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A confluence of trends led to the decline of apparel sewing in America while Europe remains more keen.

Something occurred to me while chatting with sewists and fabric industry experts for the last two editions of this newsletter about amajor German fabric seller’s bankruptcy and therebirth of Simplicity Creative Group. 

The U.S. home sewing market shifted hard towards quilting and away from apparel in the late 20th century. But the European market remains more focused on apparel. 

“Quilting is deeply American in the way backyard barbecues or baseball are; apparel sewing is deeply European in the way tailoring and fashion houses are,” says Darrin Stern, VP of Koelnmesse and the h+h tradeshows. “In the U.S., quilting became both the emotional and economic engine of home sewing. In Europe, apparel never lost its cultural relevance or its connection to the fashion pipeline.”

Why did this schism happen? A number of social trends and economic developments in the U.S. and around the world laid the path for quilting to rise. 

The decline of apparel sewing

Sewing skills were taught in American schools for decades, but home economics started evolving and being phased out after World War II. By the 1970s, home-ec was diversified to teach students about finances and parenting rather than just cooking and sewing. 

Garment sewing peaked in the U.S. in the 1970s. Pattern salestopped 170 million units in 1976, but by 1988 had dropped to 50 million. The number of outlets selling patterns dropped from 30,000 to less than 10,000 during that same time.  

And traditional patterns’ sizing is not inclusive. “It takes a lot of work if you don’t have the body that’s shaped like the pattern,” says Lisa Woolfork ofBlack Women Stitch. But across the continent of Africa, people usually learn to sew from body measurements. “It’s human-centered design. A seamstress I met learned pattern drafting as she learned to sew. I learned to follow the directions of a pattern.”

By one theory, the popularity of blue jeans andcasual dressing in the late 1960s led to the decline of home apparel sewing. The decline also happened as women were increasingly joining the workforce.

The quilting revival

The American Bicentennial in 1976 inspired many people to try quilting, includingMarianne Fons. She had learned sewing in high school and dreamed of studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. But “my garment sewing skills were OK but not great,” she says.

When Fons moved from Houston to small-town Iowa, she took a quilting class at a university extension, which is where she met her future business partner Liz Porter. “I took to quilting right away,” she remembers. “I liked that you got something larger — I had been doing embroidery at the time.”

She was part of the quilting revival that embraced the craft’s history while giving it modern forms. Fons & Porter’s 1993 book “Quilter’s Complete Guide” sold more than half a million copies. 

Quilting is communal, creative, and comforting, Woolfork says. And it has a much lower barrier to entry than apparel. A new sewist is much less intimidated by a small table runner than a pair of tailored pants.

Technology also played a role: The invention of the rotary cutter in the late 1970s made it easier than ever to do piecework, and long-arm sewing machines became more common in the 1990s. Many modern quilters of the 1990s had helpful home-ec experience. “We had the sewing skills to make clothes, but quilting was more fun,” Fons says. “Then quilt shops started opening up as mainstream fabric shops were closing.”

TheU.S. quilting industry has more than doubled in size in the past 25 years, according to survey data from Handiquilter. About 10 million people are regular quilters today.

“Quilting didn’t just become a niche,” Stern says. “It became a major economic engine within the wider craft and sewing sector. Quilting became a lifestyle, not just a craft.”

The rise of globalization

Meanwhile, cheap imported clothing made sewing a less attractive endeavor, and it required time many working women didn’t have.

“It no longer became essential for people to sew their clothing. It was actually cheaper to buy pre-made clothing from overseas than it was to buy the raw materials,” says Erin Love ofFirecracker Fabrics in Pittsburgh.

In the mid-1960s, 95% of clothing sold in the U.S. was domestically made. That sharedropped to 53% by the early 1990s and is just 3% today. Employment in the U.S. textile and apparel industriespeaked in 1973 at nearly 2.5 million. That figure had dropped to about 700,000 in 2004 and today stands at just 270,000.

U.S. apparel and textile industry employment, 1990-2024

A big part of this was China opening up economically in the 1970s, the rise of container shipping and the signing of various global trade agreements. When production of clothing shifted to Asia, textile production moved with it. By the 1990s, China was the world’s largest producer of both textiles and garments.

Quilting supplier Windham Fabrics started about 70 years ago as a reseller of wholesale textiles. They’d buy excess inventory produced by U.S. textile mills and sell it to domestic apparel manufacturers and fabric retailers on the secondary market.

CEO Mickey Krueger’s father started the company, and business was good until the 1990s. “In the mid 1990s, the U.S. fabric manufacturers started to go away, because the demand for the fabric wasn’t here in the U.S. anymore,” he says. It made more sense for the textiles to be produced near the garment factories in China and Southeast Asia.

“We turned our attention to the home sewing and DIY world and started creating our own fabrics for quilting,” Krueger says. Working with in-house and licensed designers, Windham Fabrics now provides fabric to quilt shops around the world.

