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 by Steven Koczak, PhD, Research Specialist
New York City has long been regarded as one of the fashion centers of the world. That reputation, created and bolstered by the prominence of its garment manufacturing industry, solidified after World War II. Fears of decline due to the rise of other fashion centers and the city’s perennial traffic problems have hounded the city since the 1950s, but New York’s status as a fashion center has continued, even as the fashion industry has geographically broadened.
Fashion Week Online and Urbanist.info have both highlighted New York’s importance to the fashion industry. An article on Forbes.com described New York City’s fashion district as a “vibrant and always-busy neighborhood [which] has a long and rich history that has become synonymous with American fashion since its inception more than a century ago. These buildings aren’t the glamorous part of the fashion industry imagination — they are where the hard work, making, and selling take place. This is where real entrepreneurship happens.”
Other indicators that suggest New York City is still a major player in the fashion industry include the fact it is home to more headquarters of fashion designers and fashion retailers than any other city in the nation. In addition, an estimated 900 fashion companies are headquartered in New York City, which is also home to more than 75 major fashion trade shows and thousands of showrooms.
In 2019, the fashion intelligence firm IFDAQ developed its “IFDAQ Global Fashion and Luxury Cities Index.” The IFDAQ Index, which was developed using data analytics, measured the importance, influence, and impact of many cities in the global fashion industry. The IFDAQ’s analysis found that New York City was the #1 ranked global fashion capital. The cities ranked #2 - #4 were Paris, Milan, and London, respectively.
NYC’s Fashion Industry Cluster = Big Business
Like tourism or high tech, “fashion” is not an officially recognized industry in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Accordingly, analyses of what comprises the fashion industry are often conducted by grouping related NAICS industries — such as apparel manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade, and specialized design services — to form a representative cluster, which Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter defines as “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field.”
The fashion industry cluster has a significant economic impact in the state. Per a gubernatorial press release issued at the start of New York’s 2024 Fashion Week event in February, the state’s fashion industry cluster is responsible for the employment of approximately 312,000 New Yorkers and generates more than $24 billion in statewide wages annually.
Core Fashion Industries
Over the years, several analysts have focused on fashion’s core industries to define the cluster. These analyses combine data for three broad groups: clothing manufacturers, clothing retailers and clothing wholesalers. Here, we looked at three NAICS categories:
- Apparel Manufacturing (NAICS 315)
- Clothing, Clothing Accessories, Shoe, and Jewelry Retailers (NAICS 458)
- Apparel, Piece Goods, and Notions Merchant Wholesalers (NAICS 4243)
By applying this narrower definition to data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), we derived a conservative estimate of the size of the fashion industry in New York State. Based on this narrower definition, in 2022 New York’s core fashion industries employed 130,170 workers and paid nearly $8.8 billion in wages. This represented 1.6% of statewide employment and 1.2% of statewide wages, per QCEW data.
Nearly three-quarters of employees in New York’s core fashion industries worked in retail, while roughly one-fifth worked in wholesale. In a reversal from previous decades, Apparel Manufacturing had the smallest piece of the pie, comprising 6.8% of fashion industry employment.
The most common job titles within the core fashion industries include #1 ranked Retail Salespersons and #2 ranked First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers. These two titles were, by far, the most-popular occupations, according to staffing patterns data from the New York State Department of Labor. Together, they comprised almost 60% of overall employment, with Retail Salespersons responsible for almost half. Rounding out the top five job titles were General and Operations Managers (#3), Fashion Designers (#4) and Cashiers (#5).
It should be noted that 2022’s numbers represent an upswing from 2021, when the “core” fashion industries employed 122,490 workers and paid almost $7.7 billion in wages. Presumably the increase represents the industry starting to climb back from the COVID-19 recession. To further illustrate the point, in 2020 the state’s “core” fashion industries employed 115,300 workers and paid a little over $7.0 billion in wages.
Long-term Trends
Fears of a decline in New York’s fashion industry date back as far as 1957, when one report suggested New York’s status was “a far cry from the virtual monopoly [the city] held in the early years of the [fashion] industry’s development.” Subsequent reports documenting a gradual decline in this industry were published in 1977 and 1986. Both of these reports read similarly and have the same theme of decline.
The 1986 report is particularly notable. Focused on Apparel Manufacturing, the report articulated a decline in clothing production in New York State from 1960 through 1984, seemingly due to perceived labor cost advantages of moving operations overseas. The report noted that “Employment [in Apparel Manufacturing] declined by 42% between 1970 and 1984,” with “a particularly severe contraction” from 1973 through 1975.
New York’s connection to the fashion industry goes back to the earliest days of that industry and goes beyond the numbers. We will now consider some of those connections.
Fashion Education
According to Fashionista.com, New York is home to four of the 20 top fashion design schools in the U.S.: Parsons, the New School for Design; the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT); Pratt; and LIM (Laboratory Institute of Merchandising) College. Three are located in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn.
Going even further, MastersPortal.com listed two New York-based schools in its list of the five top such schools in the U.S. Similarly, LinkedIn.com listed FIT as the top fashion school in the entire world. FIT’s fashion programs include both the design side and the business side of the industry.
