Fruit of Whose Loom? Where our T-shirts come from

The U.S. imported 1.7 billion T-shirts in 2007, and only produced 244 million. The majority of which were produced by American Apparel. That’s right, 90% of our T-shirts are imported.

This month I contributed to Conde Nast Portfolio magazine. Mainly I gathered data for them to include a map with a feature story they were doing on American Apparel’s founder Dov Charney.

Check out the interactive version of the map of U.S. T-shirt imports.

I also wrote a small bit of text that accompanies the map in the magazine, out now. Basically I wrote a 300 word version of: We used to make shirts. Now we don’t. Here’s why.