Three years ago, Bayard Winthrop, the chief executive and founder of the clothing brand American Giant, started thinking about a flannel shirt he wore as a kid in the 1970s. It was blue plaid and bought for him by his grandmother, probably at Caldor, a discount department store popular in the northeast back then. The flannel was one of the first pieces of clothing Mr. Winthrop owned that suggested a personality.
“I thought it looked great,” he said, “and I thought it said something about me. That I was cool and physical and capable and outdoorsy.”
Since 2011 American Giant, or AG, has mass-produced everyday sportswear for men and women, like the Lee jeans or Russell sweatshirts once sold in stores like Caldor — from the ginned cotton to the cutting and sewing — entirely in the U.S. Mr. Winthrop, a former financier who had run a snowshoe firm, made it the company’s mission to, in his words, “bring back ingenuity and optimism to the towns that make things.” He’s been very successful, especially with a full-zip sweatshirt Slate called “the greatest hoodie ever made.” AG has introduced denim, leggings and socks, among other products.
But Mr. Winthrop’s madeleine of a garment proved elusive. “We kept asking around and hearing, ‘Not flannel. You can do all these other things here, maybe. Flannel is gone.’” he said.
L.L. Bean, Woolrich, Ralph Lauren and Pendleton all made their reputations on rugged, cozy flannel shirts, but not one of those brands make them domestically today. In fact, “flannel hasn’t been made in America for decades,” said Nate Herman, an executive for the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a Washington D.C.-based trade group. (...)
Bringing its manufacture back to America, Mr. Winthrop thought, could be deeply symbolic. Both of the capability of U.S. manufacturing and of the need for big fashion brands to invest here again. It was a quixotic artisanal project, perhaps, but one with potentially high business stakes.
Flannel 101
“Forty years ago, we were able to make great shirts here, great jeans here, sold at a price that made sense to mainstream consumers,” Mr. Winthrop said at the outset of his project. “We’ve lost that capability in 40 years? We can’t make a flannel shirt in America? I’m not going to accept that answer.”
“Made in America” has become a marketing catchphrase espoused by both Brooklyn $400 selvage denim enthusiasts and Trump isolationists. And brands like American Apparel have led a renaissance of sorts in domestic manufacturing. But producing clothes in the U.S. today is exceedingly complicated. Over the last 30 years, the textile industry has been decimated by outsourcing and unfavorable trade deals, shedding 1.4 million jobs in the process, said Augustine Tantillo, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.
Communities that produced clothes for generations, like Fort Payne, Ala., the former sock capital of the world, were mortally wounded when mills closed. Sometimes the expertise or work force have dissipated. Sometimes it’s the machinery, the looms, that have gone overseas.
Each time AG develops a new product, Mr. Winthrop must patch together its supply chain from what remains. To help him navigate the process, he relies on “old dogs in the industry,” he said, though AG is based in San Francisco and runs like a tech start-up, with sales almost entirely online.
For flannel, he called James McKinnon.
At 50, Mr. McKinnon is not that old (Mr. Winthrop is 49). But he is the third McKinnon to run Cotswold Industries, the textile manufacturer his grandfather started in 1954. Cotswold made the woven fabric for headliners inside Ford cars. Later, the firm manufactured pocket linings for Lee, Wrangler and Levi jeans. Cotswold still handles pocketing business for many U.S. brands, part of a diverse portfolio that includes making fabrics for culinary apparel. The fabrics are woven at its mill in Central, S.C.
Mr. Winthrop called Mr. McKinnon at his office in midtown Manhattan and ran through the list of questions. Why is flannel gone? What would it take to bring it back? How would you do it?
Mr. Winthrop specified that he wanted to make yarn-dyed flannel, not flannel in which the pattern is simply printed onto the fabric. (...)
Shirting in general is more complicated than a T-shirt or fleece because it’s woven rather than knit. Wovens typically require more needlework, which means higher labor costs, which means that they have been outsourced more aggressively than knits or denim. And a flannel is a very complicated woven shirt.
For a T-shirt, raw material is fed into a circular knitting machine and a roll of fabric is cranked out and dyed red or blue or purple. But flannel requires the dyeing of each individual yarn, which is what gives it the patterned look of, say, Buffalo plaid.
Those dyed yarns are put on a weaving machine, or loom. There are lengthwise, or warp, yarns and crosswise, or weft, yarns. To get the famous red and black squares even and blended, the warping must be done precisely right. And the more intricate the pattern or numerous the colors, the more complex the warping and the harder the weave.
As anyone who loves one knows, flannel shirts are soft, which is achieved through a finishing process called napping.