FIT not only educates those who will design, finance, and manage the future of fashion, but also honors its past, as it also hosts The Museum at FIT, listed as one of the top 10 fashion museums in the world by fashionandtextilemuseums.com. Also on the top 10 list is the Manhattan-based Anna Wintour Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fashion Week
New York City annually hosts a “Fashion Week” event. At this event, fashion brands, companies, and designers put up their latest designs and collections in an attempt to influence fashion trends in their direction. New York City’s Fashion Week is chronologically the first such event of the year, is considered important to this industry (though not the most-important Fashion Week – that honor goes to the Paris event) and tends to set the tone for the other events.
New York’s 2024 Fashion Week made the usual celebrity- and fashion-related headlines. Fashion industry internet sites cited “more than 70” designers whose work was being showcased. Thom Browne made headlines for a new collection inspired by gothic horror, as did Ludovic de Saint with a collection based on the well-known photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the design team known as The Blonds with a collection inspired by Latin America.
Conclusion
As the U.S. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee concluded in 2009: “Fashion is a sophisticated, thriving industry that looks very different from [how] it did 20 years ago and will look vastly different 20 years from now…The rapidly changing landscape rewards companies that are nimble, responsive to shifting market conditions and able to move quickly to address unmet needs.”
New York’s fashion industry was hurt by broader trends in the manufacturing sector, specifically offshoring. The fashion industry was also hit hard by the COVID-19 recession. Despite all of these challenges, the fashion industry remains important to New York, and New York to the industry. Further, the latest employment and wage data show the industry is bouncing back.
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“Workforce stakeholders on Long Island are working to create equitable access to economic opportunities.”
by Shital Patel, Labor Market Analyst, Long Island Region
Each February, the nation celebrates the many contributions, achievements, and rich cultures of Black Americans. In honor of Black History Month, we took a closer look at the Black and African American workers on Long Island along with the structural inequities they continue to face.
Higher Labor Force Participation
In 2022, Long Island was home to 277,800 residents who reported Black or African American alone (“Black”) as their race, accounting for 9.5% of the region’s total population, per the latest U.S. Census Bureau data. More than 154,600 workers on Long Island reported being Black or African American in 2022, which was 9.9% of the total overall labor force. That was up from 131,700 workers in 2010, or 8.9% of the region’s total labor force. The increase of 22,900 Black workers on Long Island accounted for 27.8% of the region’s total workforce gain in 2010-22.
Black Long Islanders participate in the labor force at a higher rate than the White, non-Hispanic or Latino (“White”) population. In 2022, the labor force participation rate (LFPR) for Black Long Islanders was 68.4% compared to 62.8% for the White population. Since 2010, the LFPR for the Black population increased from 66.5%, while the LFPR for the White population fell from 64.5%.
Part of this difference in LFPR is due to the younger age of the Black population on Long Island. In 2022, the median age of the Black population in Nassau County was 39.2 years, while the median age for the White population was 48.1. In Suffolk County, the median ages were 35.6 and 48.9, respectively.
Conversely, there was also a large difference in the share of the population age 65+. Older persons tend to participate in the labor force at a lower rate than younger age groups. People age 65+ accounted for 24.2% of the White population on Long Island. This figure was almost double the 13.4% comparable share for the Black population.
Racial Disparity in Unemployment
The Long Island job market has historically featured a gap between the unemployment rates of Black and White workers. The tight labor market has held the overall unemployment rate in the region below 4.0% since 2017 (outside of the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021), and Black workers have benefited from the improvement in job opportunities. From 2010 to 2022, the unemployment rate for the Black population on Long Island more than halved, falling from 13.1% to 5.3%. However, the gap between the Black and White unemployment rate has averaged 2.1 percentage points since 2017. In 2022, the unemployment rate for the White population on Long Island was 3.5%, 1.8 percentage points below the Black rate.
Research has identified a variety of factors causing these disparities, including racial discrimination and gaps in education, skills and professional experience. In 2022, one in three (33.1%) Black adults on Long Island had a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to nearly half (49.6%) of White adults. Researchers have also found that ongoing discrimination influences the choices companies make about which workers to add or lay off. They found that as the economy strengthens and the labor market tightens, employers turn to Black workers who they may have previously overlooked. And when the economy weakens, Black workers are among the first to be fired. This scenario is often referred to as the “last hired, first fired” phenomenon.
As with the rest of the nation, there is a substantial earnings gap between Black workers and their White counterparts on Long Island. In 2022, Black men earned 36.1% less than White men in Nassau County, while Black men in Suffolk County earned 32.2% less. For Black women, the intersection of race and gender bias has resulted in a wider-than-average pay gap despite the fact that they participate in the workforce at much higher rates than average. Black women earned 41.3% less than White men in Nassau County, and 32.2% less in Suffolk County.