Retail consolidation accelerates

The consolidation of retail fabric chains also affected the U.S. textile market. Before the 1990s, there were many independent fabric shops and smaller regional chains in the U.S., many offering a wide selection of apparel fabrics. But those chains started gobbling each other up: Hancock Fabrics bought Minnesota Fabrics and Fabric Warehouse in 1985. Joann Stores acquired Cloth World in 1994, and House of Fabrics in 1998 (which had acquired Fabricland and So-Fro earlier in the decade). Fabric.com was working with mills, jobbers and converters in a similar way, and then was bought by Amazon in 2008.

“They eliminated the competition, controlled the market and then walked away,” Love says. “They dictated terms with the mills, and then over time, as you got hooked on Joann, and as there was less independent competition, they also stopped supplying good quality apparel fabrics.”

Now all of those major players are gone: Hancock declared bankruptcy in 2016, Fabric.com closed in 2022, and Joann liquidated this year. Remaining small fabric retailers are left between a rock and a hard place. Independent quilt shops are being asked to source apparel fabric, which has a separate supply chain.

“Most of the fabric that is manufactured for apparel is actually sold only to large clothing manufacturers,” Love says.

Minimum orders are huge, and inventory is constantly changing. And with the introduction of tariffs this year, the prices have risen and distributors can’t stock some categories of fabric at all.  

What’s different in Europe?

Home sewing has also declined across Europesince the1980s for some of the same reasons as in the U.S.: Ready-to-wear clothing has become more affordable than sewing from scratch, and women in the workforce don’t have as much time to sew clothes.

But European sewists have the advantage of some apparel textiles still being produced domestically, and fabric retail is not nearly as consolidated as it is in the U.S. Small fabric retailers are the norm rather than the exception.

“A typical European fabric or haberdashery shop will lean heavily toward garment fabrics: linens, viscose challis, woolens, double gauze, kidswear prints, fashion knits plus tailoring supplies and apparel-oriented notions,” Stern says. “Patchwork cottons and quilting lines are present, sometimes very successfully, but they’re often a section of the business rather than the primary driver of inventory decisions.”

“It really upsets me that I can go fabric shopping in Europe and not in the U.S.,” says Toni Ugueto ofSewSewLounge, who goes to Spain and London regularly. “Sewing magazines with patterns are still sold in supermarkets.”

Germany’s Burda Moden (now Burda Style) published its first issue in 1950 and quickly became a mass-market gateway to fashionable clothing patterns. Today it’s published in 17 languages across 100 countries. “The pattern-magazine culture played a big role in keeping that garment focus alive,” Stern says. 

Home sewing was commonplace in Eastern Europe through the fall of the Iron Curtain around 1990. Communist countries’ centralized economies of favored function over fashion: Clothing made by state-owned factories was affordable, but it was not stylish. Sewing your own clothes was essential for anyone who wanted toexpress themselves. According to oneresearcher, the majority of women in East Germany sewed their own clothes well into the 1970s.

Today,surveys from Initiative Handarbeit found that 81% of German crafters in 2024 sew at least occasionally, up from 67% in 2021, and the most popular project category is apparel, followed by accessories and home décor.

“At a major U.S. show, you’ll find booth after booth of quilting cotton manufacturers, long-arm machines, precuts, digital quilt panels, and quilt patterns. Apparel fabrics and garment-only pattern brands are there, but they’re the minority of the floor,” Stern says. “In Europe, you’re more likely to see rows of garment fabric suppliers, pattern houses with fashion-forward collections, apparel-oriented machine demos, and a strong presence of tailoring and dressmaking notions. Quilting exists in that environment and in some events it’s growing quickly but in many cases it’s a segment, not the center of gravity.”

What the future holds

Despite all of these changes, there is still interest across all ages in both quilting and apparel sewing, all around the world. 

“Interestingly, both markets are now bending back toward each other. In the U.S., apparel sewing is seeing a revival thanks to sustainability concerns, slow fashion, and the rise of indie pattern companies that make garment sewing feel modern again,” Stern says. “In Europe, quilting is gaining traction through modern design, digital printing, and social media communities that cut across borders and languages.”

There’s an opportunity for small fabric retailers to pick up the business abandoned by Joann, but it’s going to take a minute.

“In terms of fabric sales by the yard, far and away the retail fabric store is focused on quilting cottons,” Krueger says. “I think apparel fabric will be more available through quilt shops, probably in better quality, even if not the same value or variety. Cooler stuff, more aligned with what today’s apparel sewer will want. It’ll be up to us fabric suppliers to make that fabric available.”

In Pittsburgh, Firecracker Fabric’s Love asks for patience. “We’ve doubled our thread collection. We’re trying to get more zippers in,” she says. “It’s going to take shops a while to get that stuff in for you. I’ve been furiously trying to source flannel, furiously trying to source fleece, which is really hard to find at a price point that I think you will actually like. We’re really trying, guys. Just give us a few more months.”

Grace Dobush

contributor