By late June, the corn in the fields surrounding Tanner, Alabama, is higher than your head, and the red clay, drying after a wet spring, flakes from the dually truck’s wheel wells. Inside a modest brick home, Bill Bridgeforth sits at a folding table, wearing a neat blue gingham shirt with pad and pen in the pocket, his close-cropped graying hair hinting at a curl. With a voice as measured as the row crops outside, he rolls out the farm’s past: Three generations of his family before him have worked the land, and he and his children now carry on the legacy. But then he turns to the future, in which Bridgeforth, sixty-five, sees a thriving apparel company with his family’s name: Bridgeforth Cotton. It’s spun from his own crop, cut and sewn in the United States, and travels far abroad. It’s coming, he says, like Moses of the Promised Land.
According to family lore, after the Civil War, the newly emancipated Bridgeforths traveled south from Tennessee to settle the area around Tanner in northern Alabama they named Beulahland. Roughly translated from Hebrew, they were “married to the land,” and in that union, they prospered. Today, the family owns around five thousand acres and rents an additional five thousand, cultivating corn, soy, wheat, sorghum, canola, and especially cotton. Bill Bridgeforth himself was honored by the Obama White House in 2014 and is chairman emeritus for the National Black Growers Council. But in 2022, he decided to grow into an area he knew nothing about: apparel. “I want it to be top quality, I want it to be durable, and I want it to be comfortable,” he says of the new line.
There are figurative miles and literal countries between farming cotton and making something of it. As a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in 1993, America’s ability to process her vast agricultural commodities domestically withered. The few mills that remain, which process baled cotton into fabric, told Bridgeforth his business was too small. And that’s where the idea for Bridgeforth Cotton might have died, if it weren’t for a collaboration with Target in 2022, which released a line of T-shirts made from his crop that included a hangtag with its story. It caught the right eyes with the right contacts, and ultimately led to a streetwear veteran joining the team to midwife Bridgeforth’s idea into life. “Any time you can partner with good people who are knowledgeable and resourced,” Bridgeforth says, “that’s always a good time to take a chance and move into a different line of work.”
“In the fashion industry, there’s quite a bit of manufactured storytelling in order to sell product,” says Shawn Brown, the former brand director and president of the pioneering Alphanumeric Brand, whom Bridgeforth Cotton hired on as its creative director. “This was one of the first times in my career that the brand, the story, doesn’t have to be dressed up.”
Bridgeforth tasked Brown with designing an apparel line, but with Brown’s background, as well as his eye on streetwear trends around the world, he countered with a hybrid: workwear that nods to fashion, in the same direction legacy makers like Carhartt and Dickies have leaned in recent years.
Bridgeforth Cotton’s first capsule, which launched in March with T-shirts and fleeces, is a mix of silhouettes, from a standard fit to more fashion-forward cuts. The through line is 100 percent Black-grown Bridgeforth cotton, sown, harvested, ginned, and baled in Alabama, before being shipped to Mexico where it’s milled into fabric. From there, the material is shipped back to the States, where it’s cut, sewn, dyed, and screened in California. Despite the miles traveled, the farm’s history remains the company’s lodestar. Hues were sampled onsite from weathered signs, verdant plants, and the brilliance of its sunsets. “You realize how multicolored it is,” Brown says, remembering his first visit to the farm. And, in an ultimate nod to the family legacy, he tapped some of the family’s fifth generation to break from their chores to model the product in the campaign’s first photos.
Recently, Bridgeforth Cotton released a dedicated women’s line, and in the coming months it will launch a made-in-America denim run and collaborative capsules with clothing brands such as Darryl Brown and Art Comes First. The first steps toward the Promised Land are behind. “There were a lot of Bridgeforths before me,” Bill Bridgeforth says. “They believed in what they were doing, to be here for the fourth, fifth, sixth generation. I think that’s the story of resilience.”
