Feature: Carhartt WIP in the Park

Cold, bright, and about as far from Detroit as you can get. We took a rail of Carhartt WIP out to the Walthamstow marshes one winter afternoon and photographed it properly — heavy cotton twill utility jackets, camo fleece, the sort of thing that's actually built for standing about in a field.

Why the shapes look the way they do

Carhartt started in Detroit in 1889, making heavy woven cotton overalls for railroad workers. That's before Ford built a car in the city, and the clothes were designed for men doing physical work outdoors in a Michigan winter. The company is still family-owned and still headquartered in Michigan, in Dearborn now rather than Detroit.

The cuts we're wearing here come from that. A utility jacket in heavy twill isn't shaped to flatter anybody, which is exactly why it works over a jumper and a scarf and doesn't look ridiculous when you push the sleeves up. We wrote more about the early years and the women who made those overalls in our history of Carhartt.

How it got to Europe

Carhartt WIP is the European side of it, and it's a separate operation. In 1989 the Swiss designer Edwin Faeh started importing American products, Carhartt among them, into Europe. He set up Work In Progress as the European distributor in 1994 and took the licence to manufacture outside the United States two years after that.

By then the workwear had already been picked up by the hip hop and graffiti scenes, which is roughly when the yellow square logo stopped meaning building sites and started meaning something else. WIP leaned into that rather than resisting it, and it's been building collections out of the American archive for European bodies ever since.

What we'd wear it for

Honestly, this. A walk somewhere flat and cold with no particular plan. The twill takes weather, the fleece goes under anything, and neither is precious enough to worry about mud.

You'll find the current range in our Carhartt WIP collection.