In 1989, the American workwear brand Carhartt produced a special clothing collection to mark its centennial. While shopping with my wife at a vintage store in New Jersey a few years ago, I came across one of these garments—a cotton-duck work jacket with a patch on the chest pocket that read 100 Years, 1889–1989. The same was stamped on each brass button. Intrigued, I took the jacket off its hanger. The inside was lined with a blanketlike fabric to provide extra warmth when working outdoors. Crafted with Pride in U.S.A. read the neck tag, and the underside bore the insignia of the United Garment Workers of America, a now-defunct labor union founded around the same time as Carhartt itself.
Nineteen eighty-nine doesn’t seem that long ago. But holding this jacket in my hands, I began to have the feeling you get when looking at a very old photograph. I was holding an artifact from a lost world.
Blue jeans, high-top sneakers, Western boots, button-down dress shirts, durable workwear: iconic clothing, invented by Americans. But although Americans still sport these items, we hardly produce any of them. In 1980, at least 70 percent of the clothing we wore was made domestically. Today, that figure is 3 percent. Sewing plants in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Texas were packed up whole, the machinery shipped to Bangladesh or Indonesia, where eager workers would do the job for perhaps $5 a day. Over a period of 40 years, America outsourced the shirt off its back.
As a reporter who has covered the apparel industry for years—and who also grew up in the heartland and witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of the decline in American manufacturing—I could not stop thinking about these statistics. At first, I dwelled on the 97 percent of clothing now made overseas. But after a time, my focus reversed, and I became intrigued by what remained—the 3 percent. Anyone who had fought against economic forces and survived was either stubborn or crazy—or really good at what they did. I set out to meet them.
The shoemaker Rancourt & Co. occupies the front half of a square, flat-roofed building surrounded by scrubland in a desolate neighborhood of Lewiston, Maine. Maine, along with Massachusetts, was once the center of shoemaking in the U.S., and practically every town—Lewiston, Wilton, Dexter—had a shoe factory. Now the state of American footwear manufacturing is even more dire than clothing production—only 2 percent of shoes sold in America are still made here. Yet Rancourt continues to produce its handmade leather shoes and moccasins in this mill town.
When I arrived, Mike Rancourt was wearing a ball cap and a fancy pair of shoes in faux alligator. “It’s called a ‘captain’s oxford,’” he said of the style. “It goes way back to the ’60s.” He smiled. “I have a lot of shoes. A new product, I’ll definitely wear it for at least a month to test it and see where the weaknesses are in the shoe, in the sole, wherever they may be.”
Mike learned shoemaking from his father, Dave, a French Canadian who’d come to Maine in the 1950s and found work as a hand sewer in a factory in Freeport. About a million French-speaking immigrants crossed the Canadian border in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, and well into the ’60s, the common tongue in the mills and shoe factories along the Androscoggin River was French. With only a fifth-grade education, Dave rose to become a foreman and then superintendent at a factory.
Mike remembers his father coming home smelling of the shoe factory: “You have leather and you have glue and you have threads and oils.”
In 1982, Dave approached Mike with the idea of starting their own company. Mike was 28 at the time and working in the restaurant business. He saw shoemaking as akin to cooking: “You’re taking raw materials, and you’re turning it into something people love.”
The timing seemed terrible. The year before, the Reagan administration had lifted shoe-import quotas from Taiwan and South Korea, and cheap footwear was flooding the U.S. market. But Mike saw opportunity in this. With companies slashing costs and closing factories to stay competitive, the market had space for high-end, labor-intensive footwear.
Mike and his father set up a factory that they ended up selling to Cole Haan. Dave retired, and Mike started another business, which he then sold to Allen Edmonds. Mike stayed on as president in charge of manufacturing in Lewiston. But a private-equity firm bought Allen Edmonds in 2006, and during the ensuing recession, the new owners started talking about closing the Maine operation completely and moving a majority of its production to the Dominican Republic. Mike learned of the plan at a board meeting. He tried to understand the company’s position even as he was absorbing the blow. “It was like a dagger in me,” he said, “because it was my community.”
