How Proximity Denims is Carrying on a Made in America Legacy
For over a century, Cone Denim’s White Oak plant in Greensboro, NC produced selvedge denim cloth for iconic brands like Levi Strauss and Wrangler.
After the plant closed in 2017, the nonprofit White Oak Legacy Foundation was founded to preserve the heritage of the mill, which had been the final remaining selvedge denim maker on U.S. soil. WOLF then established Proximity Denims in 2021 as a subsidiary focused on commercial textile manufacturing. A nod to White Oak’s history, the company uses shuttle looms to produce denim as they did in decades past.
In an industry that has largely moved away from U.S. production, Proximity Denims offers an alternative to the outsourcing trend. Evan Morrison, director of Proximity Denims, spoke with Carved in Blue about shuttle looms, material experiments and making denim in America.
Carved in Blue: Where did the name Proximity come from?
Evan: The Cone Export & Commission Co. 1921 publication “World Leadership in Denims” denotes that the name Proximity was chosen due to the mill’s location nearby the source of cotton for their products. We, in an effort to caretake for our city’s history, found it more than appropriate to revive this storied name back in 2015, and I gifted the trademark to WOLF in 2021 for us to create a standalone cloth production business, Proximity Manufacturing Company. This was the first name of denim woven in Greensboro nearly 128 years ago, Proximity Denims. When I was visiting my friend Jack King at his factory, L.C. King, in Bristol, TN in 2019, he gifted me the original Proximity Denims fabric weight that was still actively being used in their cutting room, originally gifted to his grandfather and accompanied a shipment of cloth from Greensboro over 110 years ago.
Carved in Blue: What makes shuttle loom-woven denim special?
Evan: This question is quite complicated. Is shuttle woven denim any more durable than cloth woven on a modern loom using the same yarns? No. But, does it hearken back to the origin story of denim, when it was an economy-grade cloth produced to be cut and sewn into durable work clothing? Yes. Can selvedge denim be considered special? Absolutely. It saves between two and four of the longest seam/edge closures in the garment manufacturing process. Not only this, but selvedge yarns are usually slightly heavier than the body of the cloth, helping to frame out the woven goods in production, and can offer improved seam integrity if utilized correctly in garment manufacturing. But even modern wide goods have a selvedge, whereby the edge of the cloth is woven into a plain weave, allowing for various finishing equipment chains to grip the cloth and correctly pull it through their ranges. However, the essence of selvedge required the self-edged or self-enclosed edge of the cloth to be formed in the weaving process, something only a shuttle loom can do authentically.
Shuttle woven denim using antiquated machinery uses only one computer board for the motor and one circuit for the warp stop motion; every other function and drive of a shuttle loom is analog. This means there will inevitably be imperfections in the cloth, due to the unraveling of a quill inside a shuttle interlacing the warp. It’s quite beautiful to think that a machine with more parts than an automobile of the same time period, that must be constantly greased and oiled, could produce such a storied fabric. What’s more, our shuttle looms actually thrive on operating on wooden floors, maintaining their harmonic rhythm bouncing as they weave.
I think if I had to boil my answer to this question down to one statement, it would be this: The fact that the denim we weave is on the same floors that have supported shuttle looms since 1905, weaving the first order for Levi Strauss in 1913 and beginning to weave XX red line denim by the 1920s, and weaving denim using the same looms that helped make White Oak Cotton Mills world famous for over a century, that is what makes our shuttle woven denim special.
Carved in Blue: A lot of denim innovation is happening around sustainability, but what sustainable impact can be made by going back to the industry’s roots and using older methods?
Evan: This is a great question! Until sanforization—the mechanical pre-shrinking of cloth—was invented and subsequently patented by Sanford Cluett in 1930, every mill produced loom state fabric, meaning it was woven and then inspected, folded, packed and shipped. The forefathers of this industry knew only how to make first-quality cloth, and the most popular finishing and denim only involved rotary printing. So, what does this mean? This means that every pair of jeans was foregoing gallons of water, and therefore water treatment, in this finishing process that began to take a hold on the industry in the 1930s.
But what does this mean for today? I firmly believe that if loom state cloth is used in garment manufacturing, fit can be achieved through the on-body auto-tailoring of the cloth in the shrinking process, whereby an individual puts the oversized, correctly patterned garment on, and exposes it to water and heat in a bath or shower, allowing the cloth to form fit to their body’s curvature. For a designer, this means that you don’t solely have to rely on the pattern to create a “fit” and can actually rely on the cloth to optimize the fit to each wearer. Never in the history of humans have there been wider standard deviations per waist size, and if you lined up 1,000 people with the same waist size, there would be no more than 30 people with the same body shape. So, making a garment in a shrink-into-fit pattern, oversizing the pattern and using a specific thread tension in the seam construction actually can allow for the most optimized fit. Plus, this also minimizes the requirement for water treatment, whereby chemicals must be cleaned from the water supply to make it again potable, if at all. And thus, the future is in the past, and the past is now the future. Less is truly more.
