Back in 2012, I worked on a farm in the north of California. It was a freezing autumn and we spent most of our time out in the fields. One day, a co-worker left me a heavy-duty jacket, because he simply didn't want to carry it back home. I had no idea what brand it was. I just wore it every day out in the cold. It protected me from rain and low temperatures alike. It did the rough job I needed it to do.

When I left the farm, I left it there. No room in the luggage. Now, every time I think about it, the same thought arrives: I had no idea what I had. It was a Carhartt Active Jacket.

The man who gave it to me was a plumber. He worked as hard as you can get. It wasn't a hip guy from London, a rapper from Brooklyn, or a techno head from Detroit. I got it from someone who knew the brand because of its utility, which is exactly how I came to know it too.

That plumber and the Tate usually don't belong in the same sentence. But on 6 November 2025, Carhartt WIP marked 50 years of the Active Jacket inside the Tanks at Tate Modern, the old oil tanks beneath the former Bankside power station. The same jacket I had. Or I thought it was.

Carhartt's first distinction as a brand was born on the American railroads. Hamilton Carhartt started in 1889 in a Detroit loft with two sewing machines and a half-horsepower electric motor, and his first attempts failed. So he did what we would call market research today. He went and spoke directly with railroad workers to find out what they actually needed from a pair of overalls. Carhartt was born not in a factory built on abstract ideas, but among the people who were going to wear the clothes every day from 8 to 5. "Honest value for an honest dollar" became their first slogan.

The Chore Coat followed in 1917, sold then as the Engineer Sack Coat. It has stayed structurally the same for over a century. Customers spent most of that time calling it "the Carhartt Coat," and the company didn't make "Chore Coat" the official name until 1994.

Carhartt's overalls still carry a small cut above the front pocket for a pocket watch chain, a detail made for its first customers in the 1880s and never removed.

The Active Jacket came much later, in 1975, out of the same method: reinforced canvas, a hood, built to keep weather off someone on a job site. It wasn't designed to say anything about the person wearing it.

Hamilton Carhartt's method produced something the clothing industry spends decades trying to manufacture and rarely gets: a product immune to trend cycles. The construction worker wearing Carhartt in 2026 and the one wearing it in 1926 need the same things from a work jacket. The product delivers for both because it was never designed to deliver anything else.

The underground skater in Paris doesn't share the same problems as the corn farmer in Ohio, not in terms of values, aesthetics, income levels, or cultural references anyway. And yet they reach for the same logo, and neither feels betrayed by who else is wearing it.

How did a workwear brand end up adopted by entirely different cultures at once? There were many factors at play, and none of them were planned.

In America, it began with hip-hop. In the 1990s Carhartt became a rap staple because it belonged to the working class: the duck canvas, the utilitarian cut, a durability fashion brands couldn't copy regardless of budget. The heavyweight fabric carried the same weight as the culture wearing it.

At the same time in Europe, La Haine introduced the brand to an entirely different generation. Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film followed three young men, Vinz, Saïd and Hubert, through twenty hours in the banlieues outside Paris, and Hubert wore a Carhartt beanie throughout. A cultural endorsement the brand never paid for. The film won Kassovitz best director at Cannes that year.

What kept both audiences was the same thing that attracted them in the first place. The workwear company never announced it was a hip-hop brand, and it never ran a campaign telling skaters it understood them. The product stayed where it had always been and let the culture decide what it meant. When a brand claims a subculture, it goes mainstream and betrays the values that made the subculture choose it.

There are two Carhartts, and I didn't know that when I was wearing one.

[EMBED TIKTOK] @hicknope1417, "Just learned that Carhartt WIP is different from Carhartt" https://www.tiktok.com/@hicknope1417/video/7229859309612731694

The one the plumber knew is Carhartt, Inc., still owned by Hamilton Carhartt's descendants and run out of Dearborn, Michigan. It did $1.8 billion in revenue in 2024. The one that took the Active Jacket to Tate Modern is Carhartt WIP, run by a separate family company, Work In Progress Textilhandels GmbH, from Weil am Rhein on the German border with Switzerland and France. WIP licenses the name, designs its own collections and runs more than a hundred of its own stores. The two share a logo and a history, but they have different owners, different design teams and different customers.

Those three letters on the Tate invitation were the part I skipped over. Plenty of people have done the same. A TikTok titled "Just learned that Carhartt WIP is different from Carhartt" has more than 34,000 likes.

In May 2025, Carhartt's European office in Amsterdam put out a press release to make the difference clear. "Carhartt is not a fashion trend, it is a tool you wear," it said, and went on to describe clothing tested against wind, rain and cold, made for hard workers.

[EMBED TIKTOK] @theforumstore, "What's the difference between Carhartt and Carhartt WIP?" https://www.tiktok.com/@theforumstore/video/7161838847121263878

The statement came out of Europe, where WIP had made the name fashionable first. Carhartt has been expanding there since the late nineties and has opened dozens of its own stores, so it now sells on ground its licensee got to first. According to Gear Patrol, the Carhartt most fashion people actually want is WIP, even if they just call it Carhartt.