Mike declined a new role within the company. Instead, he made the CEO an offer. He asked to buy the factory—his factory—back.
Just as his father had done, Mike invited his son Kyle to join him. Together, they reimagined the family business. While Rancourt remains a private-label manufacturer for other brands, they design and make their own line of custom leather shoes. These they sell online, direct from the factory, to save on distribution costs.
Mike tries to source as many components as he can in America. The leather hides come from the Horween tannery in Chicago, where Mike deals with a guy named Skip, whose dad had dealt with his dad. The thread is from a Lewiston company, Maine Thread, and the heels are made in Brockton, Massachusetts.
Most of Rancourt’s employees used to be working-class rural white folks in their 50s or 60s who’d spent their lives laboring in Maine’s shoe factories. But these days, Rancourt can no longer count on a workforce that has grown up in the industry; it has to train newcomers. Refugees from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have settled in the Lewiston area in recent years, and about a dozen of the new arrivals have worked for Rancourt, bringing new energy to the aging factory.
Rancourt makes penny loafers, boat shoes, wing-tip brogues, dress boots, chukkas, even a sneaker that Kyle designed. But the brand is most famous for handsewn mocs. Producing one pair takes about 130 separate steps. For an hour, I perched in that corner of the factory, watching the practitioners of a nearly lost craft.
Jeff Rodrigue stood at a workbench. Laid out on the bench were the tools of the trade: a knife, an awl, thread, tacks, lasting pliers (a curious tool with the jaws of pliers and the head of a hammer), needles, wax, and a small, rounded piece of wood that is used for rubbing out marks and nicks in the leather. A good hand sewer can produce about 20 pairs of shoes a day, depending on the style.
Jeff was working on an order of bison-leather slippers. Jeff grabbed a precut piece of leather and pulled it over a plastic shoe form. He hammered tacks into the leather to hold it in place. He repeated this action with another piece, pulling and tacking so that the two pieces, the top and bottom of the shoe, were aligned.
Holding two threaded needles, one in each hand, and juggling an awl at the same time, he carefully pierced a hole into the leather. Then he stuck the needles through the hole, going in opposite directions, and pulled the thread tight in a flourish. He raised his arms out and away from his body after each stitch, his movements fluid and confident, a kind of ballet.
“Takes a good one year to learn to do it,” Jeff said. He’s been doing it now for 30.
Of course, the enthusiasm and determination of a given entrepreneur, and the skill of the employees, is only half the equation. To succeed, a business needs customers. Fortunately for Rancourt, Michael Williams was a fan.
In 2007, Williams created a men’s style blog called A Continuous Lean, or ACL, focused on historical apparel labels such as Woolrich and Filson, and new brands with a similar sensibility.
Williams ran a fashion-PR agency in New York City but had grown up in blue-collar Ohio, east of Cleveland, where he’d spent summers working for his father’s landscaping business. When Williams turned 14, his father took him to buy his first pair of Red Wing work boots. He’d always been fascinated by the factories that had made his hometown, but by the time he was coming up, they were all closing down.
One day in 2007, he visited a factory in Chelsea that made ties for one of his accounts. On the ground floor was a gallery selling work by blue-chip artists. Taking the elevator up several floors, however, Williams was transported to another time. Workers stood at long cutting tables carving up the cloth that a dozen or so sewers would fashion into more ties; the scraps were everywhere. “It felt like I was seeing something rare that most New Yorkers don’t know even exists,” Williams told me.
Williams began visiting the city’s other garment factories, including Primo Coat in Queens and Martin Greenfield Clothiers and Hertling USA in Brooklyn. These family-run factories were holdovers from the days when New York had been a premier garment center, and they reminded Williams of Ohio, rekindling his interest in the workings of industry. “It was very rare to find stuff still made in the U.S., and I wondered, Why? And, more specifically, How are the people who are still doing it doing it?” That, he told me, was when he started thinking: I should start a blog.
At the outset, Williams didn’t expect many people to read what he was writing. But the personal, ongoing nature of a blog allowed him to go deep, and to create a community around the subject. He covered menswear the way ESPN covered the NFL draft, authoritatively and exhaustively.
