Honest Value for an Honest Dollar

A factory process now manufactures, in an afternoon, the exact wear a Carhartt used to take years of real work to earn.

Hamilton Carhartt started the company in Detroit in 1889 by talking to actual railroad workers about what was wrong with the overalls they already had, then rebuilding the bib around what they told him. He sold it under a motto that doubled as a promise: "Honest value for an honest dollar." On a real pair, the fading at the knees, the frayed cuff, the paint you never quite got out — that wasn't damage. It was proof you'd done the job.

A hundred and five years later, in 1994, a Swiss importer named Edwin Faeh started a separate company called Work In Progress — he'd spent the years before that bringing American workwear into Europe under a label he called "All American Concept." By 1996 he'd licensed the actual Carhartt name to manufacture and sell outside the US, released his first collection in 1997, and pointed it squarely at the skaters, graffiti writers, and hip-hop kids who'd already claimed the look before anyone marketed it to them. Carhartt WIP has been the European face of the brand ever since.

This season's WIP collection runs brand-new garments through something the brand calls a "destroy wash" — a factory process that fades, frays, and stains the canvas to look like it survived years of actual shifts, before it's ever been worn once. Found via Highsnobiety, whose own headline on the piece is basically the whole joke already: "When 'Vintage' Carhartt WIP Looks as Good as Vintage Carhartt." The flagship piece in that finish is the OG Detroit Jacket — named, unmissably, for the city where the real version of that wear used to actually happen. $348, brand new, aged in a factory instead of a decade.