America Is Officially Back in the Selvedge Denim Business

Mike McLachlan, the founder of the Connecticut clothing brand Manresa, has owned many pairs of selvedge denim jeans over the years, but the ones he’s wearing right now are by far the closest to his heart. “Selvedge mills tend to lean more towards more character-rich neppy, slubby denim,” he says, referencing the textural characteristics prized by many selvedge enthusiasts. “But I've always been more of a fan of what Levi’s would have been using in the middle of the century. It’s fairly flat and uniform, and it’s a style of denim you don’t find very often anymore. It’s as traditional as it gets.”

For McLachlan and many others, selvedge denim—the old-school-style cotton twill woven on antique narrow looms—is both aesthetically and ideologically superior to the stuff most jeans are made of today. Not only does it take on more character as it wears and fades, it represents a direct connection to the authenticity of denim’s golden era, before it was consumed by the modern global fashion industry. McLachlan’s new favorite jeans are a one-of-one prototype, but thanks to the efforts of Trion, Georgia’s Mount Vernon Mills, and a room full of painstakingly restored antique shuttle looms, anyone in search of the kind of no-nonsense dungarees one might have bought at Sears in the 1950s will soon have plenty of options.

In early November last year, Mount Vernon Mills, a 180-year old fabric mill and America’s largest denim producer, posted an Instagram video of a semi truck backed into a loading bay, its cargo shrouded in a white plastic sheet. The video, set to the opening chords of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” didn’t reveal much, but for those attuned to the fate of American-made selvedge over the last few years, it marked a major milestone. Under that white sheet was one of 40-some Draper X3 looms salvaged from the legendary Cone White Oak denim mill in Greensboro, North Carolina. To those who worship at the altar of 20th century workwear, it represented nothing less than the salvation of American denim. A little less than a year later, that machine and 20 others like it are up and running, fabric samples are being shipped to clothing brands across the country, and a new chapter in a 120-year story is beginning.

“It has been a crazy ride,” says Tim Harris, the director of marketing and specialty sales at Mount Vernon Mills, and the company’s de-facto social media manager. He’s the one who posted the video of the looms arriving last November, and he’s been documenting their progress on TikTok and Instagram in the months since. The equipment, some of which had been in storage for nearly a decade, was in rough shape. “There were some full looms there, but there were also these bins of parts that had 6000 springs and levers in them, things that had not been made since the 1970s,” he says. “It was like, ‘Here we go!’”

The Draper looms’ journey to their current home was long and fraught. The looms—some of which date back to the 1950s—were originally used at the Cone White Oak mill, which opened in 1905 and was the official supplier of selvedge to Levi’s, Wrangler, and many other storied American brands for most of the 20th century. Before White Oak closed in 2017, it had been the last remaining commercial producer of selvedge denim in the United States, and many feared the legacy of American-made selvedge would disappear with it. Enter Vidalia Mills, an ambitious textile startup, which purchased White Oak’s equipment, moved it to Vidalia, Louisiana, and promised a glorious return to form. That never quite came to pass, however, and when Vidalia’s assets went up for auction last year, Mount Vernon Mills bought the lot.

Given its history and its size, Mount Vernon Mills is perhaps the only company with both the resources and the skilled workers necessary to resurrect American selvedge, but restoring the looms to their former glory was no small feat. Pickers scoured barns and warehouses for spare parts, and a crack squad of technicians from Greensboro decamped to Trion to teach Mount Vernon’s staff how to keep the antique machinery running. As of now, Harris says, about 20 of the 45 Draper looms are operational, and each has been christened with the name of a golden-era American cultural icon: Elvis, Aretha, Lucille.

Because antique shuttle looms like the Draper weave at a fraction of the pace of their modern equivalents and require far more maintenance, running a selvedge production line represents a significant investment for a relatively small output. To put it in perspective, Mount Vernon hopes to produce 20,000 yards of selvedge per week at full capacity, the same amount of time it takes its modern looms to churn out millions of yards of conventional denim. Despite this, Harris says, there is no shortage of buyers excited to turn its new selvedge into jeans. “The outpouring we have received for this crazy idea of bringing these old things back to life, and doing this in America, has been amazing,” he says. “Folks are reaching out. They want to be a part of it. We could not have asked for a better reception.”

One of those reaching out is Kyle Moredocks, who recently got his hands on a sample of Mount Vernon Mills selvedge. Moredocks is the founder of an eponymous Portland-based brand that makes customized jeans, jackets, and shirts to order (his Cowboy Jean recently got a shoutout from Derek Guy). Because Moredocks’ concept is based on on-demand production, he doesn’t buy huge quantities of material, and that makes it difficult to meet the minimum orders of large textile mills. “If you can go straight to the mill and meet their volume requirements then obviously that's easier. But if you're someone our size making less than 100 pairs a year, it's more challenging,” Moredocks says. At Mount Vernon, however, the new selvedge program is distinguished by being available to small brands like Moredocks and Manresa at minimums far below the industry standard.

“These [brands] are the ones keeping this thing alive—the romance and the stories behind these jeans, and they look for craftsmanship.” Harris says. “This is not cookie-cutter-every-yard- looks-the-same denim. This is handcrafted by artisans, and it’s different. This is the $300 Pappy Van Winkle, not the $25 Wild Turkey.”

Harris alludes to bigger deals with high-profile clients that he can’t name, but to anyone familiar with the recent surge of special-editions made from White Oak’s remaining American-made selvedge, it’s not hard to guess who the list might include. Mount Vernon is initially offering two standard sanforized (i.e. washed and pre-shrunk) denims: the Revere, a 13-ounce dark indigo, and a heavier 15-ounce Franklin. “We wanted to do old revolutionary names because we were doing something revolutionary,” says Harris. “Mr. Revere came and told us that the revolution was coming.”

At Manresa, McLachlan is working through his last remaining yards of Japanese selvedge, and plans to release his signature 207 jeans in Mount Vernon Mills denim in the coming months. “We'll make Mount Vernon 15-ounce during the colder months, and the 13-ounce during the warmer months,” he says. “Then maybe a field coat, maybe a barn coat, maybe a jean jacket somewhere down the line.”

In the meantime, McLachlan has been wearing his prototype Mount Vernon 207s every day. “They have a little bit more drape than a Japanese counterpart might, and they just feel comfortable as soon as you put them on,” he says. “I feel very lucky to be able to be wearing a pair.” McLachlan also boasts that as one of the first people in the world to have a pair of Mount Vernon selvedge jeans, he’ll have a head start on the fade competition that will inevitably ensue.

“I’m going to wear them every day, so nobody's ever going to catch up to me in terms of my fade,” he says. “So I’m pretty proud of that too.”