“American Flannel” starts with an old Carhartt jacket in a vintage store in suburban New Jersey. It’s got a patch celebrating the company’s 100th year in business, 1889-1989, and the label says “Crafted with Pride in U.S.A.” Holding it, writer Steven Kurutz is struck by a harsh realization. In the years since Carhartt’s centennial “the country’s entire apparel-making industry had all but vanished.” America, he writes, “had outsourced the shirt off its back.”

“American Flannel,” by Steven Kurutz. Riverhead Books. 228 pages, hard cover, $29

Kurutz, a Maine resident and longtime Styles reporter for the New York Times, writes in a familiar reportorial fashion. He finds a few people and companies that survived the textile industry’s devastation, and uses their stories to enliven a history that could have been nothing but a sad, cold graph of decline in the hands of, say, an economic historian.

This book, in short, doesn’t focus on globalization, the loss of millions of American jobs, and the disappearance of an entire industry’s manufacturing capability and supply chain. It explores all these issues, in thoughtful and thorough detail. But Kurutz also wants to tell us about the survivors, the companies driven by stubborn, determined owners committed to making the 2% of Americans’ wardrobe that is still Made in America. To understand their stories, he gives us a good bit of lively, well-researched historical background.

The clothing industries were once a fundamental part of America’s economy. Growing cotton and wool, weaving cloth, sewing clothes and shoes. Think of dust-filled mills powered by water or coal, machines driven by leather belts, and the acrid smell of vats of dye. America’s first textile mill was built in 1787, and not long after, places like Lowell and Fall River in Massachusetts became leading industrial cities. These were tough, gritty processes carried out in tough, gritty places, and “taken together, they created a kind of fabric to American life.”

And then they died. Between 1960 and 1990, foreign manufacturers with modern machinery and dirt cheap labor entered the market. Tariffs were phased out and imports surged. Molded and glued shoes replaced hand-sewn ones. Retailers and consumers played a part, and NAFTA and CAFTA delivered the death blow. “Both Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama had worn Brooks Brothers overcoats on their inauguration days,” Kurutz tells us. But during the COVID epidemic, the international supply lines of economic globalization ruptured. In 2020 Brooks Brothers, founded in 1830 and the nation’s oldest clothing company, went bankrupt.

There are, of course, survivors and revivers, and as portrayed in “American Flannel” they are a fascinating lot. There’s Bayard Winthrop, who founded a company called American Giant that makes Made in America hoodies and flannel shirts. Gina Locklear, whose Zkano brand resurrected a sock-knitting business in Alabama. Mike and Kyle Rancourt, father and son, whose family-owned factory right here in Lewiston is still producing high-quality shoes sewn by hand.

These aren’t the economic realists who ran the spreadsheets and rode the globalization tide. But neither are they quixotic cranks. These are people who believe in quality, believe in American workers and workmanship, and are determined to keep going where others have given up. They are not people who make clothes of fabric that will fray after six washings, or use plastic zippers that jam if they are tugged the wrong way.

Instead, they are “driven by personal history, by the desire to make products of lasting quality, by a sense of loyalty to American workers and communities,” Kurutz writes. And in his notably well-written book, their story comes to life. “American Flannel” is an absorbing study of a near-vanished American industry and a group of people who are keeping the remnants of that industry vital and alive.

John Alden, who lives in Portland, got a pair of Zkano socks for Christmas, with a pattern showing a sasquatch running through the forest. Despite the motif, this gift proves that American-made socks are not mythical.