As fabric spooled out of a bank of knitting machines in a flare of blue-and-white stripes, workers at the Saint James clothing factory in France’s Normandy region stacked them into piles and cut along patterns to make the company’s iconic Breton sailor’s shirt, worn by celebrities and adored by fans worldwide.
Luc Lesénécal, the company’s chief executive, surveyed an enormous workroom splashed with a rainbow of yarns. Seamstresses had recently put the finishing touches on 50,000 striped shirts and sweaters to fill orders for American stores like Nordstrom and J. Crew.
But his plans to ship for the fall retail season have been thwarted by President Trump’s up-and-down tariff threats. Instead of loading the merchandise into cargo planes, Mr. Lesénécal has parked his entire U.S. export in the company’s warehouse, where it will sit until Wednesday, the deadline Mr. Trump has set for Europe to come up with a deal or face tariffs of up to 50 percent.
“This is yo-yo politics we’ve been dealing with,” Mr. Lesénécal said, gesturing around a factory the size of three football fields, where 300 longtime employees turn out 1.5 million shirts, sweaters, scarves and coats a year. “If we don’t have visibility, we can’t move forward.”
He is not alone. European industry has been whipsawed since Mr. Trump announced a barrage of trade actions aimed at rewiring the global economy. America’s imposition of 10 percent tariffs on most goods from the European Union, and scattershot threats to push the rates to 20 or 50 percent, has led companies to freeze projects, seek exemptions and prepare to raise prices.
The European Commission, the trade bloc’s executive branch, is working to persuade Mr. Trump not to impose the harshest tariffs and is seeking a trade deal before the deadline. The bloc already faces 50 percent tariffs on its steel and aluminum, and 25 percent for cars and car parts.
“A trade war makes both sides of the Atlantic poorer and is just stupid,” the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, said at a recent meeting of E.U. negotiators in Brussels.
The zigzag tariff policy, labeled “strategic uncertainty” by the U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has confounded European executives. As president of a French trade group representing businesses with a “Made in France” label, Mr. Lesénécal now spends twice as much time as he used to dealing with tariff issues.
When Mr. Trump first announced that he would add an extra 20 percent tariff to goods from the European Union on April 2, Mr. Lesénécal was bewildered.
The base tariff on the classic Saint James sailor shirt, which costs $139, was 16.5 percent. “Our tariff jumped to 36.5 percent,” he said. “One week later it went back down, but it was still 10 percent more than what we’d been paying.”
For now, he is absorbing the additional 10 percent to avoid alienating the 150 American retailers that sell his clothing. He can do that because Saint James is an employee-held business, without shareholder pressure.
But the prospect of higher tariffs looms, he said. The United States accounts for less than 10 percent of Saint James’s exports, but the higher duty would be a barrier to the U.S. market, where it has been present for 30 years.
“We don’t want to leave the United States,” Mr. Lesénécal said, citing a loyal clientele from Miami to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. “Our clothing is an icon of ‘Made in France,’ and Americans want the ‘art de vivre’ that it represents.”
Few items are as French as the striped sailor shirts and sweaters that are made in the Saint James factory, which sits in the shadow of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey near the English Channel and traces its roots back more than 130 years. Craftsmen originally spun local wool into yarn to make fishermen’s undergarments so tightly woven that neither water nor wind could penetrate.
In the 1950s, they evolved into rugged sailor sweaters and peacoats made for the French Army. Saint James veered toward the public in the 1970s, emblazoning its tops with a blue-and-white striped pattern, originally used by Napoleon III to spot sailors who fell into the sea. The motif, copied by other retailers, became a cult fashion item after Brigitte Bardot and Pablo Picasso wore striped shirts everywhere. A billboard hangs on the factory floor showing Brad Pitt and George Clooney riding a motorcycle in Saint James stripes.
As a French heritage brand, the company could not open a factory in the United States without losing its cachet. “That would be like trying to harvest a Bordeaux wine in California,” Mr. Lesénécal said. “It would lose its essence.”
Recently, he and his U.S. manager, Benjamin Auzimour, crafted a letter to American clients, who place orders six months in advance. Should Europe’s deal with the United States result in a tariff higher than the 10 percent Mr. Trump recently added, the letter read, the excess would have to be borne by the retailer. “The risk is that some of them may say consumers won’t buy at higher prices,” Mr. Lesénécal said.
If U.S. clients balk, he might redirect the clothing in the warehouse to other countries, including Japan, where Saint James garments are popular — and there is no excess tariff.
A temporary loss of U.S. exports would not devastate the company, he said. But he has frozen plans to open two new U.S. stores. In addition to the risk of tariffs rising, he said, the U.S. dollar has weakened, raising his export costs.
“Maybe I’d rather open more stores in markets where there is greater economic security,” Mr. Lesénécal said.
The tariff tension has a particular resonance in Saint-James, a town whose identity has been entwined with America’s since the U.S.-led liberation of France in World War II. Among the neat stone houses, American flags flutter alongside those of Canada and Britain, which ousted German troops from Saint-James in July 1944. The Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial, with more than 4,000 white crosses commemorating fallen U.S. soldiers, is lovingly cared for by locals.
The Saint James factory itself sits atop a World War II airfield that belonged to the U.S. Army Air Force, marked with a warplane propeller and a plaque paying homage to the United States. So it was surprising, said the U.S. manager, Mr. Auzimour, to hear Mr. Trump claim that the European Union was created to “screw” the United States.
“No one here has forgotten what America did to secure Europe’s freedom,” he said, bowing his head at the American cemetery. “We remember why the European Union was really created: to prevent wars from happening again.”
Mr. Lesénécal is hoping that the trade war will end without major economic casualties. U.S. retailers have delayed putting in firm orders for the 2026 spring season until they have more certainty.
“I need to order wool and cotton thread from Australia and New Zealand,” Mr. Lesénécal said. “How can I do any of that when we don’t know what our business will be?”
“It’s a domino effect,” he added. “We need stability.”
Liz Alderman is the chief European business correspondent, writing about economic, social and policy developments around Europe.
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