American-Made Selvedge Denim Is Dead, Long Live American-Made Selvedge Denim

In October of last year, the last and most famous selvedge denim mill in the U.S. closed. ("Selvedge" is the name for the higher-quality, harder-to-produce denim, typically sold and worn unwashed, that took over your city starting in 2004.) And when Cone Mills’ denim mill in Greensboro, North Carolina, named White Oak, announced it would fold due to a lack of orders at the end of 2017 after 112 years in business, the news was a big deal. If there’s one piece of apparel that is impossible to untangle from its mythical all-Americaness, it’s a pair of jeans. When the European Union wanted to target essentially American products, it went after denim. And in 1915, when Levi Strauss was looking for a denim partner, he signed an exclusive deal with Cone Mills. Now, suddenly, somehow, and after a resurgence in the aughts, American-made selvedge denim will soon cease to exist. And as the last yards of the plant’s denim make their way into designers’ hands, the fabric is being turned into a collectible. Which is great—Cone Mills forever! But there's something a little grim about this sequence of events. White Oak is hailed as the most legendary and important denim producer in the states—it’s the reason brands are excited to get their hands on the remaining fabric—and yet that reputation was not enough to save it from going out of business.

“The end of an era,” the Todd Snyder brand writes in a press release announcing a collection of hats made out of Cone Mills denim in collaboration with New Era. Wrangler boasts that its new 27406 collection of jeans and denim jackets uses “among the last selvedge denim to be produced in both the United States and at Cone.” Levi’s, too, is cashing in with jeans that boast the going-extinct denim, and in even more elegiac terms. “We are heartbroken that the magical White Oak plant is making its last rolls of denim,” Levi's head of design Jonathan Cheung said over email. These collections position American-made selvedge denim as the works of an unsung artist: not appreciated in his own lifetime, but beloved in death. It's a hell of a sales pitch—and it's also too little, too late.

For a stretch in the early aughts that ran into the early years of this decade, Made-in-America clothing was the hottest thing in fashion, appealing to customers invested in quality and provenance. As lumberjack style gave way to athleisure, and then post-fashion dadcore, the spell wore off for most customers, but these collections are designed to evoke fond memories of that era. “At the end of the day, because it's the last running of American selvedge, anything that's the ‘last of’ has got people going to a nostalgia vibe,” says Jenni Broyles, Wrangler’s vice president and head of its modern lifestyle category. In theory, American-made denim can become a collectible for the same reason a pair of Yeezys or Supreme tee is: it’s extremely limited.

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“This definitely makes [the hats] a collectible,” says designer Todd Snyder. “I'm definitely buying a couple because I know we won't make them again.” Broyles says customers are acting the same way towards items from Wrangler’s 27406 collection, named after the Greensboro zip code where the brand is headquartered—just a couple miles away from the former Cone Mills space. “We've certainly had customers contact us and say, ‘I got number 27, I'm not going to wear it, I'm going to keep it as a collector's item,’” Broyles says. Snyder says his collaborations with New Era already sell out “so these will go equally as fast,” he predicts. “A lot of people have expressed interest.” Wrangler, which sells many of its jeans for around $34, is charging $225 for items made with Cone Mills’ denim.

The irony, of course, is that Cone Mills closed because the excitement around the collections cropping up now wasn’t exactly there when it was still operating. Cone Mills’ parent company International Textile Group admitted as much when the plant closed. “Changes in market demand have significantly reduced order volume at the facility as customers have transitioned more of their fabric sourcing outside the U.S.,” it said, according to denim-focused blog Heddels.

For brands that have had long-standing partnerships with Cone, like Wrangler, Todd Snyder, and Levi’s, the closure of the mill feels like a historic moment. But this might not hit a majority of customers, or even manufacturers, particularly hard. Cone, after all, wasn’t producing enough denim for its own business to survive. Many companies making jeans have already moved the production of their denim overseas, where it’s no doubt less costly. The times have also changed. “There's always a customer who just wants to look cool,” says Snyder.

And news of the plant’s closure hasn’t necessarily penetrated among the kind of customer interested in a product’s origin story. “I don't think the average customer knows about it yet,” Snyder says. Selvedge denim always served a niche community that cared deeply about where their denim came from and how it was made—and it was a correspondingly small piece of Cone Mills White Oak’s business. In a blog post after the closure, the brand Tellason wrote, “If White Oak is the size of a football field, the Draper looms that make the selvedge denim take up the space of half of an end zone.”

American-made selvedge isn’t totally extinct yet, though. Broyles says Wrangler bought enough of the denim for the brand will to release small batches of product for the foreseeable future. The strategy, while grim, carries its own stroke of brilliance: with each collection, Wrangler will deplete its supply, making each collection even more valuable and collectible than the last.