YOU ARE PROBABLY wearing jeans as you read this. If you’re not, chances are you wore them yesterday. Or you will tomorrow. At any given moment, anthropologists believe, half the world’s population is sporting jeans. Six billion pairs are produced annually. The average American owns seven—one for each day of the week—and buys four new pairs every year. “I wish I had invented blue jeans,” the French couturier Yves Saint Laurent confessed. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for my clothes.”
Barring basics such as underwear and socks, blue jeans are the most popular garment ever. They are what many of the Rana Plaza workers were sewing or inspecting when the building came crashing down. They were the backbone of American textile and garment manufacturing, until Levi’s offshored those jobs. All of them. They are hyper-polluting—in their creation, and in their afterlife.
Jeans embody all that is good, bad, and awry in fashion.
TRUE BLUE JEANS are made of cotton, one of humankind’s oldest crops—it is thought to have been domesticated in 3500 BC (though some archeologists believe that could date to the sixth millennium BC). The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described cotton as “a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep.” When the Macedonian king Alexander the Great invaded India with his army in 327–326 BC, he had his troops use cotton, which they called “vegetable wool,” for their bedding and saddle pads. In 63 BC, the Roman official P. Lentulus Spinther had sun-blocking cotton awnings installed on the theater for the Apollinarian games, and two decades later, Caesar tented the Forum and the road that linked the city’s palace and capitol with cotton tarps.
About sixty billion pounds (or 121.4 million bales) of cotton are grown each year on roughly eighty-two million acres (or 33.4 million hectares) of land across more than one hundred countries—India is the largest producer; China is a close second, and the United States is third. You can find cotton in fishnets, coffee filters, book bindings, bandages, disposable diapers, x-rays—even banknotes: America’s paper currency is 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen. Cotton’s most common use, however, is for clothing: 60 percent of all women’s apparel contains it; for men, it’s 75 percent. For blue jeans, it’s 100 percent.
For all the comfort and shelter it has given, cotton is one of our most manhandled plants. It has been spliced, and sprayed, and souped up until, like a Playboy centerfold, it barely resembles its original self.
Nonorganic cotton—known in the business as “conventional” cotton—is among agriculture’s dirtiest crops. One-fifth of insecticides—and more than 10 percent of all pesticides—are devoted to the protection of conventional cotton, though it is grown on only 2.5 percent of the world’s arable land. The World Health Organization has classed eight out of ten of America’s most popular cotton pesticides as “hazardous.”
Conventional cotton is also extremely thirsty: to grow one kilo requires, on average, 2,600 gallons (or 10,000 liters) of water. Processing it swallows even more: approximately 5,000 gallons for one T-shirt and a pair of jeans. If fashion production maintains its current pace, the demand for water will surpass the world’s supply by 40 percent by 2030.
Much lore surrounds the naissance of denim and jeans. Some historians claim the durable indigo-dyed cotton twill originated in the southern French town of Nîmes—or de Nîmes, as the French say. Some say Christopher Columbus of Genoa—or “Gênes,” in French—used the fabric for his sails and that Genovese sailors wore blue cotton pants.
Fashion scholars now believe denim as we know it today was developed by the Manchester, New Hampshire, textile mills during the nineteenth century and named “jean.” The fabric’s construction has always been simple: the exterior side, known as the warp, is made of two or three yarns, usually dark blue, woven together as one; the underside, called the weft, is a single yarn in white or another pale shade, giving the fabric a 3-D–like effect. There is a higher quality, called “selvedge.” It is woven on older, narrower shuttle looms (half the size of the common ones, which are roughly sixty inches wide) with a continuous weft thread. Selvedge denim is tighter and more substantial, and its outer edges are woven to avoid fraying—they have a “self-edge.” Selvedge jeans aficionados show off the seam edges, as if an ensign, by turning up their cuffs.
