Jeansland Podcast

A conversation with a friend about international politics turns into a simple question. If so much of the world is disturbed by the direction the United States has been taking, why doesn’t everyone just band together and try going it without the U.S.?

That question leads Andrew to what he calls the Jeansland Nations, the countries where most of the world’s denim is produced. From there, the episode becomes a closer look at supply ch...

Andrew sits down with Piero Turk, a longtime friend from the old Italian denim days, when companies were small and you learned the business by doing everything yourself.

For those who don’t know Piero, he’s a freelance designer who started in 1983 and has worked with major jean brands across Japan, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, and the UK. He’s collaborated with Andrew at Kingpins, and his ideas are wide...

Happy New Year. 2026 is here and Andrew starts the year with a reset on where real power lives in the textile world.

He talks about the four major cotton traders: Louis Dreyfus, Cargill, Olam, and Ecom. Governments and sovereign wealth funds now control much of what the world consumes. Abu Dhabi owns 45% of Louis Dreyfus. Singapore and Saudi Arabia control Olam. Trading what we need is as powerful as trading oil, and most people in ...

This week, Andrew sits down with Shamin Vogel, editorial director and co-publisher of of WeAr Media Group—the people behind WeAr Global Magazine, one of the most widely read fashion trade publications in the world, and WeAr Denim, the biannual deep dive for the denim supply chain, backed by a monthly newsletter that actually gets read—to talk about where fashion really is right now, and why so much of it feels off.

They dig into the...

This episode starts in 1975, just after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. A dictatorship ends. No civil war. No collapse. Just a quiet reset and a country that suddenly has to figure out how to function without fear, hierarchy, or shortcuts.

Then we jump to now. Portugal is one of the strongest-performing economies in Europe, and almost nobody is talking about it.

So the question is not “what happened?” It’s “how long did it take?”

In ...

Sophie Bramel is the technical editor at Inside Denim, and she watches the entire global denim ecosystem. Brands, mills, fibers, innovation, sustainability. All of it.

In this conversation, Andrew and Sophie trace her path from music and fashion reporting to becoming one of the industry's most trusted observers. She talks about why denim mills feel like "cathedrals to blue," why true innovation takes decades (she uses...

In this week’s episode of Andrew’s Take, Andrew breaks down COP30 in Belém, Brazil and why so many people still don’t know what COP is or why the world gathers every year to discuss climate goals that rarely materialize.

He walks through the entire arc, from COP’s 1992 origins to the Kyoto years, the Copenhagen disaster, the Paris moment of optimism, and the long loop of promises made and ignored. COP30 added its own contradictions:...

“If the supply chain isn’t something I can be proud of, the garment isn’t worth making.”— Menno van Meurs, Founder of Tenue de Nîmes and Tenue.

Menno van Meurs runs one of the most respected denim stores in Europe, Tenue de Nîmes in Amsterdam. He also makes his own jeans under the Tenue brand. He's not chasing trends. He's holding the line on craft, quality, and supply chain integrity in an industry that's mostly give...

In April, the White House called it Liberation Day. The apparel industry called it panic.

Andrew breaks down what happened when decades of predictable duty rates got wiped out overnight. Global jeans suppliers were hit with numbers no one saw coming. Vietnam at 46%, Cambodia at 49%, Bangladesh at 37%. Orders paused. Panic spread. The rollout felt like a list of naughty countries with penalties posted on a scoreboard.

But the story di...

In 1975, Joel Carman opened Over the Rainbow with $2,000, a love of jeans, and no idea what he was doing. Fifty years later, Joel and his family run one of the longest-standing independent denim retailers in North America.

Andrew sits down with Joel and Daniel to talk about what it takes to survive five decades in retail—from the early days when Joel was making $15 a day and driving a cab at night, to the decision to go premium in 2...

If a corporation were a person, what kind of person would it be? Andrew revisits the 2003 documentary The Corporation, which diagnosed the modern company as a psychopath. No empathy, no remorse, no conscience. Just profit with zero regard for human cost.

He applies that lens to denim. Chasing cheaper wages. Blue-washing sustainability while underpaying the people who make the jeans. The 2020 sequel's message? The corporation ha...

James McKinnon runs a 72-year-old family textile business in South Carolina. He's third generation. He sits on the Cotton Board, advises the USDA on cotton standards, and he'll tell you straight up that U.S. textiles are fighting some incredibly strong headwinds.

But he also thinks it's a fight worth fighting.

In this conversation, Andrew and James dig into what it takes to keep American textile manufacturing alive. Th...

Jeans have long been seen as the uniform of freedom. But if freedom is what we're selling, what's the truth behind the people making them?

In this solo episode, Andrew looks at two global scorecards, one for freedom and one for happiness, across the 11 countries that produce most of the world's denim. The results aren't comfortable. China ranks third worst in the world for freedom. Egypt is eighth worst. Pakistan...

Andrew sits down with two people who lived through the denim business alongside him for years. Michael Morrell and Paul Ledgett were his partners at Olah Inc., and together they built something that worked because they gave a damn about the product, the people, and doing things right.

In this conversation, they go back. They talk about what it meant to run a denim agency in New York when the industry still cared about design and rel...

The denim industry runs on water. But most of the places we make jeans don’t have enough of it. In this short, Andrew breaks down what happens when cotton, sewing, and finishing all depend on freshwater we can’t afford to lose.

Countries like Canada have 74,000 cubic meters of water per person. Bangladesh? Just 635. Yet we keep building supply chains in places with the least to spare. Even rainfed cotton gets risky when the rains st...

One question froze Romain Narcy in his tracks fifteen years ago: "Do you know the environmental impact of making jeans?"

He didn't. That moment sent him on a path from running suitcase sales trips across France to building one of Turkey's greenest denim factories to joining the steering committee of the Denim Deal. Their goal? One billion jeans made with recycled cotton by 2030.

Sounds ambitious. Romain thinks it&...

Big news in denim: Artistic Milliners of Karachi has taken a majority stake in Cone Denim, one of America’s most storied mills. From its 1891 roots in Greensboro, NC, to powering Levi’s 501s, Cone’s history now collides with one of the most ambitious players in the industry.

Andrew breaks down what this deal means for global supply chains and why, even together, Artistic and Cone make up just one percent of denim worldwide. Is this ...

This week on Jeansland, Andrew sits down with Indian journalist Subir Ghosh for a clear-eyed look at how sustainability narratives often miss the mark. Subir challenges the fashion industry’s fixation on circularity, calling it more of a marketing loop than a real solution. He explains why cotton farmers in India remain under immense pressure, why worker struggles beyond the sewing floor go largely unnoticed, and how global fashion...

Andrew rewinds to 1980 in this solo short. Cotton has been priced at 80-cents a pound ever since, while everything else (burgers, beef, coffee, gas) keeps inflating honestly. Farmers work harder for the same pay, garment workers get pushed offshore to 60-cent wages, and polyester quietly takes over as “oil in disguise.”

Jeans don’t get cheaper because of efficiency. They get cheaper because the system is stacked against the farmer, ...