Fashion's Ongoing Love Affair With Workwear
Is the construction worker 2022's chicest streetstyle star?
One look at American streetwear offers a complex and varied vision of our cultural tastes: stiletto heels are paired with $80 coveralls, frilly blouses with cheap slacks, or god forbid someone throws on a $500 designer knock-off of a $20 army surplus jacket.
Workwear has long been intertwined with fashion, since the first young lad thought to put on camo outside the battlefield. Then, in the '40s, Rosie the Riveter got greasy in her blue coveralls and red bandana and just made it all look so damn cool. Over the years, workwear has served as the key iconography for a number of subcultures: the punks wore combat boots in the '80s. In the '90s, hip-hop artists wore overalls and Timberlands. The 2000s saw skaters come onto the scene with tough, slide-proof Dickies pants.
These days, subcultures don't dictate fashion trends like they used to, if subcultures still exist at all. And yet, workwear in the youth fashion circuit is more pervasive than ever. Dickies and Carhartt are sold at shopping malls. Influencers are dipping into army surplus stores. Rapper Lil Nas X proudly declared that he wears "Wrangler on his booty." The styles all eventually find their place on the runway; the feedback loop between kids and designers is strong as ever, generating its never-ending thrum of innovative tension and creative energy.
At its Spring/Summer 2022 show, Coach had a gang of skateboarding kids cruising along its runway in baggy denim. In 2018, Raf Simons walked firefighter jackets down the Calvin Klein runway. The same year, Opening Ceremony began an ongoing collaboration with Dickies. Over the last couple of years, both Frank Ocean and Kanye West (now known as Ye) have committed to donning workwear on the Met Gala carpet, provided by Dickies and Prada.
The workwear that walks in fashion shows is inherently different from its muses, however. The primary purpose of workwear is to be functional. Designer clothing, on the other hand, is regularly remixed and tweaked beyond the point of utility. Just look at all the unfortunate models taking nose dives on the runway, all twisted up in their trailing gowns, contorted garments, and six-inch heels. Designer workwear is reimagined to serve not the working class, but the leisure class, which prizes aesthetics above all else.
There are a lot of reasons to love classic workwear. If you're getting it from the source, i.e. brands that supply actual manual laborers with their uniforms, the garments are often affordable, durable, and easily serve as closet staples. The snug fit of thick pants and jackets is otherwise hard to come by at a decent price. In the same way, construction workers don't want a pant leg to snag on a bit of machinery, skaters don't want their bony knees scraping through to the concrete. Outdoor laborers don't want to get cold, and neither do the rest of us slogging through midwest winters.
The look of workwear also comes with inherent coolness. The repetitive aesthetic of a uniform implies a certain anti-fashion edge, like the wearer's polished getup is somehow the last thing on their mind. "Oh, you like this look? I just threw it on this morning with my vintage $15 army trousers." Workwear silhouettes are boxy, even baggy. They serve the current fascination with androgynous gender-exploratory fashion. The inclusion of workwear in the wardrobe also rebels against the sometimes overbearing attitude of high fashion. "I'm down with the people," say your Carhartt beanie and faded Timberland boots.
This latter point becomes a bit complicated given workwear's appropriation by the high fashion sphere. It's not an inherently negative appropriation, as workwear has always been part of the fashion conversation, and is often included as a loving tribute to the style. Still, there is something different about your average college kid shopping the construction aisle, as opposed to Bella Hadid's stylist meticulously working khaki polos into her pap walks.
The thin line between appreciation and infatuation is often fraught with controversy. When does the romanticization of the working class by million-dollar designers and celebs start to feel tacky? Is it when overalls sell for thousands of dollars? Or shoes come pre-dirtied? What about when laborers are priced out of their own market?
There exists a dual reality in which celebrities put on their workwear pieces to step out into the night to the delight of flashing cameras, while at the same hour, workers head home after a long day to peel off those same layers, now covered in sweat and grime. What must construction workers be thinking, I often wonder, when we walk by them on the street wearing their uniforms? There is a certain humor to the situation, but also a sadness in the fact that, as the workwear market grows, the actual market for manual laborers shrinks in size.
Still, putting a ban on the rich donning workwear is just about as ridiculous as them wearing it in the first place. American fashion reflects the culture in which it was born. The country's iconic imagery includes workers taking lunch on high-rise beams, putting out fires in big red trucks, and breaking ground in yellow hard hats. The men and women who built the buildings we live and work in, and the runways we walk down, are as essential to us as their clothes.
