Denim’s Comeback Fight: Can American Jeans Flex Their Muscle and Dominate Again?
Imagine a town where the past and future of American denim collide—a place named Vidalia, Louisiana, nestled alongside the mighty Mississippi. Known for a legendary fight that nearly took James Bowie’s life, this small city also became the hopeful battleground for reviving U.S. selvedge denim production. But despite ambitious dreams, colossal investments, and those cherished Draper X3 looms humming with promise, Vidalia Mills fell silent by late 2024, leaving behind a tale of dashed hopes and a community holding its breath. So, what really went wrong? And can the spirit of American denim rise from the ashes, or is the fabric of tradition unraveling for good? Dive into the intricate saga of denim’s reign, fall, and the relentless fight to bring it back—because this is more than cloth; it’s a legacy woven into our nation’s very identity. LEARN MORE
13 min readOn the western bank of the Mississippi river, about an hour and half drive north from Baton Rouge, sits Vidalia, Louisiana. A city of around 18,000, it’s the site of the “Sandbar Fight” of 1827 that nearly killed folk hero James Bowie, and more recently (and peacefully), the annual Jim Bowie Festival and Barbecue Throwdown.
But for denim obsessives, Vidalia will always be synonymous with the dashed hope of reviving large-scale selvedge production on U.S. soil. In 2019, armed with millions of dollars in loans, a former Fruit of the Loom distribution center turned factory, and a fleet of hallowed looms, Vidalia Mills offered the promise of renewed jobs, redeemed pride, and the reshoring of a totemic American product. But by Thanksgiving of 2024, Vidalia’s employees had been sent home, its looms silent and its creditors circling.
When Mayor Buz Craft delivered his annual “State of the Town” address on YouTube last December, a pained look flashed across his face as he flatly declared, “I am disappointed…with the denim plant, which everybody knows the story on that.”
Even if they do, it’s not the full story. To understand what happened with Vidalia you have to step back, way back; the mill was merely the latest plot twist in the long narrative arc of American denim manufacturing. That story stretches across centuries and is as much about international agreements and corporate balance sheets as it is fashion, craft, and cloth. With tariffs and “Made in the U.S.A.” still swirling in the national conversation, Esquire set out to untangle how denim manufacturing established America as the jeans capital of the world, understand the forces behind its spectacular decline, and ultimately, uncover who or what could put it, and the workers at its heart, back on top.
“For me, it’s a connection to our past, to people that have come before us, to older generations of Americans,” says Michael Williams of denim’s appeal. Williams, a marketer and founder of the ur-menswear blog, A Continuous Lean, has been beating the made-in-U.S.A. drum for as long as he’s been online. When asked why, he responds, “I think we have a history in doing these things, and I think it’s worth honoring our history.” “These things” includes weaving textiles like denim and a closely related cousin called jean, which were of personal interest to none other than George Washington, whose Mount Vernon workshop wove the latter. In 1789, Washington toured a Massachusetts factory that manufactured both, which is also the year that the word “denim” first appeared in print as part of a Rhode Island newspaper’s reporting on local textile production.
501 jeans by Levi’s.
Throughout the 1800s denim became increasingly popular as a durable fabric for workwear, with factories springing up to meet the demand, especially in New England. When Levi Strauss and partner Jacob Davis created their first “waist overalls”—the original name for what we’d call jeans—in 1873, they sourced the denim from Manchester, New Hampshire’s Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which had been producing it for a decade. But by the end of the century, Amoskeag and its regional brethren were already in decline as denim production shifted south. This forced Levi Strauss & Co. to seek out a new supplier who could keep pace with its ballooning business, which the company found in Greensboro, North Carolina’s Cone Mills.
Founded in 1891 by brothers Moses and Ceasar Cone, the Cone Export and Commission Company opened its first manufacturing operation, Proximity Cotton Mills, in 1895; a decade later it would open the White Oak Cotton Mill. Within five years it was producing a third of the world’s denim. It was here that Levi Strauss & Co. decided to place all its bets for its signature product, the shrink-to-fit 501 overall, with “The Golden Handshake” in 1915, a gentleman’s agreement that established Cone as the exclusive supplier for Levi’s.
Williams remembers visiting Cone Mills and White Oak as a sensory experience. “The factory was really big and really, really loud,” he recalls. “The humidity hits you in the summer in North Carolina when you walk in.” It was there that he experienced the Draper X3 loom in action.
