Schmatta

   Viewing Mark Levin's peppy HBO docufilm, Schmatta: From Rags to Riches to Rags, last night, I saw the Made in America garment trade fall from 95% mainland production in 1965 to 5% in 2009 in an hour and 12 minutes. For many involved through this decades-long history of the New York Garment District, their reversal of fortunes may have seemed a mere eyeblink to them, also

   In between garrulous soundbites from former sportswear emperor and reformed quasi-dictatorial hothead Irving Rousso and an industry pride oratory masked as a bombastic anthem sung by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in a televised spot, the film encompasses deregulation, outsourcing, the rise of designer personalities as embodied by Halston and Calvin Klein, the Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, Reagan Red and concludes as a visual threnody for a once advanced embodiment of American enterprise, undercut and eventually dispossessed by the Reagan and Clinton administrations in particular

   But it is no spoiler to point out that whether American, Indian or Chinese, over the decades and the shifts of landscape, it is always the little guy who is shafted hardest