Some of the overall earnings gap may be attributable to occupational segregation, meaning Black workers are more likely to work in industries and occupations that generally pay less. Nearly one in four Black workers on Long Island work in lower-paying service occupations, where the median wage for all workers is roughly half the overall median wage. Black workers are also less likely to work in higher paying STEM occupations; they accounted for just 10.3% of the computer, engineering, and science workforce on Long Island in 2022.
Rising Educational Attainment
While the share of Black Long Islanders who have a bachelor’s degree or higher is smaller than that of the White population, educational attainment among Black Long Islanders has been on the rise since 2010. In 2022, 33.1% of Black adults aged 25 and older – 63,500 people – had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. That was up from 25.6% in 2010.
Growing shares of both Black women and Black men have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, but Black women have made faster gains in educational attainment. In 2021, 34.9% of Black women aged 25+ on Long Island had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, up from 28.7% in 2010. Among Black men in the same age range, 26.2% had earned at least a bachelor’s degree in 2021, up from 24.3% in 2010.
Workforce stakeholders on Long Island are taking important steps to address the racial inequities in the region and are working to create equitable access to economic opportunities. For example, offshore wind training programs target individuals from disadvantaged communities as well as priority populations like veterans, individuals with disabilities, low-income individuals, homeless individuals and single parents. Other programs, like Opportunities Long Island, work to connect individuals from underserved communities to union apprenticeship programs in building and construction trades.
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 In January 2024, New York State’s seasonally adjusted private sector job count increased over the month by 47,000, or 0.6%, to 8,346,200. In addition, the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased from 4.6% to 4.5% in January 2024, while New York’s seasonally adjusted labor force participation rate dipped from 61.5% to 61.4%.
Capital
Over the past year, the private sector job count in the Capital Region rose by 6,700, or 1.6%, to 428,700 in January 2024. Job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality (+3,300), education and health services (+3,000), natural resources, mining and construction (+400), financial activities (+200), information (+200), other services (+200) and professional and business services (+200). Losses were largest in trade, transportation and utilities (-700).
Central NY
The number of private sector jobs in the Syracuse metro area increased over the past year by 5,100, or 2.1%, to 252,400 in January 2024. Employment gains were greatest in leisure and hospitality (+2,500), professional and business services (+2,200) and education and health services (+800). Losses were centered in manufacturing (-400) and information (-200).
Finger Lakes
From January 2023 to January 2024, the private sector job count in the Rochester metro area rose by 6,500, or 1.5%, to 444,900. Job gains were greatest in education and health services (+4,200), leisure and hospitality (+2,200), financial activities (+700), natural resources, mining and construction (+200) and trade, transportation and utilities (+200). Losses occurred in manufacturing (-500), professional and business services (-400) and information (-200).
Hudson Valley
Over the past year, the private sector job count in the Hudson Valley grew by 10,400, or 1.3%, to 801,300 in January 2024. Gains were largest in education and health services (+8,400), leisure and hospitality (+3,500), financial activities (+1,400) and other services (+500). The greatest losses occurred in trade, transportation and utilities (-2,300), natural resources, mining and construction (-900) and manufacturing (-600).
Long Island
For the year ending January 2024, the number of private sector jobs on Long Island increased by 19,500, or 1.8%, to 1,129,100. Gains were largest in education and health services (+13,100), leisure and hospitality (+5,500), other services (+1,700), professional and business services (+1,000) and financial activities (+700). Losses were greatest in natural resources, mining and construction (-1,800) and manufacturing (-900).
Mohawk Valley
For the 12-month period ending January 2024, the number of private sector jobs in the Mohawk Valley region increased by 1,700, or 1.2%, to 139,200. Over-the-year employment gains were largest in in education and health services (+500), professional and business services (+500), natural resources, mining and construction (+400), other services (+200) and trade, transportation and utilities (+200).
New York City
The private sector job count in New York City rose over the past year by 67,300, or 1.7%, to 4,091,700 in January 2024. Job gains occurred in education and health services (+78,500), leisure and hospitality (+12,000), financial activities (+5,000) and other services (+2,000). Employment losses were largest in information (-10,700), trade, transportation and utilities (-9,000), natural resources, mining and construction (-7,000) and professional and business services (-3,100).
North Country
The number of private sector jobs in the North Country region rose over the past year by 2,400, or 2.3%, to 105,800 in January 2024. Over-the-year employment gains were greatest in education and health services (+700), professional and business services (+700), trade, transportation and utilities (+500), natural resources, mining and construction (+200) and other services (+200).
Southern Tier
For the year ending January 2024, the number of private sector jobs in the Southern Tier increased by 5,300, or 2.5%, to 213,300. Gains were concentrated in education and health services (+4,000), leisure and hospitality (+1,700) and natural resources, mining and construction (+500). Job losses were greatest in trade, transportation and utilities (-500), manufacturing (-300) and professional and business services (-200).
Western NY
Over the past 12 months, the private sector job count in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro area rose by 7,000, or 1.5%, to 460,100 in January 2024. The largest job gains occurred in education and health services (+2,900), leisure and hospitality (+2,400), manufacturing (+500), trade, transportation and utilities (+400), natural resources, mining and construction (+300) and other services (+300).
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