D CEO managing editor Danielle Abril reported last night that Dallas-based clothing line Foremost is moving its manufacturing to Los Angeles. You might remember that just last June, in the pages of D Magazine, Foremost founder (and two–time EarBurner podcast guest) Matt Alexander was featured in an article highlighting a small-scale renaissance of garment production in the Design District:
Alexander’s idea for Need came to him during a pub chat in London, and Foremost was only an inkling until a visitor to his Dallas office said that he was planning to manufacture men’s pocket squares here. “I knew there was a pressing demand for affordable men’s and women’s clothing, but I had thought that we’d have to produce maybe 3,000 copies of each garment and go to Atlanta or L.A.,” he says. “When I learned that garments were still being made in Dallas, I asked him, ‘Can they do 100 of these?’ It all kind of came together then.”
Matt Alexander’s discovery that the city’s decimated and nearly invisible garment trade still had capacity held out the promise that he could make money if he could find the people who still make not plans, but things. He found a world populated by scarred and aging veterans of the industry and by the rank young upstarts who have moved into its ruins.
So apparently the veterans and the upstarts couldn’t produce cheaply enough to keep Foremost a going venture. Do we need to retract our article?
