What NYC Can Teach the World About Fashion's Survival

As New York redefines its fashion identity, what lessons can we take away from its struggles and resilience? 

For much of the twentieth century, New York City was a fashion capital in name and production.

Within a few blocks of Seventh Avenue, designers and garment workers worked hard to develop the clothes that have since defined American style. The Garment District functioned as a strong, interconnected environment where proximity allowed ideas and projects to move quickly. Today, much of that has disappeared, displaced by outsourcing, globalization, rising real estate costs, and shrinking factories. All the while, New York remains central to the industry. As expansion and adaptation change what global fashion looks like, the city is changing to flex into what kind of fashion capital it wants to be, and how it can best survive in an industry of change.

The decline of New York’s garment manufacturing was a part of a big transformation in the global economy. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, trade liberalization policies and advances in containerized shipping made it significantly cheaper for U.S. companies to produce clothing overseas. Agreements such as the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement further expanded global sourcing networks. As brands increasingly outsourced from Asia and Latin America, employment in NYC’s apparel manufacturing sector dropped, and the dense network of factories shrank. By the early twenty-first century, most American fashion companies had separated design and marketing from their production, keeping creative offices in New York while outsourcing manufacturing from abroad. This was a global trend as industrial labor moved away from Western areas and into lower-cost production hubs.

Though, regardless of this struggle, the fashion industry still remained strongly visible in NYC. As a result of the loss of factory space, the city implemented zoning protections in the 1980s to preserve parts of the Garment District for manufacturing. Though many of these restrictions were later changed in 2018 to accommodate office development. At the same time, a network of sample rooms and specialty manufacturers continued to work in Midtown, supporting designers who relied on close-located production. Organizations like the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) have also supported New York’s role as a creative industry. While the volume of local manufacturing was shrinking, the city still maintained its influence through design, fashion weeks, store presence, and fashion education institutions like Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In this way, the city’s presence in fashion became primarily in creatives, even though it lost its role in industrial work.

New York’s experience shows that fashion is reliant on preserving an overall environment. Even as large-scale manufacturing declined, the continued work of sample rooms and fashion schools has continued to let emerging designers develop collections and have access to production. Even if mass manufacturing is outsourced, production can still happen at a lower scale with the proximity of education, design, production, and sale that the city offers. At the same time, the slight erosion of zoning shows that creative production can be extremely fragile when facing real estate pressures, especially in large, highly populated cities. Fashion capitals like New York truly need policy support and physical space to preserve their creative industries and maintain their ability to adapt when faced with external pressures.

Other fashion capitals are facing similar challenges of rising urban costs and outsourced supply chains, as well as the growth of digital space in fashion. Cities like London and Milan continue to struggle with maintaining local production while competing in a global market. For cities looking to sustain their fashion industries and economies, the main struggle is still in balancing global resourcing with local production and infrastructure.

By: Kailey Sigoda

Photo: “Modern Street Signs in New York City” by Mirko Vitali