On Blue Collar "Stolen Valor"
Or "Can I Wear Pants Without Making People Mad"
I’ve only recently begun passing my tiktoks over to Reels, where strangers are now perceiving me for the first time, often unhappy with me - especially when I mention workwear.
To me, a history and fashion buff, workwear connotes a pretty broad genre of well-made clothing by brands living and dead. Some of these items have crossed the rubicon into daily life from their working class origins - like blue jeans - but to me, they’ll always be workwear.
To most people outside of the world of fashion, workwear means what it sounds like, clothes worn to work, often to jobs of the blue collar variety. These highly specialized garments have a great deal of meaning to the people who actually wear them for work - a connection to their clothing more immediate than that of the idle fashion dilettantes (like myself) who collect them for their historic and aesthetic value.
To me, it feels obvious that two things can be true. That the same garments can have significance to two different communities for allegedly different reasons (I think both groups think they look good), but to pit themselves against each other feels senseless. I wonder, we all love this stuff, can’t we all just get along?
But videos titled “Vintage Workwear Brands to Look For (that aren’t Carhartt)” devolve into screaming matches in the comments.
“Please stop,” someone writes, “Some of us still work for a living and carhartt’s already too expensive.”
“Stop dude” another person exclaims, “People actually wear this shit for its intended use, not just to look cool. Stop bumping up the prices.”
Despite the fact, that I’m mostly describing archaic made-in-USA models of workwear brands that are now only sold on the dark recesses of eBay, there is intense anxiety about a way of life being lost, about prices increasing, about identity and class.
“Stolen Valor” is a term used to describe a now-felony, when ordinary civilians co-opt certain military medals, badges, and ribbons; tricking the public into thinking they’ve served in the armed forces. It’s slowly grown to become a blanket term for wearing any garments that aren’t 100% authentic to your current life and career. Failing Upwards, the podcast that pre-dated Throwing Fits, is the first entity I can find that used the extension of this term, “Blue Collar Stolen Valor” in a tweet from 2019.
Blue Collar Stolen Valor isn’t necessarily the agreed-upon term and is most often used by satirists and fashion observers. I have learned from my time online that there is a community of actual workers that feel wearing the garments they’ve come to associate with their professions is a kind of stolen valor. Let’s try to figure this out.
If you have had the opportunity to listen to Avery Trufelman’s podcast, Articles of Interest, she describes, in her season on Ivy Style, a period of time where Americans forgot how to dress. In fashion, we had the “race to the bottom” as fast fashion entered the scene in a big way and brands (rather than stick to their guns) began devaluing their product to get it as cheap as possible. This is kind of all I’ve ever known, (I was born in 1995) and growing up, all my clothes came from Target - occasionally Nordstrom if it was a suit.
What this meant was that a lot of the brands that people had relied on lost that special spark - as they sent their labor to cheap factories of ill repute. J. Crew fell off, Ralph Lauren stopped making things in the country it had so long fetishized, and the Zaras and H & Ms increasingly filled the void with flimsy nothingness.
Unlike in women’s fashion - men’s fashion historically has needed a function. Riveted jeans were made to protect miners, t-shirts were made as cheaper and more effective underclothes for the Navy, sneakers were invented not for basketball but as comfortable training shoes for the Army. Laborers and soldiers have worn the cutting edge clothes, often in dangerous circumstances, until these items have hit the mainstream. “Stolen Valor” perhaps, or maybe just earning its stripes at a time when people could be more upwardly mobile and move from blue collar work to white collar (if so inclined) or from the military to college through the GI Bill.
As I began to be interested in fashion in the 2010s, I turned toward a dying institution for inspiration - the army surplus store. There used to be one on Sunset (they turned it into a Byredo) in Silver Lake and it is where much of my fashion education began. I bought my first pair of boots there: Vietnam style jungle boots. I bought my first Dickies and Levi’s shrink-to-fits there. In a world where clothing had lost its special spark, I felt that I had found authenticity in the work-clothes and army surplus. Clothes that actually stood the test of time and also, undeniably, looked cool.
