“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.
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I was hooked from the very first page. Kurutz's writing is tight, vivid, always on point. The story he tells is as important as it is absorbing. First, it's an uplifting tale of good old American inventiveness and stick-to-it-iveness, the best kind of underdog story. It is also a cautionary tale about what happens when a country becomes so rich and complacent that it forgets how to create as well as buy. I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 2024.
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Stephen King