Where once Seattle was populated by dozens of large garment factories employing hundreds of women seamstresses throughout the city, now only a few specialty shops remain. In a burst of activity around the turn of the century, firms like the Seattle Glove Manufacturing Company set up shop. During the peak of the garment manufacturing industry, from the 1940s through the 1980s, Asian American women—first Japanese, then Filipinos and Chinese, then Koreans and refugees from Southeast Asia—made up the majority of the power sewing machine operators at many factories. In the last 1980s and early ’90s, nearly all Seattle plants closed, vanishing overseas.