The Carhartt of America
Who gets to wear what?
I cringe whenever a publication with “New York” in the name publishes something about people in small towns. Similarly, whenever I see people talk about Carhartt I get a little uncomfortable because it almost always turns into a debate of who “gets” to wear what. I suppose I make jokes about it sometimes, about the guy who might put on his thick coveralls and bright orange beanie at 6 in the morning so he can get caught up on Jacobin articles before he has to log on Slack and tell ten percent of the staff at his startup that he has to let them go because the company is pivoting its mission. It’s too easy and I’m a sucker for convenience.
Then again, I also sit in my apartment in Brooklyn and type my little words and I’ve also got my Carhartt beanie on and I’m hoping one restaurant calls me back soon about reservations tonight, but I’m comforted knowing that the backup that we have a spot at, the one with the impressive list of skin-contact wines and lovely oysters, is already set. What makes me any different from the imaginary guy I like to poke fun at?
For one, I really don’t think I’ll ever be in a position to fire anybody. At least I hope I’m not. But the other thing is I come at the Carhartt discussion from a weird angle. I can’t claim any real blue-collar background. I’ve got fairly soft hands. I was taught the value of hard work, and I get up every single day when the world isn’t really moving, and I start doing what I know how to do. And while I could definitely drink with the guys in a Bruce Springsteen song, I never kid myself into thinking I’m one of them. I’m also not the people in Jasper Craven’s recent New York Times article, “When the Heart Belongs to Carhartt,” which is one of the rare reads on the subject of what a lot of guys in the style world might call “stolen valor.” Craven looks at the area he’s from, St. Johnsbury in northeast Vermont, and the closing of Caplan’s Army Store, “a work wear outpost in the heart of town, long enjoyed a loyal base of blue-collar customers, including maple sugarers, railroad workers and grain millers.”
Craven points out that the stuff from Carhartt Caplan’s used to sell “has become a brand beloved by folk artists and rappers, oil riggers, skaters and the fashion week crowd. All of its constituents appreciate its high quality and signature canvas: thick duck fabric. It also holds a strong if intangible allure as a romanticized emblem of the humble, flinty American worker.” Yet at the same time, Caplan’s itself “couldn’t contend with the pandemic, which crashed the local economy, disrupted the supply chain and forced more commerce online. The store closed just shy of its 100th birthday, on Dec. 31, 2020.”
I’ve been wearing Carhartt for over 25 years now. When I was a kid it was inexpensive and it was available and most importantly, when you grow up near a Great Lake, it was warm and durable. I wore it to play pond hockey and I wore it to ride snowmobiles through fields covered in snow. I took some of it with me as I got older and started to develop a sense of style. The beanies stayed. I paired them with pairs of Dickies work pants I learned to shoplift from a local Walmart, but instead of thick leather workboots, I wore flimsy canvas Vans or Chuck Taylors. I didn’t give much thought to why I wore these things besides that I saw older kids I skateboarded with wearing them, but I also appreciated the durability and, most importantly, the way I could literally walk into a chain store and just pull three pairs of pants or a hat off a rack and walk right out of the store without paying. I’m not exactly proud that I used to do that, but then again, I’m happy that even my shithead teenage mind was made up that I wouldn’t take stuff from the smaller store we had near us that served as a similar purpose as Caplan’s did for St. Johnsbury, VT. Craven also writes that he used to wear Carhartt when he was younger.
“As a teenager, I once bought some crisp Carhartt pants there, hoping they’d confer an aura of toughness and a strong work ethic. My fresh new look didn’t pass muster with the sons of farmers, plumbers and roofers who knew my parents as the hippies who started Catamount Arts, a cultural hub in St. Johnsbury. Hoping to fit in, I rubbed my Carhartt pants in our dirt driveway.” He even admits to feeling a bit of “imposter syndrome” wearing the brand and living in NYC. That struck me as interesting because I’ve never really felt that way about wearing Carhartt. I certainly don’t think much of “earning” the right to wear anything I put on, but I also think back to my own introduction to Carhartt and the purpose it served for me when I was younger. If it looks good now and people want to rock it, all the better, I guess.
But I thought this one part where Craven tries to figure out what it could all mean: “It may be true that the brand’s newfound popularity in coastal cities, like New York, where I live now, is a form of cultural appropriation, one that surely sands down the struggles of blue-collar life. But the proliferation of these clothes among new types of workers may also reflect the country’s growing sense of precarity, and also solidarity, around labor.”
Who really knows? I’ve watched the style and workwear conversation go on for about a decade or maybe longer at this point. I’ve lost track of time so it’s hard to say. My hope is that people are just wearing what they want to wear, but that people will at least understand what clothes mean to people. I like how Craven went about telling that story, not pointing fingers or coming off as judgy, but also presenting people in a small town in Vermont as just that.
Other little bits:
I keep saying I want to start a newsletter that’s just about kvetching. If I did, I would write about Francis Ford Coppola complaining about he liked it more when we just had the Oscars and not 10,000 more award shows.
Adam Gopnik on Florine Stettheimer at The New Yorker is very worth your time. It’s about how she was one of the “artists who had anticipated the Pop fascination with commercial culture: billboards, magazine advertisements, Broadway shows, department stores, the works” but who has been difficult to “weave back into the story of American art, because her reëvaluation has involved a number of contradictions.”
Kat Kinsman on sun-dried tomatoes and the dream of the 1990s.