Made In The USA: Steele Canvas (and double bonus content)

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that it took an email from a reader to get me to feature Steele Canvas on this site. My wife has been a customer of theirs for a while now; in addition to a couple of their "laundry trucks", which are indestructible and not terribly expensive for what you get, we also have a couple of The Current's Year's mandatory face diapers from Steele Canvas as well.

If you're not into laundry trucks, however, I have a few more suggestions for this Christmas season:

From the same reader, we have Shockoe Atelier, which makes high-end jeans in Virginia using USA denim from Vidalia Mills. Long-time readers will recall that Cone Mills, one of the final two denim makes in America and by far the more hoity-toity of the pair, shut down in 2017. According to another company that uses their denim, Left Field NYC, here's the story:

Vidalia Mills is the first new selvedge Denim Mill in the US, since Cone White Oak began over 100 years ago. Vidalia Mills is located in Vidalia, Louisiana and has taken over the old Fruit of the Loom Mill that had closed and left the town in an economic downfall for years. They are in Partnership with BASF Agriculture Services producing quality denim using e3, certified sustainable American cotton and can trace each roll of denim back to the American Farm it was grown on. The Denim is woven on Vidalia's Draper X3 selvedge denim loom, 45 of which were acquired from the Cone White Oak Plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. Vidalia is carrying on the Torch from Cone White Oak while doing so in a much more environmentally friendly way!

Your humble author will admit to panic-buying about 30 pairs of USA-made jeans as Cone closed up --- but if you weren't that mentally ill at the time, you might want to look at Vidalia's customers, a list of which I'll put together as time permits.

Last but not least, and featured in the hamper photo., we have Sock Guy Lucky 13s in traditional Gulf colors. We've covered USA-made socks on the site in the past, and indeed socks are probably the last garment that is produced in authentic bulk within this country. Smartwool, Fitsok, and others rely on North Carolina's fairly stout community of sockmakers. I'm no longer wearing Sock Guy for cycling --- the extra cushion of Fitsoks goes a long way towards letting me ride downhill for a full day's worth of lift trips --- but they are pretty good for other uses.

Also, Gulf livery, like Martini livery, is 110% cringe nowadays unless you own a Porsche 917. (Not 911, not 944, not 924S, especially not 918, certainly not Macan.) Still, these socks are fun and very hard-wearing besides.

That's all for today. Send me your recommendations, and many thanks to Scott for keeping me on my American-made toes!