I have to be honest with you: My first American-made jeans were completely accidental. I was twenty-three, penniless from my latest spending spree on limited edition hoodies, poking around a vintage store in Brooklyn that I probably couldn’t afford new gear from. Stashed behind some used band shirts were a pair of raw selvedge jeans that were stiff as cardboard and probably two sizes too small. They were stupid expensive (likely more than I’d spent on groceries that week), but peeking out from one of the cuffs was a red selvedge line that made my stupid hoodie obsessed heart flutter.
Made in North Carolina was printed across the label. Did people still make jeans in America?!? Were there actual denim factories still operating??! ?
I tried them on. They were too small. But…I bought them anyways.
I wore those jeans religiously. For months I barely washed them, convincing myself they’d develop some kind of unique fading pattern that only deattached from my body when I died. Emma still gives me crap about how stinky they were every time we shared a subway ride. Shout out to all my MAX buddies who had to smell me during that phase too.
But wash after wash, wear after wear, they faded into a chemical fire disaster sunset of wear patterns and weird stains that only existed because of me. Caffeinated sweat stain shaped like where my phone constantly resided in my pocket. Super obvious wallet indent. A makeshift knee patch from when I slid down a wall too fast.
By the time they finally died a tragic death (failed seam while I was reaching for some junk during an in-person client meeting) I was devastated. They’d become my favorite pair through some weird sentimental attachment, and considered maybe just having them dipped in bronze so I could take them with me.
It was then that my hobby of wondering where my clothes were made turned into full blown denim obsession. And boy, what a ride it’s been. American denim manufacturing has had quite the roller coaster the past few years.
Will it explode back into popularity? Mass marketing? Will it plummet into irrelevancy as the cool kids pick their next obsession? Who knows! It kind of feels like there could go either way right now.
It was announced that Cone Mills would be closing their historical White Oak denim mill in 2017. To denim obsessives, this millClosing Cone Mills sent shockwaves through the community. My sneakerhead friends thought I was being melodramatic sending them memes of the shuttering tweet. But White Oak was where all the big boys got their denim. Cone Mills fabrics were used to make denim by almost every major legacy American jean brand out there. They produced some of the finest selvedge denim you’ll find, with a flavor and texture that you just can’t replicate on modern high-speed machinery.
In the months leading up to Cone Mills’ closing, denim enthusiasts everywhere (myself included) started panic buying White Oak denim in bulk like it was toilet paper during COVID. Every brand with a minute relationship to Cone Mills was rushing to get one more round of products made with “CERTIFIED AUTHENTIC AMERICAN DENIM™”.
After years of wondering where my clothes were made I took my curiosity full-time. Drove cross country to chance industrial parks in Los Angeles, visited converted warehouses in Detroit, rifled through abandoned tobacco facilities in Kentucky that have since been converted into haven’s for vintage sewing machines all humming along like it’s 1955. What I discovered was devastating.
Yes, the days of hundreds of denim mills churning out millions of yards of denim are long gone. But there’s a small collective of determined folks who refuse to let America’s denim legacy die.
Small local brands popped up all over telling similar stories of why they stayed. Texas Jeans has been crafting jeans in Asheville, North Carolina since 1977 producing about 2k pairs each week. They’re not known for cutting edge styles – currently selling wildly basic straight cuts that’ll blend in perfectly with any toolshed in America- but they’ve proudly stuck by manufacturing 100% of their jeans in house since day one.
The production manager Dave has been with the company for over thirty years and remembers when they could’ve easily gone offshore multiple times but chose not to. “We’ve had opportunities to move production to Asia a dozen times,” he said. “But that’s not who we are.”
Not far from Texas Jeans, Round House Manufacturing has been producing jeans in Madison, Oklahoma since 1903. That’s right, they’ve been making jeans for over a century. Their factory is beautiful, with wooden floors worn down from years of workers walking the same path to their sewing stations, and the exact same factory layout it was built with a century ago. James, the owner told me they had zero intentions of closing up and leaving at any point because “why would we leave the town that’s supported us for so long?”
Closer to where I’m located in Ohio, All American Clothing Co. has built their brand story around being proudly made in America. So much so that they track each pair of jeans by which specific American employees worked on it during production. It’s borderline aggressive how made in America focused they are.
These are the vets. Companies that could easily leave the US and still operate but have spent decades proving why manufacturing in America is important.
What really got me excited were the newer brands who were coming up through the ranks, itching to prove that “Made in USA” can mean something in 2024.
My first stop was Detroit Denim. Founded when Detroit was not-at-all cool and struggling through the financial crisis, their mission was simple- figure out a way to make premium denim in America without compromising on quality or traditional industrial techniques. Combining found industrial manufacturing techniques with hand-detailed processes many companies gave up on decades ago. Every pair of denim goes through eight different craftspeople before heading to retail, all from Detroit itself with many employees coming from city wide programs trying to reintroduce manufacturing to the city.