Originally, the New Hampshire–spun yarn was dyed with natural indigo farmed in the American South. Indigo is one of humanity’s oldest natural dyes, extracted from the leaves of the Indigofera plant. It was first cultivated in the United States in the mid-eighteenth century by slaves of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, an Antiguan of English descent. She sowed seeds sent by her father, the lieutenant governor of Antigua, on her family’s South Carolina plantations. Like cotton, indigo was farmed by slaves, and it soon became one of the Southern colony’s most lucrative crops.
Denim remained a niche textile until the early 1870s, when a Reno, Nevada, tailor named Jacob Davis wrote to his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, a Bavarian-born immigrant with a successful dry goods business in San Francisco, and asked for help mass-producing his most recent design: workpants with metal rivets at key stress points. The pants were such a hit among miners, farmers, and laborers, Davis claimed, “I cannot make them fast enough.”
If Strauss would cover the hefty $68 patenting fee, Davis proposed, the two men could be business partners, manufacturing the riveted trousers in San Francisco. Davis included with his letter two versions of the pants—one in an ecru-colored canvas known as “duck,” and another in denim. Strauss liked what he saw and applied for the patent. On May 20, 1873, it was granted. Davis settled in San Francisco and within weeks was overseeing the first run of Levi Strauss & Co. jeans. Made of denim from Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, a mill in New Hampshire, the pants were sewed by fifty seamstresses in the duo’s new factory on Market Street. Today, Levi Strauss & Co. design and sell the majority of jeans. It is one of the most successful apparel brands, ever.
The world’s oldest surviving Levis can be found in the Vault, the company’s archives at its headquarters, Levi’s Plaza, an early-1980s brown brick and dark glass office complex across from the Embarcadero in San Francisco. The Vault is watched over by company historian Tracey Panek, a kind, keen middle-aged woman who calls to mind an elementary-school librarian.
On a sunny fall Friday in 2017, Panek—dressed in black Levi’s jeans, a well-worn blue denim jacket, and a bright red turtleneck, perhaps a nod to the company’s signature scarlet tab—welcomed me into the Vault to view the best of Levi’s vintage collection. We started with a pair from 1879. Panek tugged on her white cotton gloves, pulled open a drawer in one of three fireproof safes, and gingerly lifted the pants out to place them on a long archival table.
They were short, wide, and a faded chalky blue, with century-old dirt so embedded on the thighs, it would never, ever come out in the wash. Panek explained that, because jeans weren’t cheap, miners would mend and share them until they had no life left. “I call them the first sustainable garment, because you could patch them up and pass them on,” she said.
In 1890, Strauss and Davis introduced a new jean silhouette called the “501,” named for the lot number. Panek showed me a pair from that era. Made of a denim known as “XX,” for extra strong, they had buttons for suspenders (instead of belt loops), a button fly, and four pockets—three in the front, including a small inset for a pocket watch, and one on the back; the fifth, on the derriere, was added in 1901. Since then the 501’s silhouette has gone unchanged.
The profits from his blue jeans empire made Strauss one of California’s wealthiest citizens. He wore it well: standing about five feet six and gently rotund, he was always impeccably turned out in a dark broadcloth suit with a waistcoat, silk tie, and top hat. He did not don the jeans his company produced. He never married either, claiming, “my entire life is my business.” When he died in 1902, at seventy-three, he left much of his nearly $1.667 million estate to local charities, and the company in the hands of his four nephews. One of them, Sigmund Stern, and Stern’s son-in-law Walter Haas, took charge. They modernized the jeans’ design, replacing the button fly with zippers, the suspender buttons with belt loops. And while they continued to buy their denim from Amoskeag Mills, they added a new source in the South: the Cone brothers’ White Oak Cotton Mills, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Cone Mills was founded in the mid-1890s by Moses and Ceasar [sic] Cone, two brothers who, like Strauss, were of Bavarian stock. Hearing of Strauss’s success out West, they spotted a bankable business opportunity and transformed a defunct steel mill into a denim factory called Proximity Manufacturing, since it sat close to cotton fields and gins. In 1905, they inaugurated a second facility, White Oak Cotton Mills, named for a majestic two-hundred-year-old specimen that stood nearby.
