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Fashion on 4th Street: The Factory, one of the newest players in San Francisco’s revived manufacturing game, wears its slogan, Do you know where your clothes were made?, on its wall as pattern maker Gio Adamme pins a dress on a fit model.

From Sketch in Dogpatch to Finished Garment in South San Francisco: Rising star designers Lauren and Josh Podoll—shown in their light-filled studio
in Dogpatch’s American industrial center—contract with Jeanette inc., a fabric-stuffed South San Francisco sew shop run by Jeanette Guo that turns out pieces like a green printed dress from their fall 2011 line. Their sketchbook includes designs for the collins silk dress from their fall ’11 collections.

Another Lab in Dogpatch’s Creative Zone: With wall art for inspiration, owner-designer Ian Hannula cuts patterns inside Nice Collective’s headquarters. The almost all-local company either does its work in-house (it stitches its industrial jackets using old keyhole buttonhole machines formerly owned by Levi’s) or contracts it out (its stingybrim fedoras were assembled by a local contractor).

Made in S.F.

A new wave of agile, Small-batch fashion upstarts (Department Seventeen, Taylor Stitch, Tellason) are joining pioneering design houses (The Podolls, Erica Tanov, Nice Collective) to revive a venerable San Francisco tradition: Garment Manufacturing. What will keep their britches from getting too big for what's left of the city's factories?

Nikki Ioakimedes | Photography by Jen Siska | | August 22, 2011

In a one-room studio on the sprawling third floor of the American Industrial Center in Dogpatch, designers Josh and Lauren Podoll recently packaged their largest order yet—thousands of tops that are now hanging in Anthropologie stores from Market Street to London’s Regent Street. The couple, who worked out of Lauren’s mother’s garage in Burlingame before they signed their showroom lease last year, have come a long way since launching a line of T-shirts in 2003. Now Hayes Valley luxury retailer Modern Appealing Clothing (MAC) and Barneys on Madison Avenue stock their pieces alongside Dries van Noten and Maison Martin Margiela. And all of their garments—including every piece of Anthropologie’s massive order—are sewn in San Francisco.

And so are flannel shirts by Pladra, Tellason selvage jeans, and all those Taylor Stitch striped button-downs sported by Four Barrel loyalists. Local manufacturing is
back in vogue in a way that it hasn’t been for more than 20 years. Until the mid-1990s, SoMa was packed with sewing shops; after Los Angeles and New York, San Francisco had the third-largest garment industry in the U.S. But since then the city’s manufacturing has struggled as many operations closed and landlords sold their buildings to Internet startups. By 2002, when Levi Strauss & Co. shut its iconic Valencia Street factory, American clothing manufacturing was declared dead.

But now, there’s a new wave of designers trying their hand at local production, joining those who, like the Podolls, Erica Tanov, and Nice Collective’s Ian Hannula and Joe Haller, have persisted in making their clothes here during the exodus. Retail windows across town are emblazoned with SFMade stickers, promoting the nonprofit created last year by Mark Dwight, founder of Rickshaw Bags (makers of the ubiquitous locally sewn messenger bags), that pairs more than 190 companies with Bay Area manufacturers.

San Francisco isn’t—and never will be—a fashion epicenter like New York or Los Angeles, but designers here are scoring with preppy basics (oxford shirts, ties, and, of course, hoodies) that are as steeped in locavorism as the Ferry Building produce they eat for lunch. That aesthetic resonates with customers who live in San Francisco and expect their clothing labels to read like restaurant menus—and with shoppers worldwide who want to look as if they do, too.

Predictably, the city’s garment boom is due in part to an Internet surge: E-tail’s direct-to-market model not only saves on overhead and lets most anyone into the game, but also allows for small-batch production that has to be done locally. (Offshore contractors require minimums of up to 1,000 pieces.) That means a canny entrepreneur’s idea can grow from office chatter into wearable, high-cachet “Made in S.F.” garments in an incredible two and a half weeks. Welcome to the new fast fashion.

Cordarounds.com, the 2005 brainchild of Chris Lindland, first took advantage of this model by selling ridiculous horizontal-stripe corduroys; five years later, it has morphed into a 13-person show renamed Betabrand. “I’m kind of the grandfather of Internet-oriented local men’s clothing companies,” says the 39-year-old Lindland, and he has a point: A handful of other men’s lines followed suit with polo shirts, ties, and button-downs. Betabrand cleared $1 million in sales last year, and Marine Layer, Department Seventeen, and Taylor Stitch (whose orders have tripled in the past three years) all sell online and have gone on to open their own brick-and-mortar spaces.

But part of the renaissance is more random. The new mid-Market payroll tax exemption zone, which was created to entice Twitter to stay in San Francisco, just happens to also help that neighborhood’s many sew shops, which must be viable for clothing manufacturing to succeed here. Some envision the zone as a creative clusterwith fashion at its center. During the first annual SFMade Week, last May, textile artists, tailors, and aspiring designers went on factory tours, and several supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee declared their support.

SFMade itself moved its offices into an old Chronicle building in the zone last year, and has been a facilitator. And after President Obama met with local tech giants to discuss job-creation strategies last February, former Dwell editor-in-chief Allison Arieff publicly questioned why he hadn’t included SFMade’s lauded executive director Kate Sofis. Soon enough, Sofis was onstage in Chicago alongside Bill Clinton at the high-profile Clinton Global Initiative on local manufacturing. Here in town, SFMade staffers steer wannabe designers toward some of the 10 larger sew shops, which are notoriously hard to find, navigate, and communicate in because of language barriers. “The idea is to build the capacity of the sewing shops so that the whole industry can grow here,” says program director Janet Lees.