My grandfather’s work jacket is hung up in my closet, wedged between a Brooks Brothers blazer I bought when I landed my first “real job” and a vintage Champion bomber jacket I’ve been looking for on eBay for years. It’s faded brown – khaki-ish but not quite – and covered in stains that time and age haven’t managed to bleach away. The brass buttons show serious signs of wear, developing an honest patina that no amount of vinegar brushing can achieve.
There’s a stubborn crease down the collar where it rested against his neck for 40 years. He spent those years working as a machinist in Detroit, wearing the jacket every day from Truman to Reagan. This wasn’t clothing to him – it was equipment.
When I asked him why he hadn’t replaced the jacket years ago once it started showing serious signs of wear, he gave me a look that suggested I’d just asked why he’d only got one right arm. “It’s broken in,” he told me simply. Breath took before he added, “I just got used to it.” He was right, of course.
The jacket is broken in – the leather strap keeping tools in the pocket digs into my forearm when I wear it, worn down from years of sliding it off and onto his shoulder.
That patina on the buttons? I’ve got some scars on my fingers that I’ve managed to replicate, from decades of slipping those buttons open and closed. The jacket is something of a talisman for me now, emblematic of an entire way of thinking about clothing that I’m not sure we value anymore.
Instead of garments being well-worn tools, we expect our clothing to stay crisp and new, ripping as soon as we treat them the way my grandfather treated his jacket. We’d been conditioned to believe that seams will come undone, cloth will thin, and zippers will break – not strengthen and elongate with each repeated use. Of course, the irony that I’ll happily pay several hundred dollars for “workwear-inspired” shirt is not lost on me.
I imagine my grandfather laughing himself silly (or rolling his eyes into oblivion) at the suggestion that workwear is fashion. But there’s something to be said for clothing made with the durability and functionality that American workwear was built upon. Thankfully, there are still some fantastic American-made workwear brands that have resisted the siren call of overseas manufacturing.
These brands are the clothing equivalent of your great-grandfather’s watchmaker – specialists who perfect their craft for generations, only outsourcing when they absolutely have to. I was fortunate enough to visit several of these brands’ manufacturing facilities firsthand, speaking to the craftsmen and women who’re doing their best to keep American workwear alive in an era of ever-increasing offshoring. Here’s what they had to say.
Made in America: The Last Factory in a Factory Town When I think of quintessential American workwear, Carhartt’s probably at the top of the list. According to Stephen, founder of the Eastern Subterranean online Carhartt museum, “nine out of ten Garth Ennis’” approve of Carhartt, too. Their coats and jackets are tough as nails and meant to be worn to pieces.
The fabric stands up to hard wear while retaining that unmistakable canvas feel. The first time I visited Carhartt’s factory in Kentucky, I half expected the standard-issue media tour. Flashy displays of manufacturing meant only to be seen through wide-angle lenses and dictated, practiced speech describing age-old traditions that haven’t changed since Abraham Lincoln.
Instead, I got Janet. Janet’s been sewing Carhartt jackets at the Kentucky factory for 36 years. “My mother worked this same line,” she told me, expertly guiding a thick piece of duck cloth through her heavy-duty machine. “She showed me how to set these rivets when I was in high school.” Janet’s father even worked at the factory before her. Despite the hills of Kentucky being stripped of most manufacturing save for Carhartt decades ago, their factory is a bastion of American labor at its finest.
There’s nothing glamorous about their factory floor. The whole building is bland, with linoleum floors and fluorescent lighting. Carhartt doesn’t dress their space up for Instagram-loving tourists.
It’s just a place to work, and damn good at it. That may be Carhartt’s secret – honoring tradition doesn’t mean freezing themselves in time. Automation has come to their factory like everywhere else, but that doesn’t mean their clothes aren’t made the same way.
Machines may have changed, but their decades-old methods of construction have stayed the same. It wouldn’t be an outfit visit without talking textiles. For years, Carhartt was using almost exclusively domestic cotton and canvas suppliers.
While some of that has changed to meet demand, domestically-produced materials are still prevalent throughout their line, from duck canvas jackets to denim jeans. “At Carhartt, we try not to rush wear,” said Jeff Whitlock, Director of Innovation at Carhartt. Clothing worn so hard by so many needs to work perfectly from day one. That rubber coated shirt shouldn’t feel like it’ll fall apart after drying yourself on it for a week – it should feel reassuringly sturdy.
That’s partly why old Carhartt wears so well; it’s been broken in by years of perfection. Denim That Will Actually Break in Over Time If you’ve been paying attention to menswear at all in the past decade or so, you’ve no doubt heard people talking about raw denim and crazy fades. You’ve got your açais, your honeycombs, and everyone’s trouser snake.
But how many of these brands actually make jeans like American manufacturers used to? Round House Clothes has been manufacturing jeans and overalls since 1903, keeping much of their process the same for generations. Unlike vintage-inspired brands manufacturing “heritage-lookalike” garments overseas, Round House is an original – still producing workwear in Oklahoma the same way they did a hundred years ago.
