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Apparel was one of the easiest industries to offshore. A sewing plant in Pennsylvania or North Carolina could be packed up whole, the machinery loaded onto a boat and shipped to Bangladesh or Indonesia, where eager workers would do the job for perhaps five dollars a day. Anyone who had fought against such economic forces was either stubborn or crazy or really good at what they did. All of those possibilities interested me, and I wondered, Who still makes clothes in America? Who is bold enough to enter the industry now, and why? And how are they faring?

My interest was with manufacturers, rather than tailors, knitters, or other artisans, because of the challenges of running a factory, and because the basic, well-built clothing that defined American style—blue jeans, for example—was made on an industrial scale. Through the mid-twentieth century, textiles and apparel had been one of the largest U.S. industries: in 1973, roughly the peak, more than 2.4 million Americans were employed in producing fabric and clothing of all kinds. But between the years 1990 and 2012, the apparel sector lost more than a million jobs, or more than three-quarters of its workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To be part of a business of that scale that virtually disappears in your lifetime— maybe even while you are trying to make a living at it—is a strange and rare experience. (As a newspaper reporter, I know a little of the feeling.) The 2 percent were, by definition, survivors. And those who had joined their ranks? I was curious to hear their stories.

Danny Swafford was one of them. He ran a cut-and-sew factory—an apparel workshop—in the town of Milledgeville, Tennessee, population 265. He started the business in 1979, at the dawn of the great wave offshore, and it specialized in men's and boy's sportswear and athletic apparel. Among many other things, Danny's factory had made soccer shorts for JCPenney, boxer shorts for Kmart, football uniforms for Riddell, athletic gear for Umbro, and a hooded zip-up jacket for Carhartt not unlike the one I found in the vintage store. All those clients had called him up at some point and told him, in so many words, "Sorry, we're pulling out." Reached by phone at his factory one afternoon, Danny elaborated: "They didn't say, 'We will leave you tomorrow.' They was all very nice. It's like landing an airplane—they just slowly go down. Then they'd call up and say, 'Well, in a couple of months, we can no longer, you know, manufacture here.' " Danny's factory went from 160 employees at its peak in the early '90s to himself and 10 others at present.

I found Danny through a small label that sold premium denim—his factory was known to produce clothes of superior quality—and if I expected him to be bitter or dejected by the state of things, he was not. He was upbeat and enthusiastic. At age seventy-two, he loved manufacturing clothes as much as he had when he was in high school and took a summer job making ladies' slacks at a company called Marlene Industries. The only things Danny loved as much as running an apparel factory were Tennessee football and Martha Stewart cooking shows. His factory had lately sewn blue jeans, children's clothes, and a line of stylish workwear for women, Gamine, producing for independent labels who valued "Made in America." He hustled constantly to get new clients. "I just always have found the apparel business fascinating," he said. "As long as it's still fun, I'm going to keep trucking on." He laughed. "I guess I'm a little different."

Actually, I came to see that Danny was not at all different. To my surprise, I kept meeting more people like him. Through his pride in making quality products locally and his perseverance in keeping his factory going despite enormous challenges, he exemplified the traits of his colleagues. Some, like Danny, were veterans of the days when the industry was booming. But a good number were newcomers who had improbably decided to forgo law or software engineering or some other, more lucrative field to manufacture clothing. These upstarts brought fresh energy to a battered industry, and they embraced modern technology and new ways of doing things to compete in a global marketplace of cheaply produced fast fashion.

They included an outspoken entrepreneur determined to revive classic, mass-produced sportswear and challenge Levi's and other big apparel brands; a woman who returned to her Alabama hometown to save her family's hosiery mill and, just possibly, her city's reputation as the onetime sock capital of the world; a son who joined his father in keeping alive the craft of handsewn shoemaking in Maine; and the chief executive of a denim label who envisioned a new, more sustainable way to grow cotton and make jeans domestically.

They were driven by personal history, by the desire to make products of lasting quality, by a sense of loyalty to American workers and communities. There was a contagiousness to it—one thus-minded entrepreneur inspired and enabled another. And as these strong-willed, resilient, clever, unusual Americans fought to keep their businesses going, or to start new ones, they nurtured in me a hope. That America, having become a nation of consumers and marketers, could once more be a place where people made things.