Carved in Blue: Why did you choose to source yarn from the U.S.? What is the benefit of partnering with Mount Vernon Mills?
Evan: Denim is iconically American, born in its modern form in the United States. So, it only makes sense to source the ingredients for our denim from the USA. There are still actually a lot of suppliers of yarn in the states, but sadly there is only one denim mill with indigo rope ranges left online, being Mount Vernon Mills in Trion, Georgia. The funny thing about Mount Vernon Mills’ Trion plant is that it receives very few acknowledgements, but they are truly the last man standing, if you will. One of my neighbors, Bud Strickland, used to work for Cone at White Oak and then moved on to MVM in Trion, and he helped us establish a relationship with MVM back in 2021.
They are some of the nicest, most honest and high integrity people to work with. They know their stuff, and they’ve done their homework. I’ll tell you what, some of the smartest people in American textiles work for Mount Vernon Mills, and there is a reason they are the last man standing in the denim industry in the USA. They are a friend to us, and we always do whatever we can to support them and name-drop them so that they can get the recognition they deserve. If you don’t know Mount Vernon Mills, you likely do; if you’ve ever seen Carhartt’s brown duck, black duck or navy duck, that is MVM’s famous Georgia Duck. They make some of the finest flame resistant denim and canvas used in blue collar America and have been producing high-quality denim for decades. If we can ever be of value to MVM, our goal is to be a good little brother.
Carved in Blue: You branched out beyond cotton to test weaving with hemp. Have you tried using TENCEL™ in the blend?
Evan: We’ve explored hemp, as well as recycled PET, and have engaged on several yarn development projects using U.S.-grown, degummed hemp, to explore this fiber as a durability improvement opportunity. Maybe, with some luck, we can partner with TENCEL™ on a project this year to make some beautiful fabric and perhaps even partner with a brand to make a collection of garments. In 2022, we wove two yarn developments, one using 50 percent ringspun long staple cotton, 25 percent recycled PET with Full Spectrum Hemp Extract, and 25 percent U.S.-grown degummed hemp, and the other project using 75 percent long staple ringspun cotton and 25 percent recycled PET with FSHE. In 2023, we developed two new yarns, one 75 percent cotton 25 percent hemp and another 70 percent cotton 30 percent hemp.
We’re excited for alternative fiber options, but also want to focus on yarns that utilize sustainable processing. While it makes sense to us to work toward a circularity loop closure for garment life cycle, it doesn’t make sense to us if it requires heavy chemical inputs that can then require augmented water treatment process adoption at facilities where these yarns are being produced.
Carved in Blue: What capacity does Proximity have?
Evan: We have the capacity to run about 100 yards of cloth per day in our current setup, but are in the process of expanding, with hopes to increase this capacity significantly over the next calendar year.
Carved in Blue: How can a brand best incorporate a micro mill? How do you see this fitting into the production planning of larger and smaller labels?
Evan: I like to think about strategy for larger brands in terms of good, better and best. You can make a lot of good, less better and limited-edition best. For smaller brands, working with a smaller mill makes sense, because MOQs are less, but the price per yard might be more, which is validated in their product’s premium price point. However, I do believe there is an opportunity for larger brands to engage with an operation like ours in tandem with MVM, whereby they could run a custom dye set, produce the majority of the run with MVM in Trion, and ship us tails to produce a premium product that could have the same shade and construction, for utilization in premium grade garments, to further improve the unit profit overall across the order. For smaller brands, we have met reluctance with our price point from some, but other who understand the historic value and the fair labor wages that we pay, we appear attractive.
Since we began, we’ve worked with brands to make jeans, jackets, hats, shoes, coats and bags. The reality is this, it is expensive to do what we do in the USA nowadays, but it isn’t impossible. I think that a lot of brands like to cut corners, rely on marketing to appear more premium than they are, but we are the real deal. Try to find someone else doing what we’re doing at the scale we are doing it, with the same quality, here in the USA. You can’t.
Carved in Blue: American denim manufacturing has dwindled. Do you see an opportunity for denim production to come back to the U.S. in a bigger way? And what will it take to boost onshore sourcing in this industry?
Evan: The reality is this, unless we have World War III, manufacturing of the 20th century will be forever gone and continue to dwindle in the USA. What is possible is specialization. We see so many suppliers and friends in industry who have figured out how to produce something with exceptional quality and become experts of their trade, allowing them to remain in business and thrive. NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) no doubt hurt a lot of USA businesses, especially those blue collar that could easily find lower cost labor south of the border, or overseas for that matter, but some businesses have remained in the USA purely because they have found a niche and learned to thrive in it, optimizing their costs and constantly improving their quality. This is where we find ourselves, in a niche where we have no competition, so we can focus on honing our trade and becoming the most expert of our craft, and hope that brands and consumers alike will see value in this effort.