Many people were presented with a choice when it came to evading fast fashion. You could go high - invest in small brands and Japanese brands - for a great deal of money. Or, you could go low - snag the old work-pants collecting dust in your local general store. They were still mass-produced by companies with murky ethics, but they would last and they would look good and feel good.
Sidebar: I have a theory that the current love affair with Carhartt is a love affair with duck canvas. The double knees and jackets are made of a 100% cotton canvas that is super hardy and lasts forever. I think most modern wearers of clothing (especially young, non working-class ones) have become so accustomed to low-qual stretch fabrics and denims, that the feel and patina of Carhartt has really opened their eyes and changed the game for them. Just a theory.
Even then I could tell there was a right and wrong way to go about all this. I wasn’t entirely naïve to the origins of these pieces of clothing. I had, of course, seen Dickies before, on gardeners, laborers, and the like; but their trousers were just so versatile. In that stage of my education, I’d known there were jeans and formal clothes, but I hadn’t really known what bridged the gap.
The cotton/poly trousers I discovered at that time - the fabled 874, which I’ve since eschewed for the Ben Davis alternatives - were just so easy to wear. They were rugged and ever so slightly elegant, they melted into my outfits without causing a stir. They were simple, but could become more interesting the more they frayed, faded, and distressed. They had that missing spark.
But as Sartre says, “l’enfer c’est des autres,” or, for the less-pretentious, “hell is other people.” This is the danger of getting too attached to any mass-produced garment. Because at some point it will reach critical mass - no longer just worn by our friends and personal heroes, but worn by people, who, for whatever reason we find distasteful. Such is the price of becoming too invested in any brand that can churn out thousands (if not millions) of units.
When people hear “workwear” bandied about, it feels as though they imagine the most egregious version of blue collar stolen valor. The undesirable, unthinking other. Think Brooklyn Beckham, poster-child of useless nepo-babies, wearing Dickies and Carhartt at the same time and as an extra little F.U. - the dangly little film camera. This is public enemy number 1 in the public relations battle we’re fighting. There is something that feels almost sinister in this particular example, an unemployed child of parents worth $450 million, wearing $40 work pants.
I guess I want to believe that if you love something the way I love clothes, you can wear them without offending anyone. I know there’s no way to make everyone happy and I also know there will always be people who do things in an offensive and seemingly careless way - the way I perceive Mr. Beckham. But I also know that because of my position online and my current job as “influencer,” people will assume, I, like many of the other influencers in their feed don’t really care about these clothes and the people who wear them (and may find me just as irritating).
I also believe that many of the young people who adopt these styles who are not in the trades are not so dissimilar from the young people who are. We’re all pretty fucked over. We’ve inherited a world so fucked up that we’ve resorted to fighting over who can wear pants online. Cost of living is high and gets higher, while minimum wage stays low. Inflation gets worse, banks fail, weather gets weird; and we’re the ones who get caught in the middle.
Workwear is a safety blanket literally and metaphorically. It literally provides safety to people in factories and sometimes big cities, but it also provides a feeling of protection that is more substantial than any two layers of duck canvas can ever provide. And sure, the prices go up, but that has so much to do with this swirling miasma of shit we call an economy. (Vintage is another story - and that blame can rest more squarely on the big city types.) Cotton will get more expensive as climate change ravages our world unchecked, our global supply chains will get shakier with each new apocalyptic plot twist, and elites will sow the seeds of class conflict.
I at least, will try to do my part, when I wear “workwear.” I try, at least, to wear brands I have some connection to. I don’t have much connection to Carhartt, but I do have more of an affinity with Ben Davis - a California brand that feels uniquely attuned to life and weather here. I wear vintage Levi’s and Wrangler, because those denim brands have drifted so far from their original working-class context, they now slot seamlessly into everyday life.
At the end of the day, I don’t really give a shit about big, fancy designers. I’ll always be more excited to sift through the racks of an old workwear or western supply store than to go to the trendy fashion retailer du jour. That’s because I love a deal and I love history and I love clothes with substance. Wearing army surplus or work pants requires some degree of sensitivity and empathy if you want to honor their origins and keep people happy, which I personally do.
This shit went hard
I loved how deep this got at the end from a philosophical point of view haha great read