Much of the denim produced there was dyed with synthetic indigo, developed by the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer and commercialized by BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik) in 1897. Unlike natural indigo, synthetic wasn’t seasonable, or vulnerable to blight or weather destruction. Yes, it was made of a host of chemicals—several we now know are harmful to the environment. But it was consistent, and cheaper. This meant mills like Cone could weave and dye denim twelve months a year. By 1914, the natural indigo business had been annihilated, never to recover. White Oak eventually became the largest denim producer in the world, and Moses was known as the Denim King.
In 1915, the Levi Strauss nephews met with the Cones to discuss sourcing denim from White Oak. The two sides came to swift agreement, sealed with what has gone down in history books as “the Golden Handshake.” From then on, Cone exclusively supplied Levi Strauss with denim for its 501 jeans. And blue jeans’ popularity steadily grew, until they received an unexpected bump in the 1970s—from all places, Seventh Avenue.
With the women’s liberation movement and the popularity of more casual dress, New York’s fashion designers dreamed up a new fashion category: designer jeans. With slim-cut legs and seats that cupped the rear, designer jeans embodied the epoque’s hedonism and Madison Avenue swagger. “Jeans are sex,” Calvin Klein said. “The tighter they are, the better they sell.”
To hammer home his point, in 1980, Klein cast fifteen-year-old actress-model Brooke Shields for his jeans commercial. “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” she purred in her childlike voice, as she sat spread-eagle in a pair of his jeans and a taupe blouse. “Nothing.” The ad was so provocative, the New York affiliates of ABC and CBS promptly banned it. But it had already worked its spell: Klein sold four hundred thousand pairs the week following the ad’s debut, then two million a month after that. Jean sales rocketed to record heights: more than half a billion were purchased in 1981 alone.
UNTIL THE 1970S, a good many jeans sold had been made of stiff, shrink-to-fit—or “unsanforized”—denim. (Preshrunk cotton—known as “sanforized”—has existed since the early 1930s, but was not adopted by the denim industry until the 1960s, when prewashing became a common practice.) One would buy unsanforized jeans a size or two larger, then, to get them to fit, either wash them or—ideally—put them on and sit in a bathtub full of water. Really.
To soften them, you simply had to wear them. A lot. It took a good six months to properly break in jeans. After a couple of years—years—the hems and pocket edges might start to fray, or a knee would split open. The fabric faded to a powdery blue with some whiskering—the sunburst-like streaks that radiate from the fly. Time and dedication were required to push your jeans to peak fabulousness.
That is, until the popularization of stonewashing in the 1980s. Unsanforized jeans were thrown into industrial washers with pumice stones and tumbled until the denim was sufficiently abraded. (The L.A.-based casualwear company Guess famously had a system that stonewashed jeans for seven hours—a marathon now considered an environmental horror.) Sometimes jeans were further distressed with acid, sandpaper, rasps, and files to mimic the previously hard-won wear and tear. The entire operation was christened “finishing” and conducted in “washhouses,” sprawling facilities that now process thousands of jeans a day.
Some washhouses—especially those in Los Angeles, America’s jeans-finishing center—are highly technical and follow strict worker safety and environmental norms. But a lot do not, as I saw in Ho Chi Minh City on a steamy April morning in 2018.
Vietnam’s textile and apparel industries are both old and young: for centuries, local women spun and wove silk into exquisite cloth for home and dress, but the Arkwright-like factories that spit out fabric and garments by the ton weren’t prevalent there until the mid-twentieth century. Apparel and textile manufacturing amounted to a small slice of Vietnam’s GDP for decades: when I visited the country in early 1993 and drove from Hanoi south to Da Nang, I spotted a few factories, but it was clear—as evinced by the emerald lawn of rice paddies across much of the land—that the nation’s economy was greatly agrarian.
