There are calls in Europe and elsewhere to abstain from buying or using American products. Is it possible. Or practical?
We are not advocates of boycotts and no supporter of cancel culture. But, the calls outside the U.S. to stop buying and using American—not necessarily just made-in-America—products are getting too loud to ignore. And we are not just referring to the Levi’s jeans you strut in or the Estée Lauder cream you lathered on your face before you stepped out this morning. Last Friday, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde even called for payment methods, particularly credit card services Visa and Mastercard (as well as, to be sure, Chinese ones such as Union Pay and Alipay), to face competition from Europe with alternatives, as “a march towards independence”. It now seems that many are beginning to think they can be free from the grip of American products and services.
Yet, Donald Trump said during his presentation in the White House’s Rose Garden that “they’re ripping us off”, referring to the rest of the world or those countries shocking slapped with his tariffs, “calculated”, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says, “using a method closer to voodoo than economics”. Hard to know what paranoia that was. It is unbelievable that the U.S. is so easy to steal from or cheat. The Office of the United States Trade Representative states on its website that “America is the world’s national economy and leading global trader”. What does that mean? “Americans generate and earn more than 20 percent of the world’ total income”, although they constitute “less than from five percent of the world’s population”.
Donald Trump said during his presentation in the White House’s Rose Garden that “they’re ripping us off”. It is hard to believe that the U.S. is so easy to steal from or cheat
Ask anyone in Asia (or Europe), and no one will believe that America has been taken advantage of. Everyone will tell you that America is very successful, so are Americans. It is the land of so much that many migrants—legal or not—are lured by it, which is, of course, not exactly how Mr Trump desires it. In the 2024 CNA documentary Walk the Line, about Chinese migrants making the tough trek into America via its southern border, one of the subjects of the show said in Chinese: “We thought the streets in America were paved with gold; we thought all we had to do was to pick it up.” As Mr Zakaria said on his show GPS, “the U.S. has done better than any country in the world in the last 30 or 40 years.”
America’s success is perhaps exemplified by the ubiquity of Levi’s jeans. Exported since the late ’50s, they are now sold in more than 110 countries worldwide. The global success of Levi’s is in many ways America’s success. Or what has become known as the American Dream. Levi Strauss himself was an immigrant from Bavaria, southeast of Germany. His massively popular denim jeans embody the core tenet of the American Dream—work hard and anyone can achieve success and prosperity. Levi’s story is also testament to America’s capitalist system and as the brand’s jeans evolve into a global fashion staple, it, too, reflected the broader economic trends and business moves of the latter half of the 20th century: overseas production and increasing complex supply chain.
Levi’s is probably one of the most recognisable American brands that is not made in America
In 1965, the year our nation was born, Levi’s began overseas operations when they established Levi Strauss International and Levi Strauss Far East, which led to manufacturing, operations and sales infrastructure in Europe and Asia. In the ’80s, Levi’s, like other compatriot brands, shuttered factories in America and shifted their production overseas—mostly in Asia—when increasing competition and financial pressures became obstacles to growth. Moving production abroad significantly bettered Levi’s bottom-line due to reduced manufacturing cost, which in turn afforded them economies of scale and the room to focus on other aspects of their business, such as marketing. Its prominence as a quintessential American brand and its eventual total departure from U.S.-based production made it a notable example of this economic shift and reality in America.
Levi’s Jeans is not the only fashion brand whose success is deeply intertwined with the narrative of America: immigration, opportunity, industriousness, innovation, cultural reach, and economic growth. Since Levi Strauss, they are others who have followed a somewhat similar path, such as Carolina Herrera, Diane von Furstenberg, Philip Lim, and those born to immigrant parents, such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, of which the latter two have come to embody what is called, even oxymoronically, American fashion. Their success, although less palpable now, is seen as synonymous with America’s success before names in technology started to come to represent the country’s new phase of global trade success.
