As I started to write this, I searched for my previous post on the topic, and turns out I’ve not only written twice before but I already used a variant of the pun in the title. Sigh. Old habits…
Anyway, what brought me back to the writing desk is that my two current pairs of black jeans are no longer black but gray, and lighter every year. While I almost always wear jeans, I do like some variety, so having both blue and black fills that little void quite nicely, thank you very much. Variety is the spice of life, after all. When I last purchased black jeans, they were from my perennial favorite, All American Clothing, but they were on clearance because they had chosen to discontinue them. That was four years ago.
I did double check to see if All American had by some miracle decided to offer black jeans again, but alas, it seems not. So I searched once again for American made jeans. I certainly don’t make a point of buying everything American made, or even all my clothing, but as I wrote back in my first post on the topic, there was just something irksome about my previous favorite brand, Levis, building their brand image as uber-American, but then making their clothes overseas in the interest of greater profits. I guess that is ultimately the most American thing of all, but their greed made me want to find true American jeans.
My searching led me to an article where someone claimed to have surveyed the landscape of American made jeans, and found the Best Jeans. It’s pretty clear that this was a paper survey, and no pants were harmed in their “research.”
Here are the thirteen pairs of jeans they talk about. Note that if you purchased one pair of each of these, as you might for a true comparison review, you would have shelled out about $2500.
I don’t know how one can make claims about “fit” without buying the jeans, or “value” in jeans over $200. They may be good jeans (or not), but unless they are going to last more that four times as long as my $50 (ok, now $55) All American Clothing jeans, they’re not that great a value. And who exactly has the money to spend on $200-300 per pair of jeans?! That can’t, or oughtn’t to be, a big market. Some of these companies offer payment plans for their pants. For any rational person, needing to finance your pants ought to send up lots of red flags.
Happily, there were two brands that I learned about that are selling jeans for under $100 per pair. But why All American Clothing was excluded from this roundup, I don’t know. In the end, the only non-stretch black jeans I found were (ironically…) at Bluer Denim for $178, Bullet Blues for $160, and +$300 from Raleigh Denim.
In my searching, there were a couple of interesting articles I came across that document the demise of American denim. I gather that the biggest mill that was producing selvage/selvedge denim was Cone Mills in North Carolina, and their mill was closed down at the end of 2017. But some brands apparently still have some stock, which may to a degree explain some of the outrageous costs. But not all of them, because some of these “American” made jeans are made with Japanese denim.
TL;DR — no black jeans for me.
