Made in America, Manufactured Elsewhere: How Fashion's Most Patriotic Brands Built Their Empires Overseas

OPEN SOURCE by SSQRD

Every 4th of July, the same ritual plays out across American fashion retail; Ralph Lauren drops a red, white, and blue capsule collection, Tommy Hilfiger runs a patriotic campaign, and Levi’s leans into its gold rush origin story. The campaigns always look the same with open fields, American flags, and people who look like they’ve never had a care in the world. The imagery is consistent enough across brands and decades that it functions less like individual marketing and more like a shared national mythology that the fashion industry has agreed to maintain collectively, regardless of what any individual brand’s supply chain actually looks like.

The clothes in those campaigns are manufactured in Vietnam, China, India, and Cambodia. The workers making them aren’t the people in the ads. The American identity being sold is a story, and like most good stories, it requires you not to look too carefully at who wrote it or where it was produced. This piece is about the gap between the American mythology fashion brands sell and the supply chains they actually operate, the legal infrastructure that makes “Made in USA” one of the most regulated and most violated claims in consumer marketing, and what it means that the brands most aggressively performing American identity are often the ones with the least American manufacturing footprint.

The FTC’s “all or virtually all” standard for Made in USA claims requires that a product’s final assembly or processing occur in the United States, that all significant processing occur in the United States, and that all or virtually all ingredients or components be made and sourced in the United States. It’s a high bar, and the majority of American fashion brands can’t clear it for the vast majority of their products. The standard has existed for decades, but it’s become significantly more consequential in the past five years.

The FTC finalized its Made in USA Labeling Rule in August 2021, making companies subject to civil penalties if they use an unqualified Made in USA label on a product that isn’t “all or virtually all” made in the US. Prior to 2021, the standard existed but civil penalties weren’t available, which significantly limited enforcement and allowed brands to make origin claims with relatively low legal risk. The 2021 rule changed that calculus in ways the fashion industry is still adjusting to.

In April 2026, the FTC announced a “Made in the USA” sweep including three law enforcement actions, following a July 2025 warning letter campaign to companies selling American flags and patriotic products that were made entirely in China. One of those actions targeted a company selling American flags with claims including “All-American Made Tough” and “Built by Americans for Americans” whose products were, according to the FTC complaint, wholly imported from China. The specific irony of American flags manufactured in China being sold with aggressive patriotic origin claims is an unusually transparent version of a dynamic that operates throughout the fashion industry with considerably more sophisticated branding to obscure it.

As of December 2025, at least 20 “Made in USA” consumer class actions had been filed, nearly three times the seven filed in all of 2024, indicating that legal scrutiny of American origin claims is accelerating significantly on both the regulatory and civil litigation fronts. The brands most exposed to this scrutiny aren’t the fringe operators. They’re the companies that have built their entire brand identity around American mythology while manufacturing almost nothing in America!!!

Ralph Lauren is the most studied case of American brand mythology in fashion, and for good reason. The brand’s identity is built on a version of America that never quite existed: Hamptons estates, polo matches, Western ranches, all of it wrapped in a visual language that suggests inherited wealth, leisure, and a relationship to the land that’s entirely aspirational. As one analysis of the brand’s strategy puts it, Ralph Lauren sells “as much as it sells clothing and home accessories; the mythology is a key to the company’s success,” and that mythology has proven remarkably durable across five decades and multiple economic cycles.

Ralph Lauren has manufacturing facilities on five continents, with a high concentration in China, Vietnam, India, Italy, and Cambodia. The brand has diversified its sourcing footprint over the past seven-plus years so that no single country accounts for more than 20% of production, a supply chain strategy designed to manage tariff risk rather than to support domestic manufacturing. This diversification happened in direct response to trade policy uncertainty, not out of any commitment to the American production values its marketing imagery implies.

The brand’s own CEO described its global sourcing and supply chain as “agile and well-positioned,” noting that Ralph Lauren has “navigated tariffs successfully before”, which is an accurate description of a sophisticated global manufacturing operation and a notable distance from the imagery of American craftspeople and domestic production that the brand’s marketing has always implied. The language of supply chain agility and tariff navigation belongs to a different conversation than the language of polo players and Hamptons summers, and the brand has been careful never to let those two conversations intersect publicly.

The founder’s own story is American in the meaningful sense: Ralph Lifshitz was born in 1939 in the Bronx to Polish Jewish immigrants, worked out of a drawer in the Empire State Building, and built a multi-billion dollar company from nothing. The irony is that the actual American story, an immigrant’s son building something from scratch, is considerably less visible in the brand’s marketing than the WASPy mythology of polo clubs and East Coast estates that the clothes are used to sell. The real rags-to-riches narrative is less aspirational to the target consumer than the inherited-wealth fantasy, so it gets minimized.