Trade agreements and globalization changed that landscape. By 2018, there were roughly six thousand textile and garment production companies in Vietnam, employing 2.5 million workers, and accounting for about 16 percent of the country’s exports and more than $30 billion in revenue. Experts believe that last figure will jump to $50 billion by 2020.
Much of the work is jeans finishing. In 2012, jeans production turnover in Vietnam was $600 million; by 2021, it is expected to double.
On the industrial outskirts of Ho Chi Minh, a local denim expert and I rolled up to a run-down, warehouse-like plant behind an unassailable gate. Inside, where about two hundred young Vietnamese labor, the fluorescent lighting was poor and it was 100 degrees, easy. Large fans whirred to try to cool the room. It didn’t work.
Pristine midnight-blue jeans were piled high on metal tables and dollies. Young men in butter-yellow T-shirts, trousers—usually jeans—and knee-high rubber boots took them and stuffed them into two dozen monster-sized washing machines. Other young, booted men pulled wads of sopping jeans out of the machines. An inch of navy-blue water stood on the floor. The men did not wear gloves, and their hands were stained black.
Some of the machines were older types that require twenty liters, or five gallons, of water to wash one kilogram—three pairs—of jeans. Others were less piggy, using only five liters—or a bit more than one gallon—of water per kilo of jeans. Manufacturers “know how wasteful this is,” my guide told me.
And costly: wastewater must be processed; no longer can Vietnamese washhouses dump straight into the waterways—thankfully. I saw a canal on the other side of town where jean-washhouse waste had been discharged for years. The water now resembled tar, and its stench made me want to vomit.
But it’s hard to get factory owners to change their methods.
“Their business is about washing, not about worrying about the planet,” a jeans expert told me.
The wet jeans were heaved into enormous crates and wheeled to another room, where they were thrown into massive dryers. Some of the jeans were treated with chemicals and baked in a giant oven to replicate whiskering. This is called the “dry process.”
In the distressing room, young men and women in sky-blue T-shirts—each department had its designated color—were sanding jean knees and thighs by hand, like a carpenter works on wood. Some wore medical masks to prevent inhalation of denim dust, but most did not.
The verve with which they attacked their assignment was alarming: each pair went from virgin to wrecked in under a minute. The workers’ focus was intense—they didn’t speak or notice anything happening around them. One slipup and their pay would be docked. At the time I visited, sanders processed at least four hundred pairs of jeans a day, six days a week, not including overtime.
And that was the hand distressers. The machine distressers worked even faster. I watched one woman tackle cutoff shorts with what looked like an oversized dental drill that emitted a scream so high-pitched it could crack crystal. She ground the front and back pockets and hems of those shorts to a fashionably holey state in ten seconds. Six pairs a minute. All day long. She was unmasked in a room where it was hard not to sneeze.
This all apparently compared well to the washhouses of Xintang, the town in Guangdong Province, China, that claims to be the “jeans capital of the world.” Each year, 200,000 garment workers in Xintang’s 3,000 factories and workshops produce 300 million pairs of jeans—800,000 pairs a day. The local water treatment plant closed years ago, leaving factories to dump dye waste directly into the East River, a tributary of the Pearl River. It turned opaque; aquatic life could no longer survive. Greenpeace has reported that the riverbed contains high levels of lead, copper, and cadmium. Xintang’s streets are dusted blue. And many garment workers have reportedly suffered from skin rashes, infertility, and lung infections.
IT DIDN’T HAVE to be this way, as cotton expert Sally Fox explained to me. We were sitting at a simple wooden table in Fox’s double-wide trailer home on Viriditas Farm, her 130-acre stead in the Capay Valley, northwest of Sacramento, on an early autumn morning. The living room was lined with stacks of cardboard cartons and rows of oak filing cabinets stuffed with dossiers on cotton: studies, orders, swatches. The windows were open. The quiet was broken only by her merino sheep bleating in the pasture, a rooster crowing in the barnyard, and the north wind rippling through the shade tree out front.
