American Flannel

The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States America’s first textile mill started up the same year the Constitution was signed, and for decades clothing manufacture was a pillar of U.S. industry. But between 1980 and the present, we went from wearing 70 percent American-made to wearing almost none. As the industry went offshore, the U.S. lost not only jobs but also the expertise, technology, and artistry needed to produce high-quality clothing. 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 produce quality, affordable, domestically made clothing. Impressed and intrigued, New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz, who had witnessed the devastation of the industrial heartland while growing up in rural Pennsylvania, began to follow Winthrop’s journey. In the process, he uncovered other trailblazers—from the “sock queen of Alabama” to a corporate fashion veteran who envisioned a sustainable way to grow cotton and make blue jeans—who are building a new supply chain on the skeleton of the old mills and factories, and wedding cutting-edge technology and design to the wisdom of the few workers who still know how to knit, weave, stitch, and dye. Eye-opening and inspiring, American Flannel is the story of how a band of dreamers and doers is showing how we can make it in America again.