“We’re not trying to beat $20 jeans at their own game,” founder Eric said while hand-setting one of my jeans with a rivet. “We’re providing something that can’t exist anywhere else.”
Freenote Cloth out in LA is another denim maker putting a heavy focus on some old school techniques Levi’s themselves stopped producing over 60 years ago. Stuff like chain-stitched hems, invisible selvedge markers, and hidden rowlocking along seams. They’ve built their business around keeping old American techniques alive, even going so far as to teach classes on their equipment so new generations can learn them as well. “At one point these skills employed thousands of people in Los Angeles alone,” co-founder Matt told me while giving me a tour of their vintage Union Special machines. “Now there are maybe 100 people left who know how to properly work these machines.”
My favorite discovery was definitely Darkas Denim out in White Bird, Idaho. If you’re unfamiliar with White Bird, let me paint you a picture. It’s deep in the mountains about an hour outside of Boise. There is literally no reason to drive to White Bird unless you plan on visiting Darkas. The distance alone kept me from visiting until I talked to founder Daniel, a former Levi’s employee who left the corporation to make world class jeans in converted barn. Producing less than 500 pairs of jeans a year, Daniel hand makes each pair, spending upwards of eleven hours per jean. When I asked why he left LA to set up shop in a random Idaho town, he laughed. “Places like this had cheap land and no one bothers me.”
While I could write multiple articles on all the denim brands I visited, there’s a ton of insane textile mills popping back up across the country as well trying to help feed this renewed demand for American-made. While Cone’s White Oak will forever be missed, small mills are springing back up all over attempting to fill that huge gap they left.
Vidalia Mills out in Louisiana actually purchased some of Cone Mills’ original looms when they closed, moving them to their own facility to keep the history alive. Maine Mill Works converted an old paper mill to produce small batches of denim fabrics. While we’ll likely never see textile production at the scale it once was, what we are seeing is some of the highest quality denim being produced right here in America.
Now for the bad part.
Here at American-made jeans will never beat imports on price. Like, ever. Modern overseas factories can churn out jeans with probably $5 of labor factored into the price. American labor starts at about $35-$50 per pair just for labor alone. Thats before you throw on higher costs of fabrics, environmental regulations, ethical wages- you get the point.
That’s why you’ll see American-made jeans start at about $150, with the small batch “artisanal” products hovering around the $300-400 price tag. For most Americans that’s completely unrealistic when you can walk into Target and buy some solid jeans for forty bucks.
So why do people keep doing it? I literally asked this question to every owner I talked to, and every single one of them eventually circled back to some variation of these three things:
Quality control.
Ethical Production.
Preservation.
Being right on top of production means they are able to control quality at every step of the process, catching issues as they happen and maintaining standards that would be literally impossible to ensure from across the world. Ethical production meant taking care of their employees with fair wages, safe work environments, sustainable materials. And of course, there’s the fact they’re all just hell bent on preserving what’s left of American craft.
Roy Slaper hand crafts every pair of his jeans in his garage in Oakland, by himself. “Sure I could make a lot more money doing something else,” Roy said. “But then who’s going to preserve this knowledge? Who’s going to prove that Americans can still build things with their hands?”
I know this is all just a privileged point of view. Not everyone can spend $200+ on a single pair of jeans and that’s okay! I’m not trying to preach to anyone about buying American. But when you do the math, quality American-made jeans will last you years longer than imports (because they simply are made better), bringing the price per wear way down.
My oldest American-made jeans are a pair of Raleigh Denim work pants I bought eight years ago. They’ve been patched up three times and are still my weekend warriors. At well over 400 wears, those pants have cost me around sixty cents per wear. Compare that to some cheap European jeans I bought last year that already blew out after twenty five wears. Suddenly paying more upfront actually costs less…
Plus, at least when my American jeans fall apart, I can send them back to the guys who made them for artisanal repairs. My Raleigh pants got torn and instead of throwing them away I sent them back to their repair guy Victor who hand patched them with some legit sick ass artisan work that actually added character.
Will American denim be the next big thing? Doubtful. Most of these brands have intentionally stayed small to preserve quality over quantity. But can it last? Hell yeah. Every brand I spoke with told me business was steady if not growing from customers who value how their clothes are made over just buying the cheapest thing possible.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see millions of jeans being made in America again,” Eric said as we finished up my jeans in Detroit. “But that’s okay, we don’t need to. We just need enough people who care about whats going into their clothes to keep these legacies alive.”
Lets keep America making things.