David “Rabbit” George, Fixer, in a weaver’s alley on the X-3 weave floor in the Weave Room at Cone Mills White Oak. December of 2017.
A hulking contraption of metal and wood, Draper X3 looms were primarily in operation during the mid-19th century and are particularly prized for the way they slowly weave self-edged fabrics—aka selvedge—with a rhythmic bounce, creating subtle imperfections as they go. White Oak represented only a fraction of Cone Mills’ total output, but its impact on American denim was outsized, both in terms of product and mythos. “It was very obviously an antiquated process,” says Williams. “It’s like a 300-year-old oven in a French bakery. You’re like, ‘Yeah this could be done more efficiently, but this is beautiful.’”
As jeans began to shed their purely utilitarian function in the 20th century, culminating in post-war America’s unmitigated embrace of the look for everyday wear, brands like Levi’s, Lee, and Wrangler benefited, as did denim manufacturers. By the ‘70s, Cone Mills was the world’s largest producer, satisfying the now-insatiable global demand for denim. But it was just one of perhaps dozens of mills spread out across the South (exact numbers are hard to pin down). A Time article from 1978 put worldwide denim production at 750 million yards, with the U.S. share projected at 500 million. Despite Levi’s switching in the mid-1980s from selvedge to “wide” denim, so named for the larger modern looms that can produce it more efficiently and cheaply, it celebrated a century of partnership with Cone Denim (as it is known today) and White Oak in 2015.
Two years later, White Oak was gone forever. (Photographer Matt Sharkey documented its final days in the book American Denim: The Supposed Final Days and Resurgence of a Manufacturing Icon, photos from which can be seen throughout this story.)
“My sense is that when things were made in this country, it was a kind of default,” says Steven Kurutz, author of American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home. “You could go to your local store, like a hardware store or a JCPenney or a Kmart, and you could buy things that were made in America, perhaps even made in your community.” According to Kurutz, that began to change in the late 1970s with policy shifts in Washington and boardroom decisions on Wall Street that favored lower-cost labor markets overseas, especially in developing countries like China and Vietnam. “You could take the savings and pocket the difference. It’s better for the bottom line, it’s better for the shareholder, it’s better for the CEO,” he says.
That trend continued through the ‘80s and ‘90s, eventually leading to the introduction of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 and the lesser known CAFTA-DR (Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement) in 2006, both of which lowered or eliminated barriers to trade, like tariffs. But it was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 that delivered the knock-out blow to American manufacturing, says Kim Glas, the President and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organizations. “It was overnight devastation.”
A worker folding jeans at the Levi’s factory in 1973.
“In the 1990s, about half of the apparel that consumers purchased came with a ‘Made in U.S.A.’ label, where it was cut and sewn in the United States,” Glas points out. “Today, about two percent of the apparel that is in our closet is made in the United States.” Glas and the NCTO represent 471,000 textile industry workers in the U.S., and she’s quick to make the distinction between textile production and “cut and sew” manufacturing, the process by which finished fabric is turned into clothing.
“The most labor intensive part of our supply chain went offshore overnight because it is extremely easy to unplug a sewing machine versus dismantling a yarn operation or dismantling a fabric operation,” Glas says. Some denim mills survived by selling fabric to cut-and-sew factories in places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic, but almost all abandoned selvedge entirely. An article from Sourcing Journal: Denim, a trade publication, late last year lists the top denim producing countries as “China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, India, Egypt, Mexico and more.” The U.S. wasn’t even mentioned.
White Oak’s closure inflicted a spiritual wound on the denim community that’s hard to overstate, as brands lost a beloved supplier and fans lost an iconic symbol of American heritage.
“I had been to White Oak several times,” says Tony Patella, the co-founder of denim brand Tellason. “When I heard the news, I wasn’t even thinking about our business first, I was thinking about the people in Greensboro. They call it ‘Jeansboro’ for a reason. There were families—fathers and daughters, fathers and sons—who had worked side-by-side there for decades.” Tellason, which manufactures its products in San Francisco’s last remaining denim factory, was White Oak’s fourth-largest customer despite only being a two-man operation, a distinction that had worried Patella for years.
Bobby Hamilton, Beamer Tender, tending a rebeaming frame in the Beaming Department during the last week of production at White Oak in December of 2017.
