they're famous for dressing all the presidents except Reagan and Trump.
Fun fact: Lincoln, McKinley, and JFK were all wearing Brooks Brothers when they were murdered.
Brooks is a great American brand that's gone south because of globalism. They still had a shirt factory in Garland, NC, but it can't compete with cheap chink labor. I hope that they move most of their production back to the States because their miUSA clothing is very good.
Brooks Brothers is THE iconic American clothier. Every single piece of clothing you associate with the uniform of East Coast ivy league students and old moneyed blue blooded Northeastern families came from Brooks Brothers. The Oxford Cloth Button Down, the single most iconic American dress shirt style? Invented by Brooks Brothers. The dartless sack suit, a relaxed, more comfortable counterpart to heavily sculpted and padded English tailoring? Invented by Brooks. Bleeding madras? Made relevant by Brooks. Shetland sweaters, polo overcoats, rep ties, all these things were popularized almost solely by Brooks and imitated by brands like J Press, The Andover Shop, and later Polo Ralph Lauren.
Unfortunately, if you walk into a Brooks Brothers today, you will only find ugly, ill fitting, non-iron stretchy slim fit shirts and skinny tailoring, mostly made abroad in third world countries like India and the Philippines. Unlike J Press and Andover, Brooks stretched themselves extremely thin with their giant retail footprint and were forced to capitulate to trends like yesteryear’s slim suit and non-iron shirts for the average business casual office drone. And unlike Ralph Lauren, they’ve done an
atrocious job at marketing and maintaining their heritage. The OCBD shirt is probably the single most recognizable piece of American clothing next to a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans, and yet you cannot buy an American made one in
its original, blousy, relaxed fitting form at your local Brooks Brothers store.
It’s online only, the underpaid and uncaring sales associated will tell you. And the sack suit? Virtually nowhere to be found today, despite being an entire style of tailoring invented by the US. European tailoring styles have plenty of representation among exorbitantly expensive tailoring houses; Saville Row for the British, innumerable sartorias scattered across Italy representing various regional styles from Roman to Florentine, and even the more obscure French tailoring has houses as esteemed as Cifonelli and Camps de Luca still continuing their local tradition of tailoring. But the American sack suit is virtually nowhere to be found in the United States. You’ll have better luck looking in
Japan, ironically enough.
This is but a fraction of the absolute demise of American industry brought about by American businesses outsourcing their manufacturing to foreign countries. A similar story can be found for Levi’s. While the American made Brooks Brothers OCBD shirt can still be bought online, you cannot buy a pair of American made Levi’s jeans anymore. They have a high end heritage line called Levi’s Vintage Clothing that used to source its denim from Cone Mills’ White Oak plant in Greensboro NC, the same plant that had supplied them since 1913. That hasn’t been the case since White Oak shut down 8 years ago, and with it went the American made 501 jean.
At the end of the day, all of this is just clothing autism for nerds to debate and nitpick about. But these garments used to symbolize a classic, golden age of America that no longer exists, and likewise, they either no longer exist or are on life support. If you truly care about supporting American industry and bringing back the American golden age, it’s worth thinking about where the uniform for that era went and how it can be brought back.
