Personality, it must be said, also comes at a cost to consumers. A pair of Tellason’s John Graham Mellor jeans, for instance, featuring White Oak denim and oozing with street cred (John Mellor is the real name of the Clash’s Joe Strummer, in case you need to be told), sells for $230.

For much of the past decade, that’s a cost that the cool kids apparently were happy to bear, which accounts for the explosion of retro-inflected denim brands (Tellason, Raleigh Denim, Taylor Stitch and Buck Mason, to name just a few) that used White Oak denim as a pillar of their branding.

It’s not 2006 anymore, however. Hipsterism is dead (or is it just ubiquitous?), the economy is iffy, and the cheap, disposable ethos of fast fashion has made its mark. That makes it tough when you’re in the slow fashion business.

Too many consumers “simultaneously complain about imported products, job loss and low wages, and then buy their jeans at Costco, with the same brand name as the bacon, toilet paper and dish soap in their cart,” said Tony Patella, a founder of Tellason, based in San Francisco, in a reference to Costco’s Kirkland brand.

Even before Cone Mills made its announcement, however, some premium indie brands that once prominently displayed the “Made in the U.S.A.” label were starting to embrace a new globalism. The New York brands Unis New York and Outlier now produce much of their clothing in Portugal.