Five foot seven, with a rime-white bob and an honest smile, Fox was dressed in a water-blue chambray tunic and caramel denim jeans. Her face was appropriately lined for her sixty-one years and devoid of makeup; her turquoise eyes were clear.
I had come to see Fox because she is considered by many in the industry to be the mother of modern organic cotton. A native Northern Californian, she bought her first spindle at twelve with her babysitting earnings and started spinning wool, cotton—anything she could find. While in the Peace Corps in Gambia in 1979 and 1980, she helped develop natural ways to fight pests. For the last forty years or so, she has been breeding and farming colored organic cotton in Arizona and California.
Colored cotton has been around since Gossypium barbadense was first domesticated and has existed in an array of hues: brown, tan, green, blue. The Chinese grew a pale-yellow variety used for cloth called nankeen that was popular in the American colonies, Fox told me during our chat in her trailer. “Everyone wanted nankeen gold trousers.”
After she finished her master’s, she went to work for independent plant breeder Robert Dennett, near Davis, California. While cleaning the greenhouse one day, she opened a drawer and found a bag of brown cotton. The fiber was short, weak, and rough, she recalled. But she was charmed by it and thought, If it could be spun, people would want it, because you don’t have to dye it.
She ordered seeds from the USDA and planted them in pots in Dennett’s greenhouse.
Fox was so pleased at how they turned out, she planted a quarter acre of land near Bakersfield, the capital of California cotton farming. “The next year,” she said, “I rented an acre, then five, then eleven, and on and on.” She discovered the tannins that made the cotton colored also made it naturally disease and insect resistant, so she farmed organically, back when “no one was doing organic cotton,” she said. “No one.”
She launched Natural Cotton Colours Inc., a company to sell her colored cotton, which she named FoxFibre, and began collaborating with independent fashion designers as well as landing production contracts. One was with Levi’s. Fox’s cotton was used to develop a caramel-colored denim, and her friend Dan DiSanto, then a Levi’s designer, sourced it for a new line. The jeans Fox was wearing the morning we met at her farm were made of that denim.
Levi’s and Fox negotiated a three-year deal. She would supply colored cotton seeds to farmers in West Texas, who would grow the cotton, spin it, and weave it into denim at a mill the farmers owned together as a co-op. Then Levi’s would buy the finished denim and turn it into clothing. The first year, the farmers planted one hundred acres’ worth of Fox’s seed, and Levi’s bought the denim. The second, the order was upped to a thousand acres. And the third year, it was three thousand acres. “The farmers made so much money,” Fox remembered. “They were really happy.”
As was Levi’s. The jeans and jackets were “wildly popular,” she said.
When Fox reached the one-thousand-acre mark, Levi’s head (and Strauss’s great-great-grandnephew) Bob Haas told her, “This could change the world. If you could get a hundred thousand acres’ worth of seed, I can do it, I can make it happen.”
“It will take me two years,” she responded, “but I could do it.”
“Please do it,” he said.
This time, Fox and Haas didn’t draw up a contract. “I just made it my goal because I wanted so much to be part of the reduction of this enormous environmental disaster,” she told me. “I bet my business on that. I got all the seed, and I paid a million dollars to do it and prepared to plant the seeds for one hundred thousand acres.”
As Fox was busy on the project, Levi’s plunged into a management crisis.
In 1996, when the brand was reporting a record-breaking $7.1 billion a year in sales—more than Nike—Haas initiated a leveraged buyout. The deal gave voting rights to a clutch of relatives but incurred $3.3 billion of debt, which was listed on the stock market, putting the company in a precarious financial situation.
Turns out, 1996 was Levi’s revenue apex: the following years, sales tumbled unexpectedly, as the company lost market share to fiercely competitive start-ups. Heads rolled.
Fox went to meet the new executive team in San Francisco—Haas was still CEO—and, she remembered, “the vice president went on this rant about how he hated brown and green. ‘When do you ever see a green car?’ he said.”
Levi’s canceled the cotton order.
Fox’s company, Natural Cotton Colours, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
She gazed silently out the window of her double-wide, across the Northern California prairie.
