Cone Mills supplied denim to Levi Strauss for much of the 20th century.
The Cone Mills Corporation was a major American textile manufacturer based in North Carolina. Its White Oak plant in Greensboro became especially famous for producing denim used in Levi’s jeans. The long relationship between the mill and the jeans company helped connect American cotton manufacturing with the development of iconic workwear and casual clothing.
Cone denim is particularly valued by collectors because older production used traditional shuttle looms and produced distinctive selvedge fabric. Selvedge is the tightly finished edge formed along the woven fabric’s sides, helping prevent unraveling. It is a construction detail, not a separate fiber.
The White Oak plant closed in 2017, ending a major chapter in American selvedge-denim production. Cone Mills itself had a much broader textile history than jeans alone, producing fabrics for many kinds of clothing.