The Trump administration’s tariffs are set to hit the apparel industry especially hard.

Nearly all of the clothes and shoes we buy in the U.S. come from outside our borders — many of them from countries in Southeast Asia. Imports from many of those countries are soon going to be subject to tariffs over 30%.

When President Trump raised taxes on imports from China in his first term, apparel companies moved a lot of their operations elsewhere — especially to Vietnam, said David Swartz with Morningstar. 

This time, with tariffs targeting all U.S. trading partners, there’s nowhere to hide.

“They cannot move production to other countries to avoid a tariff in one country in any realistic time frame,” he said.

Moving garment manufacturing to the U.S. is just not an option, per Stephen Lamar, head of the American Apparel and Footwear Association.

“Because we don’t have the labor, the skill sets, the infrastructure, the capabilities to scale up production,” he said.

Bottom line? “We’re not going to be able to buy clothing as inexpensively as we have in the past,” said Denise Green at Cornell University.

There could be an upside, though: We’ve been buying and wasting a lot of apparel for years, she said. “Maybe we come to value clothing and take care of it and ensure its longevity.”

But, Green added, tariffs will devastate the global apparel industry.