“I thought, ‘Uh oh, this is a ticking time bomb,’” he recalls. “It wasn’t sustainable. We spent 2015 and 2016 waiting for the call.” With White Oak out of commission, attention immediately turned to the Draper looms, as whomever controlled them could make, or break, the future of stateside selvedge.
“American Denim Mounting a Comeback at Vidalia Mills, Selvedge and All,” trumpeted the headline in Sourcing Journal: Denim. It was the fall of 2019 and Vidalia Mills CEO Dan Feibus was feeling confident. “Denim is the American fabric,” he told the publication, “so it’s time we made selvedge denim in the United States.”
Touting a $50 million infrastructure investment and a promise to eventually employ 600 workers, Feibus laid out a plan for a vertically integrated operation that could do everything from spin its own yarns to indigo-dye them and weave them into premium denim fabrics, all using traceable, domestic cotton. Feibus had purchased the 900,000-square-foot former Fruit of the Loom facility from the town of Vidalia, receiving two-thirds of the money back in grants, and retrofitted it for production. In the same article, a denim consultancy executive declares that, “Vidalia Mills is needed in the industry and hopefully can be a model for others to follow.” Perhaps most importantly, Feibus had in his possession all but one of White Oak’s looms.
X-3 shuttle looms covered with plastic sheets in the Weave Room at White Oak, awaiting an unknown fate in 2018.
“We were hopeful,” says Kieran “K.P.” McNeill, [artner and CEO at Nashville’s Imogene + Willie, of Vidalia’s early days. “Even before we knew they had acquired the Cone looms, we were supportive. There’s just not anyone else out there trying to start something new.” From its inception in 2009, Imogene + Wille has been “hell bent,” in the words of co-founder Carrie Eddmenson, on producing all of its garments in the U.S. because, “we came from a family business that in the mid-’80s was a denim wash facility and a development house.” Imogene + Wille had been a longtime customer of White Oak, and like Tellason, it looked to Japan as a low-minimum (the smallest order a factory will fulfill), high-quality selvedge alternative after the mill’s demise.
“The only place to get anything comparable was Japan, says McNeill. “So we essentially replaced [our] core selvedge fabric with a great Japanese fabric. But it wasn’t made in America, and it was more expensive, and honestly, we probably didn’t love it as much as we did the original W277 [fabric] from Cone.”
Imogene + Wille took the first delivery of Vidalia selvedge, and other brands soon followed, but the mill quickly ran into trouble. A few short months after opening, COVID-19 hit, forcing Vidalia to pivot to producing PPE essentials like facemasks and surgical gowns. By the end of 2020, Vidalia had already done its first round of layoffs, assuring the local paper, The Natchez Democrat, that it was merely “growing pains” while also blaming the pandemic. A few civil suits over the next year made a little noise, but by 2024 the paper was reporting on late paychecks and another round of layoffs, this time gutting about a third of Vidalia’s workforce. Then, in February of 2025, Sourcing Journal: Denim announced, “Vidalia Mills Faces Public Auction as $32.5 Million Debt Looms.”
The Lee factory, circa 1935.
When asked what happened, McNeill responds, “They weren’t properly capitalized. It was an overly ambitious project to build a denim mill.” Michael Williams puts it another way, “There are a lot of better ways to lose money than to make selvedge denim. It’s a real vanity business at this point.”
Once again, American selvedge denim was dead, the victim of an economy reconfigured to prioritize tech over manufacturing, globalized supply chains, and a retail model focused on selling low-quality goods at high-volumes. But there’s another culprit here: American consumers themselves. The uncomfortable truth is that as cheap, foreign-made goods flooded shelves, shoppers soon began to love, and expect, “everyday low prices.”
Tellason sells a pair of inky blue Ankara jeans, made of 19oz Japanese selvedge fabric, for $280; Imogene + Willie’s perfectly faded Henry Sheridan selvedge jeans will run you $325. On Amazon you can currently pick up a pair of Rustler Men’s Classic Relaxed Fit jeans for $14.98. “Made in the U.S.A.” had become a niche product with a price point to match, one that Americans, despite what they say or how they vote, are largely unwilling to pay. Of course many of them simply can’t, thanks to persistent inflation, enervating cost-of-living increases, and roughly 40 years of wage stagnation.
Wrangler and Lee jeans from an undated file photo by Yvonne Hemsey.