Even if the smartphone is not American, under the hood the operating system and the search engine are American
American Products Everywhere
By Low Teck Mee
Boycott? Is it at all feasible without putting my life on a hold? Let’s not talk about clothes since I don’t buy that much, and if I do buy, it’s mostly at Uniqlo. But what about footwear? In my rotation, it’s Nike, Nike, Nike, New Balance, Nike. Nike, Nike.” Even when I look outside my wardrobe, I see American brands everywhere: Just round the corner from my flat, a 24-hour McDonald’s. Not far from that is where I pick up my Americano every morning—Starbucks. And as it has been raining, I get there by going under the umbrella from the New York-based brand Davek. On my right wrist, my Fitbit tells me I barely completed 3,000 steps with my Nike-shod feet.
When the rain is too heavy, I pick up my phone to get a Grab car. Okay, I don’t use an American smartphone—nope, no iPhone ever—but whenever I turn it on, I see the “powered by Android” phrase first, reminding me that under the hood, I have an American product. It’s the same for my Windows-enabled desktop (yep, still using one of them dinosaurs) by HP. When I check my Gmail and see something from Amazon in my inbox, I am reminded again and again of how depended I am on American tech services. And my socials? Like you, Facebook and Instagram! Heck, even the news. I have the CNN widget on my homescreen, and I wake up in the morning to ABC News Live. How else would I know that a certain president is determined to wreck the world?
Nike factory in Vietnam. Photo: Getty Images
Donald Trump’s desperation to get brands and companies to shift overseas manufacturing back home is, however, no indication that fashion factories are all but gone in America. According to business intelligence and analytics provider Dun & Bradstreet, “The U.S. apparel manufacturing industry includes about 6,000 establishments (single-location companies and units of multi-location companies) with combined annual revenue of about $10 billion.” But in his Rose Garden speech, Mr Trump claimed that Americans workers “watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen out jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American Dream”.
Mr Trump’s imagining of what is happening in his homeland seems fantastical, at best. He hailed that on the day of his tariff announcement, “American industry was reborn”. Was it totally dead? This is somewhat ironic, considering that the U.S. is thought to have pioneered and perfected mass production techniques. The Americans will be proud to name Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company for that accolade. Ford’s operational success encouraged the adoption of mass production in the U.S. and then Europe. Mass manufacturing increased material wealth and standards of living in industrialized countries, with America leading the way. It led to greater efficiency, lower cost, and job creation, and wealth. Mr Trump perhaps desires to go back to the “good ol’ times”, and era of American goods. but the world has changed. America too.
Made-in-America New Balance sneakers: expensive as they are, they’re still produced stateside. Photo: New Balance
In Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, Joshua B. Freeman wrote: “The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering.” America moved much of their manufacturing in the ’80s and, presumably, the hardship too. But it did not totally disappear; it was merely transferred elsewhere. While it no longer secured the dominant position of global apparel (and footwear) manufacturer that it once enjoyed, America still has production within (such as those behind the Made in America New Balance). Sure, we are not using many products that are stamped with the visible words ‘Made in America’, ‘Product of America’, or ‘Produce of America’ (even Driscoll’s blueberries and raspberries are now from China—Yunnan, to be specific), but American brands and products are very much present among us, even if commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said on Fox News last week, ”we can’t sell rice to Asia”!
Heck, even Vogue that we read is an American magazine (the print version, interestingly uses paper produced in Finland and Switzerland, both affected by Trump’s tariffs) and WWD an American digital publication. The U.S. may not be producing as much on home ground, but they are selling significantly more overseas. And their presence have become pervasive in the digital sphere too. Big tech, for one, is dominant not only on our shores, but throughout this region. And in our lives. America’s trade surpluses in services, especially in tech and software somehow matter not to Mr Trump. The OS (operating system) of the phone you are reading this post on is likely American. The search engine or AI chat that guided you here is probably American too. This blog page is built on a American CMS (content management system) after the text is typed using an American word processing program and the illustration with an American graphics editor. America is everywhere, and they know it. Only, perhaps, not Donald Trump.
Photos: Chin Boh Kay (accept indicated). Illustration (top): Just So
Style on the Dot 