Made In The USA: L.C. King

As always, these are free to read in their entirety

thank god they don’t charge fat people more for the same thing

What is the difference between clothing, style, and costume? This was much-debated — probably still is, actually — on the AskAndy and Styleforum clothing boards back in the day. Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth: Clothing is something you need to put on in order to face the elements and/or society. Most people wear clothing most of the time. If you put in a little extra effort to have a coordinated outfit, or to wear something that is higher-quality than most people would find acceptable, that’s style. Even if it is the dreaded “street style” as seen on “Humans Of New York” or mass media everywhere. If you have a complete “Air Jordan” or “FUBU” or “Kenneth Cole” ensemble, you’re wearing sweatshop trash, but at least there’s some thought going on behind your choices, so it counts as style.

Beyond style we have costume, which is what happens when you are wearing something that is knowingly or deliberately incompatible with the situation or the person involved. I hate to think about this too hard, but a lot of traditional men’s style as obtained from Brioni or Kiton or the Row is verging on costume nowadays. The richest people in the world now dress like homeless trash. This is known as a flex, because they are so famous and powerful that they can now do whatever they want.

let me tell you something, i’ve seen much better-looking asian women naked without paying 50 billion dollars for it. fifty. billion. that’s more money than scott tucker paid to win the runoffs, even

It will not escape the thoughtful reader that the global “elite” used to dress carefully and conduct themselves with a certain decorum; this attitude did not transfer to their twenty-first-century successors any more than, say, the fictional Lord Grantham’s concern for his tenants and the poor people of his county has been replicated in the actions or morality of Jeff Bezos or BlackRock.

I mention all this because since my ascension to the landed gentry, which more or less coincided with my departure from gainful employment, I have spent a lot of time wearing “cotton duck”, or canvas, in that charmless light brown typically associated with “the trades” and other rural laborers. I already owned some of it, mostly for race weekends in early spring or late fall, and my initial forays into daily duck wear came from a simple desire to be inconspicuous. Turns out that people get a little side-eyed when you attend a township meeting out here in a sportcoat and Japanese persimmon-dye trousers paired with a Horween cordovan belt and Alden longwings.

The next time I showed up in duck. (Which has nothing to do with the animal, but rather the Dutch word “doek”, meaning canvas cloth.) My neighbors tend to wear ancient Carharrt or Tractor Supply clothing, but that’s more than I can personally stand to do.

Instead I’m wearing L.C. King, a venerable working-class company out of Bristol, TN that is still owned by the original family. They sold clothing under “Pointer Brand” for a long time before re-emphasizing the LC King marque a few years ago; I have duck pants with the “Pointer” dog logo from 2008 or thereabouts and newer stuff with the "LC King” logo. I don’t believe there’s any difference other than the branding.

It’s nontrivially more expensive than Carharrt, with the pants a bit over hundred bucks and the various overalls/coats going for well above that. Carharrt, by contrast, charges just $59.99 for their duck work pants, made in whatever hellhole gets the MBAs excited at the moment. (You can still buy a few Carharrt items that are made here; I bought the coat just to support the initiative.) What do you get for the extra money? A bit of additional durability, particularly in terms of being colorfast, and a lot of additional comfort up front. New Carharrt work pants are miserable things that feel a lot like some sort of cardboard/steel rebar approach to clothing. The LC Kings, by contrast, aren’t much worse than a new set of selvedge jeans. They are warm, relatively puncture-resistant, and able to shed oil, grease, and ink stains in admirable fashion.

Like most good clothing, the King duck pants tend to disappear in your mind once you’ve worn them a few times. I suspect they are a little rougher on high-end automotive leather seats than a proper set of wool pants, but they have absolutely zero inclination to shed dye the way blue jeans might — so if you’re a gentleman farmer who wants the white leather interior in his Cullinan (or your F-350 Limited!) then you’ll be able to wear these without concern, assuming you’re relatively clean and tidy. If not, these canvas pants have the ability to retain a bit of sand or rock and basically sandpaper whatever you’re sitting on.

Right now you can use code NEW23 to save 25% off the $115 retail of LC King canvas pants. To my sorrow, their very nice olive canvas pants are out of stock in most sizes at the moment, so you’ll have to get either the duck or the denim. I think there are better choices for USA-made denim pants than LC King, from Dearborn Denim on the cheap side to Origin and 1620 on the high — but they’re not bad, just a bit unsophisticated in the cut and style.

You want the duck anyway. Or at least I do. Right now, it’s costume for me, but wait a few years; it will eventually become just plain clothing.