Unlike Carhartt’s iconic physical looming presence, Round House is more low-key about their working man’s aesthetic. While Carhartt might brag about their heavy-duty duck canvas jackets, Round House just makes them and worries about selling themselves later. “You won’t find us advertising on billboards or sponsoring celebrities,” writes CEO Jeremy Morris on their website. They don’t need to.
Round House isn’t fussy about their manufacturing floor either. Unlike Japanese denim workshops with rows of pristine, carefully curated vintage sewing machines, Round House looks like it was built to get work done. High ceilings, wide-open floor space, and workers bent intently over their business at hand.
It’s efficient, and that’s the point. Round House doesn’t dress their space up. There’s no artfully-placed woodworking tools or photos of founders tilting sheepishly at the camera for visitors.
It’s work clothes for workpeople. “Our jeans are built to do a job,” Jeremy told me over the phone. Round House has no need to put leather patches on their jeans or hammer-metal studs into their jackets. Their garments are workwear because they’re built to work.
Made in America: Bootmakers That Have Stayed True to Craft In Red Wing, MN, there’s a leather tannery called S.B. Foot that has been processing leather for Red Wing Shoes since 1908. Now acquired by the bootmaker themselves, it’s incredibly rare to find companies that tanneries and manufacturers in the same corporate family tree.
When you can get leather just as cheap from overseas, who needs control over your own supply chain? It reeks. I don’t mean that endearingly.
The Red Wing tannery is about as attractive to the nose as you can get. Animal fats, runoff minerals, processing agents – it’s a wonder any of these workers can breathe, let alone work, amidst such odiferous cruelty to the olfactory system. The place is loud as hell too, but we’ll get to that.
The first thing Red Wing’s factory manager Tom told me was that everything in this room wasn’t just handmade – “It’s person-made.” Not a single machine runs autonomously here; every needle and head is watched over by an employee. The process of leather tanning hasn’t changed much in over a century, which isn’t shocking considering the bootmaker themselves is more than twice as old. While the chemicals may be less dangerous nowadays (“thanks science!” as Tom proudly shouts over a beating drum full of filthy hides), most of the process is handled in the same exact way.
There’s beauty in how Red Wing manages to bridge the gap between industrial efficiency and artisanal tradition. There are hundreds of people working the manufacturing facility just down the road from the tannery, producing boots at a rate that rivals any high-fashion workshop in Italy. Yet within that machinery of production, time-honored tradition lives on.
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Goodyear welting – that signature durable stitching that lines the inside of Red Wing’s heritage line boots – has been done by hand at Red Wing for generations. I watched as Matthew, a second-generation bootmaker and welter, worked the stiff leather around a boot last with the assistance of a Goodyear stitching machine. It looked easy.
Too easy. “Give it a try,” Matthew offered when I completed gawking at his skill.. So naturally I accepted. Half an hour and three boots worth of ruined thread later, I took myfailed attempt back to Matthew. “About two years before you get good at this,” he chuckled. “My dad will tell you it took him three… so I love to yell at him about that when he criticizes my work.” That devotion to craftsmanship, manufacturing, and quality control is part of what separates true American workwear brands from businesses content on dabbling in nostalgia.
These aren’t small artisanal workshops making custom cuts in limited batches. These brands make hundreds of pairs of boots, thousands of shirts, and tens of thousands of pairs of jeans each year. Yet within that mass-market efficiency is an authenticity you simply can’t find at most other brands.
Canvas That Never Left America Unlike most American-made workwear manufacturers, Filson actually still makes most of their clothing in the United States. Sure, much of their assortment is made overseas (who can blame them, truly), but Filson maintains one of the last American manufacturing facilities for their iconic heavy tin cloth outerwear. While many brands will throw some indecipherably spelt French town name at you for their “exclusive domestic fabrication,” Filson actually means it.
Located just outside of Madison, WI in an otherwise nondescript industrial park is where you’ll find Filson’s domestic production. Tours here are impressively DIY – there’s no reserved path or collections of Pinterest-ready vignettes showing off their process. Want to see where they cut their garments?
Go right ahead. This probably won’t come as a shock to Filson devotees, but their clothing is actually made to get better with age. Tin cloth, the iconic material Filson pioneered during the late 1800s Klondike Gold Rush, is a 14oz canvas coated with a wax formula that makes it highly water resistant. “It’s a marriage of cotton and wax,” Sarah told me as we wandered through Filson’s impressive textile archive.
What sets Filson’s tin cloth apart from other waxed cotton fabrics is that it actually gets better with age – the wax wears into your clothing and softens the fibers at stress points, creating a truly one-of-a-kind garment that only improves. Filson told me that when wearing tin cloth in the rain, moisture will actually bead on top of the wax layer until you stop moving. At that point, your clothes begin to absorb moisture rather than repel it.
Talk about investment pieces. Made in America: Denim Without All the Dressing Just because something is built to last doesn’t mean it’s timeless. While most American-made denim brands will lean heavily into their heritage tales of production and craftsmanship, Travail Denim Works instead lets their jeans do the talking.
