Retail + schools try to train tailors

The shortage is real. The fix is unusually concrete. In September 2025, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Nordstrom launched a nine-week certificate course in custom alterations and tailoring, built to train adult learners and early-career workers for jobs in Nordstrom tailor shops and similar roles. FIT says the program was created through its Center for Continuing and Professional Studies, taught in person, and designed as a direct path into retail alterations work, not a vague enrichment class (fitnyc.edu). That matters because the labor pool has been thinning for years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 14,950 tailors, dressmakers, and custom sewers in U.S. business establishments in May 2023. Clothing and clothing accessories retailers were the single biggest employer. Mean annual pay was $40,190, which helps explain why the pipeline has been weak for so long (bls.gov). More recent reporting using BLS calculations put the occupation’s mean annual wage at $44,050 in May 2024, still far below the roughly $68,000 average for all workers, while the total number of workers in the field remained under 17,000 and the median age skewed older at 54 (abcnews.go.com). So Nordstrom did not just sponsor a scholarship and call it workforce development. It helped shape the curriculum around the actual work its stores need done. FIT says students learn hand sewing, industrial-machine work, garment fitting, fabric and garment construction, and men’s and women’s alterations. WWD reported that the course also trains students on blind hemming and other retail-specific techniques aligned with Nordstrom service standards, which is the key detail here: this is a retailer building its own operating system for labor supply (fitnyc.edu) (wwd.com). The company has scale to make that useful. FIT said at launch that Nordstrom employs about 1,500 alterations specialists and described itself as the largest employer of tailors in North America. AP reporting this week echoed that point and tied the program to a broader shortage as older workers retire while demand for repairs, custom fit, and secondhand remakes rises (fitnyc.edu) (halifax.citynews.ca). The first cohort has already finished. WWD reported that Nordstrom and FIT held a completion ceremony on February 11, 2026, for the inaugural class, and that every student in that first group received a full scholarship funded by Nordstrom. A second cohort was already in the room, which suggests this was built to repeat, not to generate one press release and disappear (wwd.com). The harder question is whether training alone can rebuild the trade. FIT’s scholarship page for the spring 2026 session says the class was full, but it also notes that applicants need prior sewing and garment-construction experience and that the scholarship covers tuition and materials, not housing or relocation. This is less a pipeline from zero than a conversion funnel for people who already know their way around a machine. Nordstrom is not reviving tailoring from scratch. It is trying to catch skilled sewers before some other industry does, then teach them the last mile from fitting room to final stitch (fitnyc.edu). That still may be enough to change how stores think about alterations. Retailers have long treated hemming and repairs as a service desk tucked behind the sales floor. But if fit keeps becoming a reason customers buy, keep, and remake clothes, alterations stop looking like a courtesy and start looking like infrastructure. Nordstrom’s own job listings still describe apprentice roles as a way to “break into the tailor trade,” with on-the-job training layered on top of store service expectations. The interesting part is not that a fashion school is teaching tailoring again. It is that a major retailer decided the skill was important enough to pay for, standardize, and route straight into a job (nordstrom.wd501.myworkdayjobs.com).