Welcome to The American Thread, a recurring column on the fate and future of fashion in the US, written by Vogue Business editor-at-large Christina Binkley. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
On the day that US presidential nominee Kamala Harris gave her concession speech dressed in an aubergine Tory Burch pantsuit, Stephen Lamar was already fielding texts, emails and phone calls from US apparel makers reeling from possible impacts of a second Donald Trump presidential administration.
Lamar, the president and chief executive of the American Apparel Footwear Association, says apparel brands and retailers are most keenly focused on the portent of more Trump tariffs, which would inflate apparel costs and ultimately prices in the US.
On the same day across the pond, in bad news for European luxury brands, Goldman Sachs economists were scrambling to revamp their 2025 economic growth forecasts for Europe, using a conservative estimate of what Trump’s plans might mean. On Thursday, they slashed an already anemic growth estimate to 0.8 per cent from 1.1 per cent. They also cut forecasts for 2026, and warned that if Trump actually imposes the full tariffs he promised, the forecasts will be further slashed.
Far away in California, Governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the blue state’s legislature to, he said, “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration”. “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom announced. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.”
His speedy response to the election helped raise expectations that other blue states will step into a possible federal environmental and social impact regulatory vacuum with a spate of new state-level rules. For the apparel and retail industry, that could mean new laws covering manufacturing, distribution and end-of-life practices.
“That’s not a good thing, because then you have a patchwork of regulations,” says Rachel Kibbe, founder of Circular Services Group, which advises apparel companies and retailers and is currently advocating for trade and regulatory incentives in Washington DC. “Companies can’t comply, consumers are confused.”
Speculation aside, it must be said that Trump has proved to be an erratic leader in the past. That’s one reason why Goldman’s economists used conservative tariff estimates rather than taking him at his word. But taking him at his word means the apparel industry must anticipate threats to its underpinnings in manufacturing and distribution.
Trump has pledged to deport millions of undocumented workers. That’s difficult for the industry to protest, without conceding that it employs undocumented or falsely documented workers. The American fashion industry is rife with low-wage workers in cotton production, cut-and-sew factories, sorting houses and other parts of the supply chain that consumers rarely witness. Removing some of them from the labour supply will raise labour costs and apparel prices in a US economy that is already at or near full employment.
In the background of all this is general angst: the apparel industry employs a great number of women and LGBTQIA+ workers who are concerned about social issues including access to health care and the continued right to gay marriage.
The US apparel industry is still reeling from the tariffs that Trump imposed in his first term, which the Biden administration maintained. They’re a big part of the reason that socks and sneakers are a lot more expensive these days, as brands pay tariffs to import the raw materials and finished products they sell in the US.
“We’re looking at historic inflation in our industry right now and that’s as tariffs have worked their way in,” says Lamar.
Ninety-eight per cent of clothing and footwear consumed in the US is manufactured overseas because the US apparel manufacturing industry was wiped out as factories moved offshore beginning in the 1970s. “No amount of putting tariffs on our industry changes the fact that we don’t have the ability or resources to manufacture all our apparel here,” Lamar says. “People have been looking at onshoring, but there are very, very insufficient skill sets and capabilities and infrastructure to do that.”
With the last Trump tariffs that targeted Chinese imports, many US apparel manufacturers moved production from China to other countries, including Vietnam and Portugal. Lamar says that any production left in China probably can’t be moved elsewhere. “If it hasn’t left China yet,” he says, “it’s probably never going to leave China.”
So Lamar is revamping his trade group’s approach to working with lawmakers. “The question is, what are the tactics we’re going to use to speak with the administration,” he says.
Lamar believes the new administration may be more helpful in the industry’s fight against the flood of counterfeit goods, or dupes, being sold on third-party online platforms like Amazon, TikTok Shop and Ebay. Leaning on Trump’s past criticisms of Amazon in particular, Lamar says he is looking at language in the Phase One trade deal with China that Trump signed in January 2020, which could be used to restrict third-party sites from distributing dupes.
“We’re going to take that language right to the Trump administration,” Lamar says. “We know through our last experience with them that he views some of the big tech marketplaces as not as responsible as they should be.”
Some advocates are hoping that the Trump administration, with its hostility to Chinese imports, will be more amenable to revising or ending the ‘de minimis’ rule that allows small shipments of many imports worth less than $800 to avoid tariffs. The de minimis rule inadvertently helped to create an ultra-fast fashion boom in the US after Congress raised the minimum from $200 in 2016 to encourage e-commerce.
Hopes to revamp that and impose a more unified federal regulatory framework could raise support for the Americas Act, a proposal with bipartisan support to encourage trade within the Western hemisphere. The trade act would close the de minimis rule and create incentives for apparel recycling among trading partners, including $14 billion in loans and grants for retrofitting infrastructure and machinery, and tax breaks for textile resales.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Kibbe, who favours carrots over sticks when it comes to leading industry change, particularly when it comes to tariffs. “I’m hoping that others see the light in the House and Senate to advise the administration that tariffs will not help with immigration.”
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