At the dye house of G.J. Little wood and Son in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia, there are labeled barrels filled with powdered dyes — Intracid Blue A, Nylosan Scarlet, Lanaset Green, Intralan Bordeaux. They can make “a thousand different oranges,” Richard Little wood told me, pointing to a pile of acid-orange wool destined to become scarves, which sat next to a heap of familiar deep blue that would become peacoats for the United States Navy. When I asked him how the mill remains in business, Little wood said: “We try to stay flexible and learn new things. We worked very hard to figure out how to dye this fake fur that is produced in Japan. It was very tricky to work out how to get it to hold a dye. Kanecaron, it’s called. I just got my wife a coat of it.”