NAUTICA's "Made in USA" T-Shirt Collection Is a Full-Circle Return to Its New York Roots

Summary

• NAUTICA has launched a five-piece Made in USA T-shirt collection dropping May 29, with each style fully produced on American soil from fabric and sewing through to printing
• The tees feature a tubular body construction with no side seams, delivering a structured, three-dimensional silhouette alongside New York-rooted motifs including the NAUTICA logo, the American flag, and the Big Apple
• Campaign visuals were shot in New York by photographer Jiro Konami, whose work spans The New York Times and Interview Magazine, with the imagery documenting real New Yorkers across the city’s everyday landscape

Nautica has unveiled its “Made in USA” T-shirt collection, a five-piece drop releasing May 29. Each piece is produced entirely in the United States, covering fabric, construction, and printing, marking a deliberate return to the domestic production values that defined the brand’s founding decade in New York.

The construction decision is the starting point. Each of the five styles uses a tubular body build with no side seams, a method that produces a cleaner silhouette with a structured, three-dimensional shape and greater durability than panel-sewn alternatives. That kind of spec detail sits quietly inside a T-shirt most people will reach for without thinking about it, which is precisely the point. The motifs work the same way: the Nautica logo, the American flag, and the Big Apple are familiar enough to read instantly and specific enough to place the collection firmly inside a New York origin story that the brand has been telling since David Chu founded it in 1983 with just six outerwear styles.

That origin story has a street culture chapter that the collection speaks to directly. Nautica’s maritime preppy aesthetic crossed over into hip-hop, skateboarding, and creative communities across the 1980s and 1990s, building a following that had nothing to do with sailing and everything to do with how the brand’s clean graphic language translated onto the block. Collaborations with Lil Yachty, Diamond Supply Co., and Shark Week in recent years have kept that cultural thread alive. The Made in USA collection strips the brand back to its most elemental expression: a New York-born label making T-shirts in America, with its home city as the only graphic reference it needs.

Jiro Konami’s campaign imagery extends that logic into the visual language of the drop. The Tokyo-born, New York-based photographer received the Fuji Photo Salon New Face Award in 2010 for a long-term documentary project and has since built a body of work appearing in The New York Times and Interview Magazine across fashion, editorial, and artist photography. His approach for the Nautica campaign focuses on individuals from across New York’s diverse communities, integrating the collection into the city’s everyday fabric rather than elevating it above it. The result is campaign imagery that functions as a document of the city as much as a product showcase.

The Nautica “Made in USA” T-shirt collection releases May 29 via FREAK’S STORE retail locations and Daytona Park online.