Dearborn still ends up on fashion kids, mostly through the beanie. The A18 watch hat has been in the catalogue since 1987, and in January 2025 Men's Health noted it had become increasingly popular with celebrities and influencers. Carhartt's own website still sells its best-selling beanie as "the beanie you can't work without." It sells to them as a work hat, and they buy it anyway.

It took more than an indestructible product to get Carhartt inside European culture. A Swiss couple had everything to do with it.

In 1989, the year Carhartt turned a hundred, Edwin Faeh started bringing American workwear into Europe through his agency, All American Concept. He and his wife Salomée noticed who was buying it. Young Europeans with no connection to manual labour were buying American work clothes because of what they meant. In 1994 Faeh set up Work In Progress as Carhartt's exclusive European distributor. Two years later WIP won the licence to make Carhartt products outside the US, and in 1997 it opened its first store, on Neal Street in London, and started its own skate and BMX teams.

None of this was planned in Dearborn. In 1994 an American workwear company signed a distribution deal with a Swiss importer, the kind of paperwork companies sign all the time. At that point the split was just a licensing arrangement.

In a fax to Carhartt dated 18 November 1995, Faeh told them there was plenty of time to build the brand in Europe and that Carhartt was "the product/brand which will be loved by the next generation." He gave it until about 2015, joked that everyone could then retire to Hawaii, and signed off with the reminder that slow and steady wins the race. Twenty years later he told Hypebeast that workwear is not a trend. Dearborn used almost the same words in 2025, in the press release meant to separate itself from him.

In 2000 WIP launched Combination Records, an in-house label for new electronic music. Among its artists was Underground Resistance, the Detroit techno collective, so a Swiss-run company ended up tying a Detroit workwear brand back to Detroit's own music. Rugged magazine followed in 2003, covering the skate, art and music scenes WIP was already part of, and Carhartt WIP Radio came five years after that. WIP also does collaborations, with Nike and A Bathing Ape among others.

It went back to La Haine too. For the film's 25th anniversary in 2020, WIP made a capsule with Kassovitz himself, including a recreation of Hubert's beanie and an embroidered Active Jacket like the one Kassovitz wore on set in 1995. So the film Carhartt got for free became a WIP collaboration twenty-five years later.

One thing is to be a brand that funds cultural expression. Another entirely different is to sit inside it.

None of it had to reach the plumber. The chasing was done in Weil am Rhein, under the same name, with WIP's own money.

Dickies had the same chance. It was founded in Fort Worth in 1922, had the same blue-collar origin, and got picked up by skaters and rappers in the nineties just like Carhartt. Nobody split the job there. VF Corporation bought it in 2017 for $820 million and pushed the workwear brand itself towards the culture that had adopted it, with lifestyle ranges and fashion distribution.

Revenue peaked at $837.2 million in the year to April 2022 and fell every year after, down to $542.1 million by March 2025. In August 2025 VF's chief executive, Bracken Darrell, admitted Dickies had expanded its lifestyle offerings too quickly and moved away from its core workwear strengths. While it chased the skaters it lost ground with the electricians who had always bought it, and the skaters didn't stay either. That September VF sold it for $600 million to Bluestar Alliance, a licensing company whose other brands include Off-White and Palm Angels.

Ownership is part of this. Dickies belonged to a public company that needed growth every quarter, while Carhartt has been in the same family for 137 years and can afford to be patient. That explains the pressure on Dickies. It doesn't excuse the choice it made under that pressure, which was to aim one brand at two audiences at once.

Most brand strategists treat versatility as a positioning exercise. You reach more audiences by changing the messaging, adapting the product, chasing what people want this season. Carhartt ended up handling it through structure. Build something honest, price it fairly, and let the people who need it find it. When a different audience turns up, that audience gets its own company.

The skater buying WIP is borrowing credibility from the plumber. The jacket means something in Paris because it means something on a job site in Ohio. If the plumber stopped wearing it, there would be nothing left to borrow, and WIP would be selling a logo with no reason behind it.

Carhartt didn't plan any of this. What it did do, once WIP got big, was leave it alone. It didn't fold WIP back in or go after the same customers with its own product, and when the two started to blur in Europe, it went out of its way to sound less fashionable, not more.

Most brands do the opposite, and they get the chance to far sooner than Carhartt did. A work boot or a hardware-store jacket can turn up in a hundred TikToks in a week, and the instinct in the marketing meeting is to answer it with new colourways, a creator campaign, a capsule with someone cool. Dickies answered it and lost both audiences. The people who made the product credible never asked to be marketed to, and they notice when the brand starts talking to somebody else.

If a culture you never aimed at picks you up, the product it picked up should stay exactly as it is, still talking to the people it was made for. Anything you build for the new audience needs its own name and its own team, even if that means somebody else gets to be the cool one.

The most useful thing Carhartt did for its cool in 2025 was put out a press release saying it didn't have any.