Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Like a lot of guys, I appreciate and embrace what has come to be called workwear style: boots, flannel or chambray shirts with two flapped or buttoned pockets, waist-length jackets. I feel I can claim it honestly, because I've been wearing variations on this look for decades. I spent a good portion of the '80s in a variety of thrift-store shirts that had been worn by actual people to do actual work, like a white poplin Dallas Police Department uniform shirt. I also had a sweet khaki Indiana Jones-type shirt with epaulets from Banana Republic back in their pre-Gap days, when they still made stuff that was interesting and utilitarian. (If BR wants to regain some of that cachet, they should ditch that bogus "heritage" line and do a real heritage line of products from their own history.)

The latest company to jump on the "mining our archives" bandwagon is Dickies, who plan to sell shirts and pants made in a factory in Texas using American-sourced fabric. (More than anything else about this announcement, I was surprised to learn they still had an operating factory in this country.) The shirts will cost $175 and the pants $200, which means the people who will most likely be buying them are the same guys who favor those Japanese brands that produce quirk-infused versions of classic American workwear and sell them at ridiculously inflated prices in trendy boutiques to skinny guys with beards who like to talk about selvage denim.

I don't begrudge Dickies for wanting a piece of this action, but it bugs me that they have so completely missed the point. If you want to celebrate your company's heritage, wouldn't it make much more sense to produce something that you can sell at a price that average people can afford, thereby making it more visible to other average people? The type of person most likely to wear Dickies is least likely to be able to afford such gear, and the esoteric connoisseur market (the most likely customer for this type of limited-production item) is least likely to care about the heritage of a company like Dickies, which is just colossally ironic.

[I have one Dickies garment, a short black canvas jacket with a gray corduroy collar and a blanket lining. I picked it up a couple of years ago for around $40 from a place online that sells work clothes, and I typically wear it this time of year. It came with a big red logo patch with a D on it on the pocket, which I removed, not because I don't want to be associated with the company, but because I don't like logos.]

I would have liked to see Dickies land somewhere in the middle, with some pieces inspired by archival designs, made with soft, broken-in fabrics but priced in the $80 to $100 range. (Bill's Khakis are made in Pennsylvania and cost $98 a pair, which is a little steep but still seems reasonable to me.) Maybe they'll do something like that later. But for now they're giving the impression (to me, at least) that they care more about marketing an image than about their own history.