“I lost everything.”
FOR MUCH of the twentieth century, Levi’s was known in the apparel industry as a company with a conscience. In part, that was because the family that ran it—Strauss’s descendants, the Haases—were devout Jews who carried on his commitment to charity and philanthropy, and in part because the company was headquartered in politically liberal San Francisco. In the 1970s, Levi’s chief executive Walter Haas Jr. brought in a religious ethicist to advise him on how to adopt more responsible business practices. The company famously pulled its operations out of Indonesia in the mid-’70s because of the country’s widespread corruption and chose not to enter the South African market because of the government’s racist apartheid policies. In the early 1980s, Levi’s became one of the first American corporations to address the AIDS epidemic, drawing up corporate standards to support HIV-positive employees.
When Walter Jr.’s son, Bob—a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coast—took the helm in 1984, he upheld that ethos. “It is more than paternalism, really,” he said in 1990. “A company’s values—what it stands for, what its people believe in—are crucial to its competitive success.”
But now the business was sinking. The teen market had moved on to hipper brands such as Gap and Tommy Hilfiger, and the fashion consumer to hot new specialty labels. To make up for the precipitous revenue drop, Levi’s started selling at discounters like Kohl’s, further denting its rep. “Levi’s lost sight of who they are,” Morgan Stanley Dean Witter apparel analyst Josie Esquivel said at the time. It had “lost its cachet.”
And its moral compass. As sales evaporated, so did the company’s values. In 1997—three years after NAFTA—Levi’s announced it would close fourteen plants across the US and Europe, citing high labor costs.
The hit to employees, and the towns where Levi’s had operated for decades, was brutal, as I heard from Annabelle Nichols, a straight-backed southern woman who, when I met her in 2016, was seventy-four years old. Nichols had spent the first four decades of her garment-manufacturing career at Levi’s Cherry Street plant in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The Knoxville facility was Levi’s largest in North America. It opened in 1953, in a former tobacco warehouse, and was divided into four sections, each about the size of a football field, separated by cement-block walls and steel sliding doors. Almost all the employees—95 percent—were women. They worked from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, from 6 a.m. on Saturdays, making twenty thousand pairs of blue jeans a day, as well as khakis “and dress slacks,” Nichols said. The remaining 5 percent of staff were men, and they were managers. There were no female managers; women who oversaw workers were dubbed “supervisors.” They were paid less than, and reported to, the men. Nichols joined the workforce in 1961, at nineteen, and after seven years, she was promoted to supervisor.
On Monday, November 3, 1997—the day before election day—as the plant floor rattled with its usual Gatling-gun-like racket, an authoritative voice came over the public-address system and asked workers to turn off their machines.
Once the cavernous space was silent, the voice continued, more mournfully:
“We have some devastating news . . .”
The factory would cease operations by the end of the year.
Workers began to weep at their stations.
At the time, Levi’s employed 37,500 people in more than fifty factories worldwide. Thirty-two of those facilities were in the US. Five were in Canada. Levi’s announced it was going to close eleven, including Cherry Street, immediately. That amounted to nearly 6,400 production employees—1,800 of them in Knoxville—or 34 percent of Levi’s North American workforce.
Levi’s swore it wasn’t outsourcing the work: a spokesman said the downsizing was due to consumers spending less on apparel, from 7 percent of one’s income in the 1980s to 4 percent in the 1990s. The company offered generous severance packages and job counseling to what it called “dislocated workers.” That year alone, Levi’s cut some 43 percent of its global workforce.
Nothing really eased the pain of the layoffs. Nichols retired briefly, then returned to work, as a production manager for Omega Apparel, a military uniform manufacturer, in Smithville, Tennessee.
Not everyone was so lucky. “We lost a lot of good people,” she told me. “Several passed away right after.”