Williams became a preeminent proponent of a philosophy known as “Buy quality, buy once.” The idea was that rather than purchase lots of cheap, disposable products, people should spend more on a few well-made items and use them for years, in effect reducing their consumption. His argument for timeless quality resonated with young urban professionals and fashion addicts, as well as with older readers who remembered a time when America’s factories hummed. As his influence grew, Williams found that he could help launch new businesses and save established ones. One of those brands was Rancourt.
Williams touted the Rancourts as “good people who are doing their part to continue the shoe craft in Maine. Even if you take all of that away, Rancourt makes some damn fine shoes.”
Rancourt’s success continued, but over time, Williams’s enthusiasm for the heritage movement waned. He felt that it had been reduced to a trendy look of flannel shirts and rugged boots, stripped of its deeper meaning. After 2015, Williams pulled back from posting regularly.
The Donald Trump years did little to change his mind. Like many Americans, Williams believed that outsourcing had destroyed whole regions, and he had always thought the American-made movement would grow as more people became wise to the value and logic behind it. But when Trump got elected, the “Made in the U.S.A.” movement “got co-opted by this far-right group,” Williams told me. “It got tainted.”
The pandemic changed that. Stories of doctors wearing raincoats into emergency wards and nurses wearing trash bags and washing and reusing the same masks for days because of a lack of protective clothing brought home the impact of offshoring.
In spring 2020, Williams reengaged with his blog, writing a series of posts that took the country to task for turning away from manufacturing and building. “I was infuriated by the fact that we can’t make N95 masks,” Williams told me. “It goes to show we’re just inept. We’re this limp shell of a country. We don’t have the machines. Everything is so dependent on other countries.”
When he called Kyle Rancourt that June to ask how the shoe business was faring, Kyle answered, “We have no business.” A bunch of wholesale orders had been canceled or postponed, and customer orders through the Rancourt website had dropped to zero. Mike and Kyle were facing the very real possibility of having to lay off workers.
Williams sprang into action. He lent his marketing skills, helping Kyle hatch a plan for a crowdfunded project. Rancourt would offer its retail customers wholesale pricing on some of its best-selling shoes, such as the Classic Ranger Moc and the Beefroll Penny Loafer. Williams did free PR for Rancourt around the crowdfund, asking friends and fashion influencers to share it, calling in a lot of favors and promoting it to his tens of thousands of readers on ACL.
The response was overwhelming. Within days, Mike and Kyle had filled enough orders to keep going deep into 2020, through the worst of the shutdown.
When I returned to Lewiston again in 2022, Rancourt’s employee parking lot had significantly more cars; the company had added a dozen workers in the previous two years. Inside, a group of well-dressed tourists was buying shoes in the factory store off the lobby. The factory itself was hopping. Handsewn shoes were back in style; the winds of fashion had shifted in Rancourt’s favor. But that didn’t explain it entirely. In the wake of the pandemic, people were more interested in U.S. manufacturing, and apparel labels were responding.
Out on the factory floor, in the hand-sewing department, Jeff had a new colleague. A middle-aged man with a shaved head and thick-framed glasses stood at the workbench in front of Jeff’s. Joao Kalukembiko had come to the United States from Angola in 2016, with his wife and child. In New York City, where he initially lived, a fellow immigrant told Joao about Maine. After working at Dunkin’ Donuts, Joao heard about Rancourt through Lewiston’s African immigrant community. Kyle liked Joao’s positive personality and hired him on that basis.
After trying a few different jobs, Joao proved to be good at stitching soles for Rancourt’s sneaker line, work that requires hand-eye coordination and close attention to detail. One day, Joao mentioned to Mike that he wanted to try hand sewing. Mike got him training with the veterans, and, unlike everyone else who had tried it, he did well and stuck with it.
By the time I arrived, Joao had been doing the job for more than a year—long enough, by local tradition, to call himself a hand sewer.
This essay was adapted from the forthcoming book American Flannel.
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Source: theatlantic.com
