Do work, son.
As more and more fall + winter looks from our favorite “street-level culture” (a term that I’m stealing from Worship Worthy) brands continue to be unveiled, I notice that an increasing number of designers have stealthily included work shirts as part of their collections.
It’s by no means on the same obnoxiously obsequious level as plaid print button ups or other flannel shirts – but its appeal (and no doubt, its future resurgence in popularity) is drawn from the same type of blue-collar romance and durable sensibility that both the work shirt and the buffalo-check flannel have in common.
STPL’s Fall 2008 offerings, dubbed “The Science of Design”, include this updated take on the work shirt, seen on the right.
More after the jump.
From Dickies workwear to cowboy shirts to the relatively recent years’ explosion in popularity of flannels and steady rise of Carhartt streetwear in the States, the working man’s wardrobe is being absolutely looted by designers for the coolguy street brands.
As I noted in an earlier article, one of the best (or perhaps the best) new pieces this fall from The Hundreds is their Dolo shirt. Part faux-chambray, part Pittsburgh steel worker, the Dolo is a step in the right direction – in other words, away from the scene’s absolutely Katrina-like flood levels of flannel.
The Hundreds’ Dolo. Still boner-inducing. Check out Bobby’s attention to detail on this particular shirt at The Hundreds’ blog.
My particular favorite so far in this early season comes from San Francisco’s own Self Edge. Their Pote Tin Kyriaki (Never On Sunday) shirt is a beautiful spin on a traditional Western workwear shirt. Using raw denim sourced from Cone Denim’s White Oak collection, it’s a heavy and sturdy piece that harks back to the days of the San Francisco Gold Rush and the types of durable workwear that those gold prospectors had to wear.
The traditional yoke seen on the shoulders of a Western shirt are integrated with the flaps for the upper pockets. Combined with the crispness of the dark denim, Never on Sunday is salivatingly clean and modern.
The blue stitch detail provides some eye-pleasing pop and unobtrusively perks up the shirt’s dark demeanor. Also notice how the slant for the button holes matches the slant on the holes on the front of the shirt – a nice touch that draws the eyes on a vertical plane, a slimming effect.
I absolutely love my flannels and western shirts, and I’m certainly not averse to adding more roughneck gear to my wardrobe. Hopefully this whole thing doesn’t get out of hand and overdone like everything else in the street-level culture scene.
The irony in all this is that the original purveyors and customers of real work shirts would absolutely scoff at the idea of paying ridiculous sums of money for what is, at its core, a shirt designed for grimy, sweaty, smelly work. The image of a Detroit auto worker walking down Haight and throwing down $190 for a shirt to wear to work is unimaginable. It’s funny that we’re all jonesing to stock our closets with rugged workwear just so that we can look pretty at our next event.
Photos by way of highsnobiety.com, thehundreds.com, and self-edge.com
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