LEVI’S SALES CONTINUED to free-fall—revenue slid to $5.1 billion, a 28 percent drop in three years. The company announced more plant closings, to “give the company greater flexibility,” said Levi’s American division president John Ermatinger. But Bruce Raynor, secretary-treasurer of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, saw the strategy for what it truly was: “[Levi’s] decision to join the race to the bottom.”
To execute the closures—and captain a turnaround—Levi’s hired fifty-two-year-old Philip Marineau, most recently the president and chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America, as CEO. He was the first non–Strauss family member to helm the company. (Haas remained chairman.) Marineau said he’d use the same methods that he employed to sell Gatorade and Mountain Dew, since, he claimed, without irony, soft drinks “aren’t dissimilar to the fashion business.”
The plan was simple: Levi’s “had to go from a company that was a self-manufacturer to a creator, marketer and distributor of apparel,” he said. In other words, it was going to subcontract all production, which would in turn be subcontracted, and so on, and so on.
That meant shutting down the last Levi’s-owned facilities, among them the “Mother Factory” on Valencia Street in San Francisco, opened in 1906, and a plant in Blue Ridge, Georgia, an Appalachian Mountain town of fourteen hundred, that had been in operation for forty-three years. Levi’s had already laid off three hundred at Blue Ridge a year earlier. Now it was giving pink slips to the final four hundred.
These were blue-collar jobs. Most workers earned $8 to $14 an hour for such tasks as making belt loops, attaching rivets, and sewing zippers into jeans. Some took home as little as $20,000 a year. But Levi’s made up for the low pay by being a generous member of the community—donating to the hospital, schools, nursing homes, the public library, and Little League teams. In 2001, it gave $10,000 to the fire department for a new communications system, and each Christmas, it sent small bags of grooming products or a bit of cash to senior citizens at the local health center. Over the years, the company contributed several thousand dollars toward the county’s first mobile defibrillator and helped pay for a Jaws of Life hydraulic rescue tool for car crashes, curling irons for a cosmetology course, and field lights at the stadium. “They’ve just allowed us to have a lot of things we couldn’t have had,” the high school principal, Doug Davenport, said.
That was over. Blue Ridge became an emblem for the economic and social destruction that profit-driven short-term decisions taken in boardrooms—like offshoring—caused in small manufacturing towns across America.
The state opened an employment agency to help former Levi’s employees find new jobs—not an easy task considering few had a high school diploma. Local kids weren’t taking swimming lessons at the county rec center, because former factory families could no longer afford the $20 enrollment fee. Many moved away in search of work, shrinking school enrollment, forcing the school board to fire teachers. Revenue sank, which led to cuts in public services. “Money is going to be tight,” said Fannin County’s recreation director, Bernie Hodgkins. “It’s going to devastate this little county, I feel.”
Levi’s took a beating in the national press for pulling out of Blue Ridge—but that didn’t slow Marineau down. Quite the opposite. In all, he sacked 25,000 Levi’s employees. He defended his actions in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: “From a justice standpoint, there’s no reason to say that the person in San Antonio deserves that job versus the person in Pakistan.”
In the midst of firing all those folks, in 2004, Marineau reportedly earned $6.3 million in salary, bonus, and long-term incentive payouts and was up for an additional $4 million bonus over the next two years. At the close of those two years—at the age of sixty—he stepped down. His pension was $1.2 million a year.
And Levi’s sales were still tumbling: $4.19 billion—almost half of its peak a decade earlier.
AFTER HER BANKRUPTCY, Sally Fox regrouped. Through an “ag exchange,” she traded her farm in Kern County for the one in Brooks where we were sitting that October morning. “Same amount of acreage, though this is much prettier,” she said, gazing admiringly out the window at her rolling terrain. She arrived with a truck, a travel trailer—which became her home, until she upgraded to the double-wide in 2003—and her seeds. She kept breeding and growing small amounts of cotton, to keep the lines alive. She financed everything by selling items she produced—yarns, socks, sweaters—on her website. All is 100 percent organic.