“Was [it] the right move to make this trade-off of shipping our jobs overseas and in return getting cheap TVs and toasters and jeans?” Steven Kurutz asks. “That came at a huge cost. I think the past 15 years in America has been a reckoning with that decision.”
Current political rhetoric also flattens the monumental complexity of reshoring American manufacturing, a fact that comes up again and again in conversations. When those jobs were shipped overseas America lost not just the factories themselves but also generations’ worth of expertise and experience, something that’s not easily reconstituted. “You can’t just snap your fingers,” observes Patella. “It takes a ton of money, planning, and training. The ‘just make it here’ reaction isn’t based in reality.”
There is a place that never faltered, where the lights stayed on and the looms kept humming.
“Welcome to Trion,” reads a monumental brick sign, “Home of Mount Vernon Mills & The Trion Bulldogs.” For 180 years Mount Vernon has been weaving in Georgia, first plain gray cloth, and later, denim. “We are the community,” says William H. “Bill” Rogers, President and CEO. “We actually house the town’s fire department; we employ around 500 people.” For all intents and purposes, Mount Vernon Mills is the last man standing, the only rope-dyed, indigo-range denim manufacturer left in the U.S. (Cone Denim, which now manufactures in China and Mexico, was acquired by Pakistan’s Artistic Milliners; Cone declined to participate in this article).
Rollers stained with indigo in the Dye House at White Oak.
Where Vidalia had aspired to be vertically integrated, Mount Vernon actually is—spinning, dying, weaving, and finishing, mainly for the industrial workwear market but also for fashion brands. As a result, when it comes to the future of American selvedge, all eyes are now on Trion.
“One thing I think people forget about when weaving denim, like in the situation of selvedge, they think you gotta have these looms,” says Rogers. “And yes, you need to have the looms, but they forget about everything else you have to have to produce denim. You have to have ball warping, you have to have re-beaming, you have to have an indigo range, which is a huge operation, because we still ring dye indigo to produce what we consider a true authentic denim.” Thankfully, Mount Vernon has all of those capacities, and as of last October, Vidalia’s Draper looms, too, which are slated to begin bouncing again this year.
The news was met with a collective sigh of relief in the denim community. Yet again, the Draper looms had been saved, and with them, American selvedge. But how much longer could this story replay itself? Nearing a century of use, Draper looms are already notoriously difficult to service and repair; besides, operators retire. If selvedge truly is the highest expression of denim and an invaluable piece of our heritage as a nation, why do we just keep crossing our fingers and praying that a few dozen machines built before the advent of color television will end up in the right place? “I do think there needs to be an initiative around selvedge that doesn’t necessarily require using 100-year-old machines,” says McNeill.
Levi’s jeans for sale at the Lyon Motorcycle Show in Lyon, France, on February 26, 2026.
There are other ways to help ensure the future of American selvedge. First, for “Made in the U.S.A.” to ever be more than just a feel-good soundbite, consumers need to accept the fact that domestically made goods cost more because American workers are paid more. From cotton farmers to cut-and-sew factory workers, the premium you pay for a pair of “Made in the U.S.A.” jeans (according to Federal Trade Commission rules, in order for a product to carry the label, it must be “all or virtually all” made in the U.S.A.) supports workers across a diverse range of industries and communities.
Second, active government support is essential. Goods like Champagne and Parmesan are protected by what are known as “designation of origin,” which stipulates that only specific regions can produce a product under that name. Through legislation, selvedge could become to the U.S. what Harris Tweed is to Scotland. Washington can also provide financial support in the form of tax credits, like those laid out in the “Buying American Cotton Act of 2025,” which creates a tiered system to incentivize manufacturers. (Using American-made cotton in their clothing confers a credit, which increases if the fabric was additionally woven in the U.S.)
The Draper X-3 loom harness in action.
But more than anything, the survival of American selvedge is dependent upon the brands that moved away from it decades ago. Not flash-in-th-pan capsule collections, not a SKU or two of novelty styles per season, but a true investment in American-made selvedge, all up and down the supply chain. That may sound naive in the era of the Amazon Haul, but imagine the knock-on effect across the menswear industry.
“We need some of the bigger players to commit,” says McNeill. “The Gap decides that they’re going to make a line of jeans in the U.S. and they’re gonna create infrastructure and jobs around that. I’ve yet to see anyone go, ‘Ok now’s our time.’ I get it, those are big ships. Those are hard things to navigate…”
Suddenly, Eddmenson interjects. “But a bold move is possible.”
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