Designer Francis Young, whose Philadelphia-based label Paratodo manufactures the vast majority of its clothing stateside, was similarly wary of the effect the tariffs will have on his production costs. “It’s a disaster,” Young told me via DM. “I got notifications from the majority of our fabric suppliers about price increases. The reciprocal tariffs could play a huge factor come summer when we ship our new products to our Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese accounts.”
Rather than encourage American production, the tariffs, Young said, “will probably have the opposite effect. Whatever companies are supposed to be incentivized to reshore manufacturing here will most likely just lay people off to maintain their profit shares. You literally can’t make everything we make here without decades of building up industries.”
And then there are the menswear retailers, both at home and abroad, for whom the tariffs seem poised to cause similarly thorny challenges. “Fewer choices, higher prices, and potentially lower product quality,” said Hampus von Hauswolff, the head buyer for Stockholm’s multi-brand boutique Nitty Gritty, when I asked him to characterize the potential threats of the trade war. “We really enjoy working with smaller brands from different countries, like Lady White and Evan Kinori [in the US], but these shifts in customs and margins will probably make it more difficult to sell the products without raising the prices too much.” On the other end of things, online orders from America represent a significant slice of Nitty Gritty’s international sales—and that income now seems in jeopardy, too. “We definitely rely on certain sales from the US,” von Hauswolff said, “so that could impact us for sure.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the most optimistic insider I spoke with was Jonathan Elias, the co-owner of Toronto menswear shop Lost & Found, whose home nation has already been embroiled in Trump’s trade agitations for months, with Canada imposing a 25% counter-tariff on all US goods in March. Lost & Found, Elias said, managed to get nearly all of its American-imported wares for the season delivered prior to the tax, which should help its local customers avoid any potential sticker shock for at least the immediate future.
Moreover, Elias said his customers aren’t really the type to get sticker shock in the first place. They come to his store to buy things hard to find anywhere else—small-batch gardening trousers from Kyoto, say, or whimsical Scottish knitwear—and expect to pay a premium for it. “If you’re really concerned about these tariffs,” he said, “and you’re really concerned about the effect that it is gonna have on your business and the economy, then you have to just be even more diligent about finding brands and products that not everybody has. Tariffs or not, if there’s only 50 of a certain cult piece in the entire world, they’re gonna come to you for it anyway.”
In the end, like the rest of us, Elias is just taking it day by day and waiting to find out what happens next. “Honestly, I don’t know man,” he said, when I asked how he thought this would all play out. “I just want everyone to succeed. The only thing you have control over is you, whether that means trying to alter your business or pivot or do whatever you need to do to survive. Everyone views this as a negative, but there’s always some good that can come of this. It’s just another obstacle, an opportunity to overcome and learn something valuable for future use.”
Whether overcoming that obstacle is possible for every store and brand, of course, is yet to be seen.