Kansas City’s Garment District preserves the story of a once-major local clothing industry through a museum in the Poindexter Building, part of the Kansas City Museum. Founded in 2002 by Ann Brownfield and Harvey Fried, it later contributed more than 300 Kansas City-made garments and accessories to the museum’s larger holdings of historical clothing, textiles, and costumes. The surrounding district is integral to that history: many nearby buildings date to the 1870s, and garment manufacturing expanded there on upper floors of wholesale dry goods buildings in the early 1920s. After World War I into the 1940s, the industry employed more than 4,000 people and ranked as Kansas City’s second-largest industry.

Kansas City, Missouri · USA