THE LEGEND OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST SWEAT SHIRT

For decades, Barry Schwartz has devoted his life to making the highest-quality sweatshirts on the planet. Along the way he's endured fire and flood, heavyweight competition and the hollowing out of the American textile industry. Now the fashion world has taken notice, and demand is skyrocketing.

- NOAH JOHNSON

YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER heard of Camber, an apparel company founded in Philadelphia in 1982, though you likely know its garments, or ones that are inspired by them. Its knitwear-sweatshirts and tees, mostly-is distributed globally and often outsells the apparel of brands in New York, London, Toronto, Paris, and Tokyo with 10 times the hype. Camber's sweatshirts, in particular, have gotten very buzzy lately, but what makes the company remarkable transcends any trend. The company makes sweatshirts like Rolex makes watches, which is to say with a degree of care that borders on the mythic. And it defies all kinds of modern expectations about where and how clothes get made. Camber's story, which is largely untold, is the story of the greatest sweatshirt ever made. And the only way to fully understand it is to put one on, to feel its heft and quality, though that has become a hard thing to do.

Those sweatshirts-Camber's coveted Cross-Knit hoodies and crewnecks-are manufactured in an early-20th-century factory in Norristown, Pennsylvania, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The three buildings form a U-shaped white-brick-and-stone colossus that sits on the bank of the Schuylkill River. The 5,000-square-foot Camber factory sits within an 80,000-square-foot industrial complex, but when I visit one Friday morning, I find most of the ground floor empty. A long, dim hallway leads me to a labyrinth of rooms that make up the main office, and there, through several panes of glass, I see Barry Schwartz, Camber's founder and CEO. Working at a large, municipal-style desk in a tidy office, he appears to be the only person in the entire place. It's about 9 a.m., and he tells me he's already been here for hours.