It’s obvious from the second you meet founder Marcus that Travail is different – forged in the unforgiving heat of oil rigs and oil fields of southern Texas. “The problem with traditional workwear brands is they catered to construction,” Marcus explained. His experience working in energy sector operations exposed him to far tougher conditions than hauling bricks or roofing. When your job literally involves playing catch with acid, your clothes need to actually be built to do the job. “We take features from traditional workwear that made sense 100 years ago and apply them to things people need today.” Instead of waxed canvas jackets and woven leather boots, Travail makes jeans with tools woven into the design.
Pocket placements are tailored to modern devices like smartphones, multitools, and laptops. Reinforcements are triple-stitched and placed at strain points ripped jeans wouldn’t know exist. Travail isn’t simply trying to look like workwear – they’re making clothes that will actually work.
Just don’t call their jeans vintage inspired. Similarly, Vermont-based Vermont Flannel is still producing work shirts in the US of A, down to the yarn they spin into cloth. “A lot of brands that say ‘Made in America’ get their fabric from somewhere else,” explains Emily, operations manager at Vermont Flannel. Unlike most ‘Made in America’ brands that stitch-shirts imported from god-knows-where, Vermont Flannel’s shirts are 100% sewn in-house.
Workers dedicate their entire shift to one specific task, whether that be ironing pockets on to shirts or sewing front panels. When I asked one of the sewers what he’d change about the production process, he scoffed. “Don’t change nothing,” he said through a mouth full of shirt. “Everything I see here, they did like this when I started.” The Workers Wearing the Clothes On Their Backs If you had asked me years ago whether I’d be writing about clothing manufacturing for a living, I would have laughed in your face. Ask me now, and I’ll agree to buy you a beer if you make the trip to Kentucky.
The people who work at these factories are passionate about their jobs in a way I didn’t expect. Every single person I spoke to at Carhartt – from the warehouse to the sewers to management – had an emotional response when talking about how great it felt to work there. “It feels good putting your name on something and having pride in what you make,” Larry, a sew operator, told me. They’re damn proud of what they make too.
Despite cheap imitators selling hundreds of boots on Amazon and eBay, Red Wing workers know they’re making something that will outlive most of these factories garments. “Yeah sure,” said toolmaker Aaron when I asked how he felt about counterfeits. “It pisses me off!” I won’t sugarcoat it: genuine American-made workwear is expensive. A regular Carhartt jacket will run you $89 from their website. The same jacket made in their heritage Made in USA line will run you $250+.
Round House jeans retail for double what Levi’s are selling for at Macy’s. Red Wing heritage boots will set you back $300+, while work boots that look nearly identical are available at Walmart for less than $100. That’s not hyper inflation ofpricing, that’s outright robbery.
The sad reality is that genuine workwear is financially out of reach for most people who need it to do their jobs. Carpenters, construction workers, and laborers can’t afford to have boots fall apart on them, so they purchase whatever cheap alternative they can find. That Joe from SEO Metropole is wearing a $350 Red Wing boot doesn’t help them out at all.
But for Americans who can make that investment, that heritage boot or perfectly faded pair of jeans hold value that far exceeds the initial price tag. Sure, that Red Wing boot costs more than three other boots on Amazon. But that same boot can be resoled countless times and will easily last you decades if maintained.
Same story with that $250 Filson jacket. Buying better means spending more upfront, but you’ll save in the long run. Supporting domestic workwear that’s actually made in America means supporting jobs that pay actual living wages.
Ask any of these workers what they thought about cheap imports and you’ll get the same response. “Shit hats. Terrible,” was Sergio’s response at Round House when I asked what he thought of cheap alternatives. “If you’re going to wear something, you should get something that’s going to last,” says Larry at Carhartt. In an age of nearly unlimited consumerism, that kind of pride is reassuring to hear.
What’s next for heritage workwear brands? The looming question on all of these brands’ minds is “who’s going to take over?” Many of the most skilled craftsmen and women I spoke with were retirement-aged, hanging up their boots after decades on the job. Will the next generation of Americans take up these mantles, or will we lose these crucial skills for good?
Some brands, like Red Wing, are combatting this through apprenticeship programs that acclimate newcomers to old-world methods through years-long programs assistant older craftsmen. Others, like Filson, have put serious effort into archiving their process down to the finest detail, creating decades worth of documentation that would make even the most information-obsessed member of Craft Punk blush.
Thankfully, there are new bloods eager to take up these traditions as well.
From California’s Tellason to New York’s Left Field, young American manufacturers are keeping workwear alive by producing clothing in America. Personally, I think there’s reason to be optimistic about workwear’s future. As conversations around sustainability and responsible consumerism become mainstream, workwear’s ethos of built-to-last clothing is having a mainstream resurgence.
Jeans that break in. Clothing that conforms to your body, not the other way around. My grandfather treated his clothes likegarments of war.
Things to be worn and put to use, not babied and pampered. When I asked him where his favorite jackets were he told me that he didn’t have a favorite – he just had clothes. We’ve been conditioned to believe that when we buy something, we own it.
In many ways we don’t; we merely borrow it from the future. Supporting domestic manufacturers and craftsmen who build their clothes to last helps ensure there will still be clothes to borrow in the future.