Tommy Hilfiger has evolved over the last 20 years from an all-American brand to one that now manufactures almost exclusively in foreign countries, especially China and India. The brand’s aesthetic identity, which was built explicitly around American preppy culture and remains so, hasn’t shifted meaningfully even as its manufacturing footprint has moved almost entirely offshore. The flag imagery is still there. The red, white, and blue color palette is still the primary visual identity. The clothes are made somewhere else.

The timeline of that shift is interesting, Tommy Hilfiger’s 1990s peak coincided with the brand becoming a significant part of hip-hop and streetwear culture, embraced by communities whose relationship to the “all-American” identity the brand was selling was considerably more complicated than the preppy imagery implied. The brand’s adoption by Black communities in particular involved a cultural remixing of its imagery that the brand subsequently commercialized, building marketing campaigns around a cultural resonance it hadn’t created and didn’t fully understand. The brand’s cultural credibility in that period came from communities whose relationship to American national mythology was defined by exclusion rather than aspiration, a dynamic that the patriotic branding was never designed to acknowledge.

The shift to overseas manufacturing happened quietly, without the patriotic branding changing in any corresponding way. The stars and stripes still appear on the website. The “American” in the brand’s cultural identity is still the primary selling proposition, and the factories are in China and India. Most consumers who buy Tommy Hilfiger for its American identity aren’t aware of that disjunction, and the brand has no particular incentive to make them aware of it.

Levi’s occupies a particular place in this conversation because its origin story is specifically American in ways that Ralph Lauren’s and Tommy Hilfiger’s aren’t. The Levi’s 501 was invented in 1873 as workwear for California miners and ranchers, and the brand’s association with American working-class labor history isn’t invented mythology. It’s a documented fact rooted in a specific historical moment in American economic history. That foundation makes the gap between the origin story and the current manufacturing reality particularly significant.

Levi’s produces the overwhelming majority of its garments outside the United States, primarily in countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The “American original” framing in its marketing is historically accurate about the 501’s invention and culturally misleading about who’s making the jeans being sold today and under what conditions. The brand that was created as workwear for American laborers is now produced by laborers in countries where wage and safety standards bear no resemblance to what American workers are entitled to, and the marketing doesn’t engage with that gap in any substantive way.

Levi’s has faced documented labor concerns in its overseas supply chain, including reports of wage violations and unsafe working conditions in contracted factories, which exist in tension with the brand’s longstanding association with American workers and labor rights. The brand’s current marketing leans heavily into its heritage and its association with American counterculture and working-class identity, while the supply chain producing those garments operates under conditions that the brand’s own historical values would not endorse.

The difference between what brands say and what they do isn’t primarily a moral failure. It’s a legal architecture, and understanding how that architecture works explains why the difference persists despite being publicly visible and extensively documented. The FTC’s Made in USA standard applies to unqualified claims. A brand can use American flags, frontier imagery, and overtly patriotic marketing without making a specific “Made in USA” claim, and the FTC has no jurisdiction over the cultural associations those choices create. Patriotism is legal, but a flag on the label is not, unless the product actually qualifies.

This means a brand can run a 4th of July campaign featuring the American flag, American landscapes, and American cultural imagery, manufacture all of the products in that campaign in Vietnam and China, and be in complete legal compliance, as long as it doesn’t put “Made in USA” on the label of a product that isn’t. The cultural claim and the legal claim operate in entirely separate regulatory spaces, and the fashion industry has spent decades taking full advantage of that separation.

Williams-Sonoma paid a record $3.17 million civil penalty in April 2024 for violating a prior FTC order related to false Made in USA claims, representing the most significant enforcement action in the apparel and home goods space in recent years. The penalty is substantial in absolute terms and negligible relative to the revenue generated by the misleading claims over the period they were made. A company that spent years selling products at a premium on the basis of American origin claims it couldn’t substantiate, and then settles for $3.17 million, has still run a commercially profitable operation.

The 4th of July is a useful moment to examine what American identity in fashion is actually selling and to whom. The version of America that Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Levi’s market is one of aspiration, leisure, and a relationship to the landscape that’s available to a relatively narrow demographic. Academic analysis of Ralph Lauren’s advertising has consistently noted that the brand’s American Dream imagery centers white affluence, with communities of color appearing as peripheral figures in a narrative whose protagonist is implicitly the wealthy white American male. The “American” being sold is a specific and exclusive version of the country, and it’s one that has remained remarkably consistent across decades of demographic change in the actual United States.

The workers manufacturing the clothes in those campaigns are in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, countries whose relationship to American foreign policy and economic history is complex and rarely examined in the context of fashion brand patriotism. The American flag on a polo shirt made in a Vietnamese factory carries a specific kind of historical weight that the brand’s marketing isn’t designed to engage with. The 4th of July campaign exists to sell clothes and the supply chain that produced those clothes exists to minimize cost. The American mythology connecting the two exists to make consumers feel that buying the shirt is a participation in something meaningful rather than a transaction that benefits a global manufacturing operation with no particular relationship to the identity being sold.