Toots, I don't want to make too many assumptions about your age, but you probably recall a time when visitors from abroad would stuff extra pairs of 501s in their suitcases to bring back from the states. The raw 501 was the gold standard for denim in both style and structure, and was very expensive overseas. People sometimes say they don't make them like they used to, but they're wrong. They make them like that and it costs $160. Now the $50 options are not the same as the og product, but whether or not union labor weaving southern cotton on a narrow loom in the carolinas matters is another debate for another time and thread. But even in their own words, around the turn of the century Levi Strauss changed from a jeans maker to a jeans marketer.

However it's not like my $250 trousers are bringing anything important back. The factory mentioned in that article is 4 blocks from my house and is now a Quaker school that the technocracy can spend their riches to teach their children the morals they never learned. The manufacturing jobs in the mission with good wages, benefits, and often union protection have been entirely replaced by service industry gigs with no future, and it doesn't matter how many trousers Self Edge sells (notably on the same street as the old factory), manufacturing is never coming back here. Probably not anywhere.