From the Yiddish term for rags, the shmata business generally refers to the garment and textile industry. The term describes an entire ecosystem, from sweatshops on the Lower East Side to major retailers, and beyond.

I loved going to the office in New York with my dad. The Garment District was alive with people pushing racks of clothes down the streets. The sights on the streets, mixed with the smells of hot dogs and pretzels and the sounds of the city, made the area electric with energy. Every building in the Garment District had hundreds of offices for different businesses in garment production. There were offices for sock production, gloves and mittens, underwear, sweaters, ties, blouses, dresses, stockings, and more. Each office had its own specialty. Today, most of this production and energy is gone.

McKinsey & Co. reported in 2024 that the New York fashion industry employs 50,000 fewer people today than it did ten years prior. That’s a mere shadow of its former self. In the 1910s, the garment industry accounted for 46 percent of the industrial workforce in New York City. Today, just 6 percent of the city’s jobs are in fashion. This decline is not just in New York, but coast to coast.

When I was young, my dad would regularly visit the Hathaway Shirt Company and other mills in Waterville, Maine, as well as in other parts of New England, and in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania. Later, the mills moved to the Carolinas and Tennessee, and then to Asia, and now to India. There is not much onshore anymore.

Ok, call it a comeback

In September 2019, before the world fell apart, I had a chance encounter in Portland, Maine, with Tom Chappell. Tom is most famous for being the Tom in Tom’s of Maine. I met Tom in a clothing store in the Old Port section of Maine’s largest city. I had some time to kill between meetings in Augusta and my flight at PWM. I wandered into Rambler’s Way, a company dedicated to producing sustainable wool, creating local jobs, and breathing new life into the country’s textile industry. Tom (I call him Tom) told me about his passion to revive Maine’s textile heritage, grounded in values like craftsmanship, community, and responsibility. I am thrilled that Rambler’s Way is still going strong.

I am also impressed by companies like Buck Mason, which makes crazy-good undershirts, by the way (ok, call it a commercial).  With limited experience in apparel design or manufacturing, the founders started the company, which now produces some 300,000 of the 500,000 t-shirts it sells annually in American factories, using fabrics made in the United States. Two years ago, Buck Mason bought a sewing factory in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, and an associated cloth mill in neighboring Shillington, all very close to Womelsdorf, where my dad would regularly visit.

Back in New England, I am thrilled that “Fall River, once called ‘Spindle City’ after the number of spools that fed its thousands of textile looms, is undergoing a manufacturing renaissance that leverages its industrial heritage.”

Northeast of Hartford, Connecticut, is the small town of Stafford Springs. There, a woolen mill had opened in 1842 and was reborn in 1988 when Loro Piana invested more than $30 million “to modernize the machinery and brought over from Italy a textile engineer, Giuseppe Monteleone, to train local workers and run the plant.” This renaissance was the vision of Jacob Long, who started American Woolen.

In New York, the touchstone of American apparel, the Washington Post featured three designers swimming against a strong current to bring garment manufacturing back to the city that never sleeps. Naomi Mishkin’s Naomi Nomi line is “designed in Brooklyn. Sewn in Queens.” Also mentioned are Batsheva Hay’s line, Batsheva, and Carolina Herrera.

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere

There are many challenges facing American-made garments and textiles. Among many are labor forces and costs. As reported by the Washington Post, “how to recruit the next generation to keep looms, logistics and marketing humming [is a key question]. Employers here say their biggest challenge isn’t foreign competition but convincing young people that manufacturing is a career at all, let alone one worth showing up for every day.” Also, when factories close, skills are lost.

Just like garments and textiles come in all shapes and sizes, so do public and private sector solutions to bring American manufacturing back to America. Government agencies and businesses must work together to train a new generation of workers in manufacturing, ease the environmental and economic burdens of reopening mills or new manufacturing sites, lower barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs, and more.

The business of America is business. So is American manufacturing.