TCF POST Report
WASHINGTON — Clothing and clothing accessories stores were one of the few bright spots in an otherwise soft July for U.S. retail, according to Census Bureau data released Friday, posting the strongest month-over-month gain of any major retail category even as total retail and food services sales pulled back.
The headline numbers
Overall retail and food services sales fell 0.6% in July to a seasonally adjusted $763.6 billion, snapping a modest 0.2% gain in June. Clothing stores moved in the opposite direction, rising 1.9% to $28.3 billion — the best monthly performance among all the kind-of-business categories the Bureau tracks, and a reversal from a 0.7% dip in June.
How clothing stacks up against the rest of retail
No other major category came close to clothing’s monthly gain. Building materials and general merchandise stores each rose a modest 0.3%; food and beverage stores were flat; and several categories posted outright declines, including motor vehicle and parts dealers (-1.8%), nonstore retailers (-2.2%), gasoline stations (-0.9%) and electronics and appliance stores (-0.5%).
On a year-over-year basis, clothing sales are up 5.0% from July 2025 — exactly matching the pace of total retail and food services growth (also 5.0%), and running just behind food services and drinking places, which also posted a 5.0% annual gain. That puts apparel roughly in the middle of the pack: well behind gasoline stations, where sales are up a sharp 16.2% year-over-year on higher fuel prices, and behind sporting goods/hobby/book stores (+10.1%) and miscellaneous store retailers (+10.7%), but comfortably ahead of laggards like furniture and home furnishings stores, which are down 1.2% from a year earlier, and motor vehicle dealers (+1.9%).
Within the apparel sector
The report doesn’t break out clothing’s sub-categories with advance-estimate data this month, but the prior month’s revised figures show shoe stores at $2.99–$3.6 billion in recent months and women’s clothing stores around $2.5–$2.9 billion, giving a sense of how the category is split.
The bigger picture
Retail’s July pullback was led by weakness in nonstore (e-commerce) retailers, down 2.2% for the month, and motor vehicle dealers. Excluding both autos and gasoline — a core measure economists watch closely — total sales fell a smaller 0.2% for the month but were still up 5.1% from a year ago, suggesting the retail slowdown was concentrated in a handful of big-ticket categories rather than broad-based.
For the three-month period from May through July, total retail and food services sales were up 6.3% from the same period a year ago, with clothing contributing a similar 5.2% pace over that window.