If you're lucky enough to own a pair of authentic, "selvage" denim jeans, you know what you love about them: their visible engineering, their durability, and the almost living way they fade and mold to your body. What you might not know is that their existence has long relied on an odd combination of obsolete machinery, working class necessity, retro fashion, American mythology, and foreign ingenuity.
Today, most denim, both here and abroad, is produced in extremely high-tech environments — at sprawling factories full of computer-controlled looms. These machines are big, fast, and exact, programmable to the tenth of a millimeter. That's all very nice for a textile factory's bottom line, but it doesn't do much for the life or uniqueness of your pants. If you want character in your jeans, and that extra ounce of longevity, you have to go old school.
Nowhere in America is the old-school approach on more vivid display than at Cone Denim's White Oak plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. Founded in 1895, Cone Denim has long served as the primary source of fabric for legendary American jeans makers such as Lee, Wrangler, and of course the granddaddy of them all: Levi Strauss. Cone's plant is where textile makers "literally filed the patents for denim production in America," says Victor Lytvinenko, co-founder (with Sarah Yarborough) of Raleigh Denim, a North Carolina-based vintage denim workshop.
To satisfy our rapidly expanding appetite for denim clothes, in 1905 Cone opened the White Oak plant. To mark the history he hoped to make, Moses Cone named the plant after a 200-year-old great white oak that stood on the property, long serving as a local meeting spot.
Today, as you walk through White Oak's cavernous weave room, where technicians and robotic arms rove among long rows of electronic looms, long-chain dye units, "slashers," and other modern textile machinery, at a certain point you see the flooring change from concrete to old wooden planks. Resting on those planks are 51 mechanical power looms, all made in the 1940s and all painted green, loudly clacking away like oversize manual typewriters.
These machines were made by the now defunct Draper Corporation of Hopedale, Massachussetts, and this particular model, the Draper X3, represents the last generation of "fly shuttle" looms that America ever made. The period authenticity in this room is more than aesthetic; the vibrations of the Drapers bouncing on the wooden floor provide White Oak denim's unique terroir. The plant's signature is in every swath of denim it makes, like cursive vibrations written in weft yarn.
Just last month, on October 18th, the International Textile Group (ITG), which now owns Cone Denim (after nearly a century of Cone family ownership), announced that on December 31, the White Oak plant will close. In its press release, ITG wasn't vague about its reasons. As clothing manufacturers have turned to "fabric sourcing outside the U.S.," it said, orders at White Oak have dropped too low to sustain the plant's high capacity.
In addition to eliminating roughly 200 jobs, ITG's move shutters the last major factory making vintage-style denim — that is, the last one on American soil. Between the lines of ITG's announcement was a hidden aspect to this trend: A lot of that fabric coming from overseas represents foreigners' attempts to replicate, and even improve upon, old-fashioned American denim. Could their work be as authentic as the un-killable material that clothed California's 19th-century gold miners, and has kept generations of American ranch hands warm ever since? Could it be even better?
The Selvage secret
Brad Johnson, the group manager for Cone's White Oak plant and two others in Mexico (the company also has a plant in China), has been on the job here for 29 years. "I got fascinated by the weaving part first," Johnson says, as he walks off the weave room floor, down an abruptly quiet hall, and into the plant's archive room. Here, the same wooden planks, glowing like amber, cover the floor, and historical garments made from White Oak denim are on display, from weather-beaten overalls, circa 1940, sealed behind glass cases to pristine, vintage-style Levi's on racks.
White Oak devotes significant resources to recreating historical fabrics on the same weave room floor where they were originally made. "You've got that history that gets woven into that fabric," Johnson says. "If you appreciate the cracks and pops from vinyl records, you probably appreciate selvage jeans."
One of denim's many unique qualities is that you only dye the yarn that goes on the outside of the fabric, called the "warp yarn." The yarn that goes inside, called the "weft yarn," is typically plain white cotton (although it shows up inside your pants or jacket as a pale blue). To make selvage-style denim, the dyed warp yarn is stretched out vertically while a small shuttle pulls the weft across the loom horizontally, filling the fabric with the uncolored cotton.
White Oak's dyeing process is unique to the application of indigo — a convention of style and convenience, not of necessity. "Indigo was cheap," Johnson says, "though it is not a very good dye stuff for cotton. It washes down." When the impermanence of the indigo dye on the warp is interlaced with the white weft, it gives jeans their saturated depths of color and texture. "That's one reason people love jeans, in my opinion." Pointing to his own Levi's, Johnson says "These are not as old as they look, but they have these whiskers like I've worn them for years."
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