“Flannel, of all the things in your wardrobe, is the one thing that you know intuitively if you like or not,” Mr. Winthrop said. “It has to feel right in your hand.”
“I thought it looked great,” he said, “and I thought it said something about me. That I was cool and physical and capable and outdoorsy.”
Since 2011 American Giant, or AG, has mass-produced everyday sportswear for men and women, like the Lee jeans or Russell sweatshirts once sold in stores like Caldor — from the ginned cotton to the cutting and sewing — entirely in the U.S. Mr. Winthrop, a former financier who had run a snowshoe firm, made it the company’s mission to, in his words, “bring back ingenuity and optimism to the towns that make things.” He’s been very successful, especially with a full-zip sweatshirt Slate called “the greatest hoodie ever made.” AG has introduced denim, leggings and socks, among other products.But Mr. Winthrop’s madeleine of a garment proved elusive. “We kept asking around and hearing, ‘Not flannel. You can do all these other things here, maybe. Flannel is gone.’” he said.
L.L. Bean, Woolrich, Ralph Lauren and Pendleton all made their reputations on rugged, cozy flannel shirts, but not one of those brands make them domestically today. In fact, “flannel hasn’t been made in America for decades,” said Nate Herman, an executive for the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a Washington D.C.-based trade group. (...)
Bringing its manufacture back to America, Mr. Winthrop thought, could be deeply symbolic. Both of the capability of U.S. manufacturing and of the need for big fashion brands to invest here again. It was a quixotic artisanal project, perhaps, but one with potentially high business stakes.
Flannel 101
“Forty years ago, we were able to make great shirts here, great jeans here, sold at a price that made sense to mainstream consumers,” Mr. Winthrop said at the outset of his project. “We’ve lost that capability in 40 years? We can’t make a flannel shirt in America? I’m not going to accept that answer.”
“Made in America” has become a marketing catchphrase espoused by both Brooklyn $400 selvage denim enthusiasts and Trump isolationists. And brands like American Apparel have led a renaissance of sorts in domestic manufacturing. But producing clothes in the U.S. today is exceedingly complicated. Over the last 30 years, the textile industry has been decimated by outsourcing and unfavorable trade deals, shedding 1.4 million jobs in the process, said Augustine Tantillo, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.
Communities that produced clothes for generations, like Fort Payne, Ala., the former sock capital of the world, were mortally wounded when mills closed. Sometimes the expertise or work force have dissipated. Sometimes it’s the machinery, the looms, that have gone overseas.
Each time AG develops a new product, Mr. Winthrop must patch together its supply chain from what remains. To help him navigate the process, he relies on “old dogs in the industry,” he said, though AG is based in San Francisco and runs like a tech start-up, with sales almost entirely online.
For flannel, he called James McKinnon.
At 50, Mr. McKinnon is not that old (Mr. Winthrop is 49). But he is the third McKinnon to run Cotswold Industries, the textile manufacturer his grandfather started in 1954. Cotswold made the woven fabric for headliners inside Ford cars. Later, the firm manufactured pocket linings for Lee, Wrangler and Levi jeans. Cotswold still handles pocketing business for many U.S. brands, part of a diverse portfolio that includes making fabrics for culinary apparel. The fabrics are woven at its mill in Central, S.C.
Mr. Winthrop called Mr. McKinnon at his office in midtown Manhattan and ran through the list of questions. Why is flannel gone? What would it take to bring it back? How would you do it?
Mr. Winthrop specified that he wanted to make yarn-dyed flannel, not flannel in which the pattern is simply printed onto the fabric. (...)
Shirting in general is more complicated than a T-shirt or fleece because it’s woven rather than knit. Wovens typically require more needlework, which means higher labor costs, which means that they have been outsourced more aggressively than knits or denim. And a flannel is a very complicated woven shirt.
For a T-shirt, raw material is fed into a circular knitting machine and a roll of fabric is cranked out and dyed red or blue or purple. But flannel requires the dyeing of each individual yarn, which is what gives it the patterned look of, say, Buffalo plaid.
Those dyed yarns are put on a weaving machine, or loom. There are lengthwise, or warp, yarns and crosswise, or weft, yarns. To get the famous red and black squares even and blended, the warping must be done precisely right. And the more intricate the pattern or numerous the colors, the more complex the warping and the harder the weave.
As anyone who loves one knows, flannel shirts are soft, which is achieved through a finishing process called napping.
“Flannel, of all the things in your wardrobe, is the one thing that you know intuitively if you like or not,” Mr. Winthrop said. “It has to feel right in your hand.”
by Steven Kurutz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Travis Dove
