American Flannel Quotes

“For 40 years, the prevailing mindset of the industry was that people wouldn't pay $30 for a premium cotton T shirt made in America. They'd sooner spend eighteen dollars for a pack of six-- three dollars a shirt-- made by Hanes in the Dominican Republic. That mindset had shut down the mills. That mindset had cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and gutted once flourishing communities. It had caused a cheapening of quality.”
― Steven Kurutz, American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home

“The French perfected the clean, elegant line and the atelier approach to making clothing. The Italians were masters of the fine handwork needed for leather goods and tailoring. What America excelled at as the apparel business scaled up and industrialized in the early 20th century was mass-produced good-quality, hard-wearing clothes. American workwear and sportswear, like American cars, had a tough, overbuilt quality: the copper button fly on a pair of Levi's, the waxed cotton "tin cloth" that made Filson gear able to withstand wind, rain, and maybe even a blast of dynamite.”
― Steven Kurutz, American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home