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find the information for you.
Also, the country of origin is sometimes posted on the product page under ?About this product?. In some cases, it will say "Imported" so you know it was not made domestically.
We hope this is helpful, but if you would like to speak with one of our representatives, please call us at the number below.
Kudos for a response that at least addresses what I asked. Now how about the products? Although 27 items came up in response to the search for "Made in USA." on the BR website, none of those were. I found a monogrammed merino wool/silk sweater (item 784324) that was. The 'stars and stripes' Pima cotton T shirt is NOT made in the USA.
What is my point? I guess the more I think about it, the more surprised I am to realize how little is made in this country. Hipsters agonize over where their food is grown, and strenuously patronize local businesses, but think nothing of the fact that the goods they buy were made overseas. Foodie friends: What percentage of the furniture you have purchased is from Ikea?
I'm not trying to guilt anybody here. The reality is that finding American goods that are affordable (or even not affordable) is very difficult. We got the Brooks Brothers catalog today and they tout that much of their current line is "imported". The other two suggestions were Rag & Bone and Bonobos. I've emailed their customer service peeps to see if its true.
To summarize: Clothes made in the US include American Apparel, at least jeans by BB, one sweater by BR and possibly two other American designers. If this isn't ripe for a movement, I don't know what is.
4 comments:
That's an interesting fruit-bowling of localvores, foodies and hipsters. Besides holding them in equal amounts of contempt I can't speak to their preferences on this issue except that I expect they all share a kind of hollow, poorly thought out leftism on the buy american idea.
Broadly I am pretty sympathetic to the claim that more people need to consider the origin of the products they buy. But I am not sure if in the instances of clothing, food etc it makes all that much of a dent or all that much sense. Especially as you mentioned buying a VW made in Mexico (a Passat or CC is a whole lot of trips to BR and the farmer's market) and that kind of outweighs everything else right? Is it economically feasible to produce mass produced clothing within the US? Without tariffs I doubt it and I am not sure if clothing (or food) is the place to place tariffs down. It disproportionately affects nations that are not competing with us re: industrialization but rather desperately poor nations. In short I would much rather tariff foreign automakers before say, sugar from central and south america.
All that said, I do buy American clothing wise. I don't care much for American Apparel but that's most of my t-shirts, sweaters and hoodies and then my jeans and dork clothes come from here: http://www.allamericanclothing.com/SFNT2.html FWIW, Carhartt is moving everything out of the US if they haven't already.
Slacks and dress shirts are a losing proposition unless you are having them custom cut from a tailor. Obviously spendy.
Also, on the larger issue, manufacturing hasn't really fallen off in America. Manufacturing employment, however, has. Obviously the latter drop off has the deleterious affect on the economy but the US is still producing a massive amount of the world's hard goods - just doing it with less and less employees.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html
-dcv (in case it wasn't obvious)
firstly: dcv- it was obvious.
I do think there are more options out there than one might think (re fabricated in america things). I've bought clothes and Xmas presents from ppl on etsy- some of whom were making things themselves, some of whom had bigger operations but with production still US-based. Likewise, after Katrina I found a place to buy a piece of furniture I'd been coveting in LA (http://www.modernwoodworks.com/) and they make everything on the premises (confirmed by sanding and sawing noises when I called with a question). One obvious problem with all this (my buying history) is that large scale domestic production is inadequately represented. I tend to agree with D that larger structural reframing (via tariffs probably? & D points out several problems with that idea) of the terms of production/trade/purchase price would be needed to make US-based mass production of clothing (and other items) viable. Nonetheless, I do think part of the problem is a broader shift (since WWII?) wherein Americans (and loads of other ppl) are interested in cheap, short-term purchasing, rather than more costly, but long-lasting goods. If we all shifted to a cost/amount-of-time-worn (per lifetime) model our sense of a good price point would also change radically. I'm surprised at how interesting all this is to think about deliberately (rather than in shopping habits/whims). Thanks for the post Drita! -AK
This bell can't be unrung. I don't think that there's much beyond signaling in any Buy American campaign, and I tend to agree with the spend more for better approach (although I do drive an old VW, which could plausibly be argued as spending more for worse).
Mostly, I just think that macroeconomic analysis of the effect of individual decisions is largely a pointless activity (not that I have much of a beef with pointless activity). The best any of us can possibly do is live a life of active harm reduction -- the system we're in is one founded on exploitation, whether of feedlot cows or some poor dumb bastard underwater on a reverse amortization mortgage or Palauan garment factory workers.
I don't know what my point is. I'm still actively hallucinating from running this morning.
An interesting piece in the NYT recently hit on another angle: where is the yarn and the fiber of your fabric manufactured? A "Made in the USA" label only indicates that the fabric was manufactured and stitched together in the USA, not that the components of the fabric themselves were made or manufactured here. Makes a difference, actually.
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