Mother Nature created cotton as a perennial. During its first year, it “wants to grow and become a huge tree,” Fox told me, “and in the second year it puts out its flower. If you want the plant to flower its first year, it has to be stressed, by not giving it enough water or fertilizer; low-fertile soils will cause it to flower. That’s why cotton always had the reputation of being a poor-soil crop—it was your last-resort crop, before you put a lot of manure or cover crops on your field. If you didn’t have any money to bring fertility back to your soil, you could put cotton in and earn some.”
But in the 1980s, BASF developed a mepiquat chloride–based growth regulator called Pix that effectively turned cotton into an annual: when applied to the plants, it triggers flowering. As cotton farmers are paid by the yield rather than by the acre everywhere except in the European Union—where production, in Greece and on the Iberian Peninsula, is small—this scientific breakthrough upended the cotton business. Farmers began to irrigate and water their plants profusely to push growth, then apply Pix. “Suddenly you could go from one bale of production an acre to six bales,” Fox said. By the 1990s, most conventional cotton farmers were using Pix.
To keep weeds down, the American multinational agrochemical and biotechnology company Monsanto introduced, in 1997, a commercial variety of genetically modified cotton called “Roundup Ready Cotton.” The seeds were engineered to allow the plant to endure heavy spraying of Roundup, Monsanto’s “broad spectrum” glyphosate-based herbicide. In effect, Roundup would kill everything but the cotton. To work efficiently, each needs the other, forcing farmers to buy both. Monsanto’s competitors have come up with their versions, too. And conventional farmers have bought into it: in 2018, 94 percent of American cotton was genetically engineered. In Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri, it was up to 99 percent of the cotton farmed; in Georgia, 100 percent.
Roundup is the world’s most heavily used pesticide, and it accounts for 40 percent of the global glyphosate weed killer market. Fashion pro-environmentalists were skeptical that all this scientific innovation was good for Earth. In 1994, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard researched the impact of Roundup, concluded that it was toxic, and pledged to source only organic cotton by 1996. Twenty years later, Chouinard’s concern was confirmed: in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, classified Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” In 2018, Bayer bought Monsanto and announced it would retire the century-old name, which, among activists, had become synonymous with corporate evil.
To combat cotton’s myriad of scourges, farmers apply Bayer’s Aldicarb, a carbonate insecticide. Aldicarb is one of the most widely used pesticides. It is also demonstrably poisonous to both humans and wildlife. Exposure to it can cause blurred vision, headache, nausea, tearing, sweating, and tremors; in high doses, it can be lethal. Burglars in South Africa have been known to use Aldicarb to poison dogs.
Worryingly, sixteen American states have reportedly found traces of Aldicarb in their water tables. Under President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency drew up a plan to phase out Aldicarb in 2018. But in 2017, after the Trump administration took over the federal agency, the web page outlining the phaseout had not been updated.
DESPITE ALL THE FASHION ills that denim represents, its popularity carries on unabated. This cycle of fashion consumption continues for many reasons, not least because of “the pressure of capital markets, private and public,” David Weil, dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, told me. The supply chain—from raw materials to labor—has been corrupted. “What’s viewed as acceptable behavior has eroded,” he said.
To change it, he believes state and federal agencies must bring “the tops of these companies to the table and get them to have a greater incentive to set pricing structures that behave differently.”
Ultimately, he said, brands will have to accept the idea of smaller profits.
It also means “consumers will have to pay somewhat more,” he said. “If consumers want $11 garments that they are going to feel good about, wake up.”
In short, the industry needs a reckoning. Today, fashion executives “dictate everything they want in their supply chain to an incredible degree—a specificity not only of the product, but product delivery, barcode, shipping containers,” Weil said. “They will send back an order when the dyes aren’t right—they monitor that precisely.
“But,” he continued, “somehow it’s unreasonable to make sure that there is adherence to fire emergency escape rules, and you aren’t operating in a building like Rana Plaza. Either you start attacking that piece of this problem, through a combination of consumer and NGO pressure, and cooperation of governments.”
Or, he said, you come up with “a different production model, entirely.”