Fashion, as even we khaki-wearing office types know, is all
about trend setting. Flapper dresses in the 20s. Shoulder pads
in the 80s. Skinny jeans that make men look like wobbly, newborn
gazelles in the 2000s. It's a business built on thinking a few
years ahead, and sometimes dragging the country places we didn't
know we wanted to go. So perhaps its appropriate that clothing
was one of the first American manufacturing industries to take a
truly post-industrial turn in the late 20th century. U.S.
textile mills began closing in the 1970s, and by the 1990s
apparel production was in full collapse. The Bureau of Labor
Statics has produced a great online feature tracking the last 20
or so years of the domestic fashion industry, including graph
below illustrating the way jobs simply evaporated here thanks to
competition from abroad. Between 1990 and 2011, 80 percent of
apparel manufacturing jobs disappeared. This has been a tragedy
for workers and factory towns. But it's been triumph for
consumers, because it's kep