Why America's Oldest Custom-Shirt Brand Picked the Covid Recession to Launch a Touching New Video

Two generations of the Hamilton family talk about the value of tradition

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As an avowed history fan and the fourth-generation scion to run his family’s shirt-making business, David Hamilton is aware that Hamilton Shirts has made it through worse than the Covid-19 pandemic. There was the last pandemic, for one, the Spanish Flu of 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and caused double-digit losses to businesses across the country. But Hamilton Shirts, the oldest custom shirt brand in the country, kept its doors open. World War I and II, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the OPEC oil embargoes, Black Monday—the family-run company somehow soldiered through all of those disasters, too.

Even so, there’s an edge of menace to the coronavirus era that had been missing from past crises.

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