Intentions might be sincere to bring textile and apparel production back to the United States, but rebuilding domestic manufacturing isn’t as easy as opening a new mill or encouraging brands to buy American.
John Sedivy, vice president of corporate purchasing at Mount Vernon Mills, drove this point home during a recent interview on the state of U.S. textile manufacturing, with Sheng Lu, professor & director of graduate studies in the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware.
While local manufacturing has capabilities, many structural challenges stand in the way of an end-to-end domestic revival.
Mount Vernon Mills is a perfect example of what the U.S. textile sector can still do. The 181-year-old, privately owned company operates a vertically integrated woven-fabric business, flowing U.S.-grown cotton through its spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi. The company can produce 90 million yards of piece-dyed, denim, woven, greige and fire- and flame-resistant fabrics each year, including selvedge denim using American-made, vintage machinery from the 1960s.
Sedivy touts the U.S.’s modern textile mills as highly automated, computerized and energy efficient, with weaving equipment that can monitor quality and identify problems, not unlike other advanced manufacturing industries.
So if technology isn’t the barrier, what is?
The answer is scale. According to The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), 41 textile-related U.S. facilities—including spinners, dyers, weavers and knitters—have closed over the past two years, weakening the industry’s ability to function as a complete domestic supply chain.
“The industry is really on its back foot in many ways, and we’re trying everything we can from a policy standpoint to raise that awareness,” he said.
Textile capacity also has a “national-security dimension” as the U.S. needs reliable access to clothing and textile products for military personnel. Ultimately, he said, “the biggest challenge we have is the scale the industry has lost.”
Tariff Uncertainty
While tariffs were designed to encourage U.S. manufacturing, Sedivy described their impact on textiles as broadly “neutral.” While tariffs do make overseas sourcing less attractive in certain circumstances, they also increase costs for domestic manufacturing. Textile machinery is frequently imported from Europe and Asia, so tariffs on machinery parts raise expenses.
“It’s not a material cost, so it doesn’t go into your cost of goods sold, but it does impact your overall operating costs,” he said.
Uncertainty is the bigger issue. Textile manufacturing requires substantial, long-term capital investment, and a company deciding whether to build or modernize a facility needs confidence that the trade environment will remain relatively stable for years—not months. Plus, with tariffs often levied by executive action, the situation is always at risk of changing with each new administration.
“For manufacturers deciding whether to invest or not, it’s not just about a one-year return of investment, it sometimes can be up to 10 years,” said Lu.
Such uncertainty can be “paralyzing.” Sedivy likened it to a sporting event where the rules keep changing so players just opt to stay on the sidelines.
The Yarn Bottleneck
Rebuilding U.S. textile manufacturing requires solving a deeper supply-chain problem—yarn.
The U.S. does have yarn producers, but they tend to be very specialized, and either very large or very small. This challenges manufacturers looking for the wide range of yarns required by fashion today. “It’s not so much yarn volume that’s the constraint, but yarn variety. If you can’t get yarn made, you definitely can’t get fabric made,” Sedivy said.
Mount Vernon Mills, which produces mainly workwear and protective fabrics, is somewhat insulated by fashion trends, but fashion brands need a lot of fabric variety to meet seasonal and trend collections. “That’s very challenging to do here, even if a mill has the machinery and technical expertise,” said Sedivy. “We can get some [yarn] from regional partners like Mexico or Canada, but even there it’s pretty limited.”
This fact underscores that reshoring isn’t just about bringing or rebuilding one to two factories. “It’s about how to rebuild the supply chain,” said Lu, and one weak link can ruin the whole chain.
Regional Trade
Since the domestic apparel market alone isn’t large enough to sustain U.S. textile mills, regional trade agreements, particularly USMCA and CAFTA-DR, are central to the future of U.S. textile manufacturing.
“Nobody in, say, Sri Lanka, is going to buy fabric from Mount Vernon. It just doesn’t make economic or logistical sense,” Sedivy said. “If USMCA and CAFTA DR weren’t in place, we frankly wouldn’t be having a conversation today.”
Even so, the industry needs greater coordination between USMCA and CAFTA-DR countries to create a more integrated Western Hemisphere textile and apparel supply chain where yarn, fabric and garment production could move efficiently.
Sedivy “dreams” about even more coordination between the two agreements. “If it was easier to use, say, Honduran yarn in Mexico or Honduran yarn that comes to the U.S. and that fabric can go to Mexico and and return as garments, that’s a much bigger thing,” he said. “I have no reason to believe that’s going to happen, but it would make the whole region stronger if it could.”
Increasing country of origin enforcement is also essential. “There’s almost certainly abuse about origin—it could be fabric, yarn forward, fiber forward, and of course garments coming into the U.S.,” he said. “If it’s not enforced, it puts anybody trying to obey the rules at a disadvantage.”
Domestic Sustainability
Shorter supply chains also offer environmental benefits. Compared with supply chains where cotton and other products travel between continents before a finished garment eventually reaches the U.S. consumer, a regional supply chain can significantly reduce transportation distances and speed to market.
“You reduce your forecast error, which means you buy more of what you actually need, less of what you don’t,” said Sedivy, adding that U.S. textile facilities are using “far less water and energy than 10 or 20 years ago.”
Attracting the Next Generation
The U.S. textile and apparel industry also faces a credibility problem, with young people questioning whether to build careers in a sector that has experienced years of plant closures.
“You can’t blame a younger person for saying, ‘I don’t know if I want to go into this because look what’s happened to the industry,’” said Sedivy.
But Lu is optimistic, noting that while many fashion and apparel students have never visited a textile mill, such visits can change outdated perceptions.
“The more our students are exposed to the modern textile mills, textile and garment factories, the more interest and knowledge they’ll get about what the current industry actually is doing, and that’s really helpful to shape their interest,” he said.
