Will Tariffs Really Save American-Made Fashion?

Yahoo

16-04-2025

The word on every fashion person's lips isn't 'Le Teckel' or even 'florals'—it's tariffs.
We've been hearing about them, over and over, since the election, but over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has rolled out the specifics—additional ad valorem duties (i.e., taxes) on all imports starting at 10% and varying by country. It's been an information deluge, but a big headline has been that many of fashion's biggest manufacturing hubs have been hit with the highest rates, including China at 125%, Cambodia at 49%, and Vietnam at 46%.
In the original executive order, President Trump said one of the goals of these tariffs is to stimulate domestic manufacturing. (According to the American Apparel and Footwear Association, only about 3% of the U.S. apparel and footwear market isn't imported. A good percentage of that is military clothing, which is required by law to be made here.) There are many, many, many complicating factors, from the globalized nature of the supply chain (at some point in the process, something will need to come from someplace else) to the lack of technology, know-how, and infrastructure stateside.
Gigi Burris O'Hara puts it like this: 'Imagine all the food at the grocery store got really expensive—would you all of a sudden become a farmer? You don't have the land, you don't have the seeds, you don't have the know-how. Things becoming more expensive does not train and incentivize people to produce domestically.'
Burris O'Hara is a milliner and the founder of Gigi Burris Millinery, which produces in the U.S. but sources much of its raw materials from abroad. Any part of the supply chain she can bring to the U.S., Burris O'Hara has looked into—she's also the founder of the non-profit Closely Crafted, which works to preserve and sustain craftsmanship—but it's not just a matter of geography.
'The U.S. has lost the ability to be a self-service country in which we can supply raw goods and manufacturing,' she argues. 'It's not a possibility, and it never really was, at least in my business.'
By and large, brands that manufacture in the U.S. already are expecting to feel the most significant impact on their raw materials. For his most recent bridal collection, which debuted on the runway during Bridal Fashion Week, Andrew Kwon worked with a European mill to develop a completely custom fabric, something he sees as an essential investment and differentiating factor for the brand. Kwon doesn't know for certain how the price of that material might go up after the 90-day pause on tariffs. He hasn't discussed specifics with any of his vendors just yet, but he has been thinking about how to navigate potential price increases with customers.
'It's so weird, because if tariffs make the prices go up on some of these fabrics and the costs are just much higher, are we going to eat the costs, or we are going to have to have an honest conversation with our retailers and private clients that the price is totally different from what they were first told?' he asks.
Jewelry brand Lizzie Fortunato, which manufactures most of its pieces in New York, considers the global nature of its materials to be a source of pride. 'Getting things from all over and aggregating them takes a lot of human thought, capital, and physical labor,' explains Kathryn Fortunato, the brand's co-founder and Director of Sales and Operations. She describes the business as 'exceptionally piecemeal,' adding, 'So many people might have two vendors—our list of vendors, in a given collection, is 80 to 90.'
Fortunato is bracing herself for the brunt of the tariffs, given that the 'base' of 10% is almost double what the brand was paying prior (plus the potential of reciprocal tariffs, which could create more obstacles to selling overseas). 'If one part of your supply chain is disrupted, it doesn't really matter how good the rest of it is,' she argues. 'That causes reverberations. If you can't ship on time or you can't restock products on your e-commerce website, you're losing sales, and when you lose sales, you lose income and cash flow. And when you lose income and cash flow, you don't have as much conviction around employing a big team or doing that extra photo shoot, and the effects become second, third, fourth level.'
In a statement, David French, Executive Vice President of Government Relations for the National Retail Federation, predicted that the tariffs would hit local communities and small retailers the hardest. Meruert Tolegen has already felt it: The 2025 LVMH Prize semi-finalist found herself on the receiving end of a five-figure duty on a big order of packaging from China—and this was when the import tariff rate was 34%.
Tolegen's European suppliers have also started communicating the possibility of price increases, and she's started brainstorming creative solutions to maximize her resources (think: buying more of one fabric and using it throughout the collection, to avoid surcharges). At the same time, though, she's reckoning with how to handle the added expenses, and potentially eating the cost versus passing it on to the customer.
Already, when you're a fashion brand producing in the U.S., 'there's little to no margin,' says Rebecca Henry, co-founder of House of Aama. 'It's already more expensive to produce locally—the labor is expensive, the fabrics are expensive, everything is more expensive. It's just going to become more expensive to produce here without having the labor to really create the products and to do the things that you would want to do.'
House of Aama has historically made everything in L.A.'s Fashion District, using fabrics from across the globe, but it recently began exploring its manufacturing options overseas, at least for part of its offering. 'We're directly at the middle ground of that project,' brand co-founder Akua Shabaka says. 'Literally, in real time, we will see how this affects us, because we're trying this for the first time…It may still be more beneficial to do it overseas, even with the tariffs, but we're waiting to see so we can make an informed decision.'
The brand is continuing to explore what made-in-the-U.S. can look like, especially when it comes to textiles, but Henry laments the lack of support or incentives for those already producing stateside. Natalie Chanin understands this challenge better than most: For the past 20-plus years, she's been building the supply chain for her slow fashion brand and non-profit, Alabama Chanin, in the U.S. 'This is the work of passion, not necessarily the work of profits,' she says.
The intent to rebuild American supply chains is good, Chanin argues—but it's a project that requires an investment in training and education across generations, as well as a shift in our value system around labor. (She points to groups like Fibershed, which are laying the groundwork from agricultural and material standpoints.)
'When we start to invest in our communities, that circular cash investment becomes true economic impact and makes Americans' lives better,' she says. 'The problem with tariffs, as we are seeing them right now, is they don't rebuild a robust community of makers. It's a one-stroke action that doesn't really fix the problem.'
In the short-term, Burris O'Hara predicts 'an adjustment period to make sure that there's enough to meet the needs and of learning where individuals are going to need to rescale or upscale—and there's just been no padding on that.' That padding could look like subsidies to hire and train people to support the influx of business. One short-term effect some designers foresee is that the already-limited factories that exist to service luxury fashion brands in the U.S. will get an increase in workflow (good) that runs the risk of displacing small businesses that count on them in the face of potentially higher-paying clients (bad).
The existing U.S. manufacturing industry has already been struggling in the face of challenges such as the cost of electricity forcing many to consider a move abroad, and an older workforce, meaning that skills and know-how could disappear once the people in those jobs right now retire. 'If we don't inspire young people and if we don't make sure that there are security and guardrails in these jobs, what very little is left will be gone forever,' Burris O'Hara argues.
'A lot of this work takes place out of city centers, and I think a lot of people in smaller communities don't even know that it's happening right there,' Chanin adds. 'It's easier to be willing to pay more for a T-shirt when you know the farmer that's growing the cotton, when you eat in the same restaurant with the people who are sewing it.'
A lot of brands find themselves in a holding pattern, awaiting the tariffs but not yet understanding the specific ways they'll impact their businesses. Everyone's on high alert, though.
'There is not one person on our team who has not been distracted from their core job with regard to having to think about this brand new can of worms that they hadn't previously thought about,' Fortunato says. 'It's unprecedented that—of my 20 employees spanning production design, sales, social media—every single person, no matter where they sit, has a slightly different day job than they did two weeks ago.'
Read the original article on InStyle