How Carhartt went from workwear to streetwear

Carhartt was never meant for fashion. It was made for railroad men in Detroit. More than a century later the same jackets are worn in hip-hop, at skate spots, in Lagos markets and on every vintage rail worth checking. The clothes barely changed. The people wearing them did.

In 1889, Hamilton Carhartt set up in a small Detroit loft with two sewing machines and a handful of workers. He had been asking railroad men what they actually needed, and the answer was simple: overalls that wouldn't fall apart.

So the first thing he made was a heavy bib overall in duck canvas and denim. Stiff when new, built to be worn every day until it softened into the shape of the person inside it. That idea, clothes that get better the more you wear them, is still the whole point of Carhartt.

It's also how the brand ended up in places Hamilton Carhartt could never have pictured. The archive is full of the evidence: patterns, catalogues, portraits of the people who made and wore it.

In 1954 Carhartt released a short, blanket-lined work jacket. It was called the Zipper Jacket. It came in blue denim first, and a year later in the brown duck everyone pictures now.

It wasn't officially named the Detroit Jacket until 1998. By then it had already left the job site.

By the late 1980s and the 1990s, Carhartt was turning up a long way from construction sites. In New York and in cities across America, rappers and their crews wore duck jackets, hooded actives and double knees. They were tough, warm, cheap enough, and they looked right with a pair of work boots.

Nobody was paid to wear it, and that gave it weight. When a workwear jacket shows up on a stage or an album cover, it reads as real. That is something a fashion brand can't buy.

Europe got its own Carhartt. In 1994 Edwin Faeh started Work in Progress as the brand's European distributor. In 1996 the company won the licence to make Carhartt outside the US, and in 1997 it released its first collection: the same workwear, cut slimmer for city life.

Carhartt WIP backed the scenes that were already wearing it. It started its own skate and BMX teams in 1997, Combination Records for electronic music in 2000, and Carhartt WIP Radio in 2008. Skaters liked the fabric for the same reason railroad workers did. It survives being dragged across concrete.

It printed, too. Rugged Magazine started in 2003, and WIP magazine launched in 2017, twice a year, mixing skating, music, art and the people around the brand. It has passed its tenth issue.

In Lagos, Carhartt doesn't arrive through a flagship store. It comes in okrika bales, through market stalls and resellers who can spot real duck canvas from across the aisle. A faded chore coat over a plain tee, wide work trousers, a beanie in harmattan. On the street it reads as Lagos, not Detroit.

The brand has noticed. Slam Jam's Carhartt WIP editorial was shot and filmed in Lagos by Mosako Chalashika, a Lagos skater, following a crew through the city in chore coats and wide-leg trousers. See the Lagos editorial.

The campaigns look like fashion now: billboards over city streets, portraits that could sit in any magazine. But the pieces at the centre haven't moved. The Detroit Jacket, the chore coat, the double knee, the beanie. Workwear first, everything else second.

Good vintage Carhartt is worn, and that's the point. You're paying for the fade and the softness, not for perfection. A few things to check before you pay: