Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

speaker

1,089 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 3 Jun

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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Planet Money · Strange threadfellows: How the U.S. military shaped what we all wear · 10 Dec 2025 podcast

But Avery says this more direct three-way relationship between the U.S.

military, the world of fashion, and the world of gear is still alive and well.

Patagonia, we should say, is a financial supporter of NPR.

Now, in order to understand how this modern web of military partnerships works, Avery actually visited one of the major conventions where military suppliers display their wares.

It's called the Association of the United States Army Trade Show, or AUSA.

So Avery is walking around AUSA trying to interview reps at those well-known clothing companies.

Yeah, I just want to be guarded.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, we don't know exactly why a number of these companies didn't want to talk to Avery about this part of the business, but you can sort of intuit why.

Like, maybe they don't want to broadcast their involvement with the military to customers who might be turned off by that arrangement.

But just when Avery was about to give up on getting an outdoor brand to talk about the business of military contracting, she did meet someone who was willing to talk.

It started with this special operations community that led us to develop a system, a seven-glove system for the special forces community.

And then that's cascaded into bigger army projects.

Now, one big reason that gear companies like Outdoor Research might want to work with the U.S.

military is, yes, the massive scale of their orders.

But it's also the fact that military clothing must, by law, be made in the United States.

Making military gear offers a means of subsidizing domestic manufacturing, which has become extremely rare in the clothing industry.

So military contracts offer a way for companies like Outdoor Research to diversify their supply chain and their streams of income.

The outdoor side where you've got seasonal forecasts and planning.

For us, I mean, the government's our best customer, but they're also our worst.

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