Rents Falling in New York’s Garment District

“In a sense, we have a reprieve,” said Nanette Lepore, a New York fashion designer who manufactures 85 percent of her clothing line in almost 30 independent factories within a few blocks of her office on West 35th Street. “But we’ll be back in this battle again, if we don’t decide that the garment district is important to the heritage of New York.”

During the Fashion Week in September, Ms. Lepore took her final bow wearing a T-shirt that read “Save the Garment Center.” That plea is part of an informal grass-roots campaign that aims to keep rents affordable for the small pattern-cutters and trim shops that call the district home.

High rents are hardly the only problems plaguing the city’s fashion industry. Employment in the apparel trades has been shrinking drastically for decades, as tens of thousands of jobs have moved to China and other low-wage countries. After peaking around 275,000 in the 1950s, the number of apparel manufacturing jobs in New York has steadily declined to around 20,000 today, according to Barbara Byrne Denham, the chief economist at Eastern Consolidated, a New York broker.