The Meaning of Carhartt
A trip to the company archive
I think I’ve always felt a little too coastal elite to truly pull off a Carhartt jacket. I had a boyfriend from New Hampshire who once gave me his old Carhartt and that was the closest I came to “earning it.” Is that the right way to put it? Can one earn the right to wear Carhartt?
As a part of this whole little Americana series I’ve been enjoying commissioning and editing right now, comes a dispatch from my friend Audrey Kalman. Kalman is a master at the American roadtrip (and good at finding fun niche stuff generally). She wrote her masters on the meaning of American denim, and keeps up with college football. She’s been known to rock a Carhartt, but even she’s still figuring out what it means to wear workwear in our modern wimpy society. A trip to the Carhartt archive helped give her some clarity.
The floor is yours, Audrey.
I have seen the swath of The United States with the most American flags. More flags than I have seen in my adventures to Atlanta Georgia, or Auburn Alabama, or Dallas, Texas or Lake Tahoe, or Monument Valley, or my entire 2021 jaunt across the state of Missouri (and certainly more American flags than my hometown of San Francisco or my adopted city of Portland, Oregon). None of these municipalities presented me with as many American flags as I saw earlier this month, when I went to Michigan, and to the Carhartt Archive.
I hadn’t come to the state of Michigan just to visit Carhartt. The highways of the Great Lake State hosted me partly so I could visit my little brother (go Blue!), but I couldn’t resist the urge to visit this brand that also felt like family, complete with all its complications and competing emotions. Whether your mind goes to hi-vis construction equipment or to the blue collar stolen valor of so many bicoastal elites, you know Carhartt when you see it, and you’re probably seeing a fair amount of it these days.
Durability was my foremost priority when I purchased my Carhartt jacket back in 2018. It was a teal-colored, sherpa lined jacket. I had just been hired as a metal fabricator in the University of Oregon’s science department (go Ducks!), and needed a jacket that would function as my armor while I worked in the machine shop. It had to be warm, dry, and protect me from specks of metal that would fly out of the milling machines that I operated. I had to take a 40 minute bus ride to a farm supply store in west Eugene, just to get this Carhartt jacket, try it on, pay at the register, and then hop back on the eastbound bus, happy as a clam!
I wore my Carhartt jacket throughout hundreds of hours of shifts in the metal shop, and later in the woodshop. It was always a warm hug that I could shake the sawdust right out of. And to the passers-by who saw me hauling wooden crates and emptying ventilation systems, my hands wrapped in band-aids, my teal duck canvas jacket made sense. Its grime didn’t need to be cleaned or apologized for. This Carhartt, like me, was working.
Wearing my Carhartt as I carry my iced latte back to sit at my laptop feels like a more precarious sign. “I used to work in a woodshop!” I find myself wanting to blurt out. “Yes, I can change a tire!” It’s hard not to play constant defense when you’re a corporate girlie in duck canvas. What do I mean when I wear this same jacket, in my new environment? Any gen-Z dipshit in workwear must feel this small twinge of shame. Even Carhartt itself has done avant garde fashion collaborations with designers like Junya Watanabe, and created high-end boutiques in New York and LA that would send Eugene clientele running. Where I feel torn is that I fall somewhere in the middle: while I do genuinely love to work in the woodshop, I do also love the look of workwear and the style of it. So do a lot of people. And so what are we communicating when we wear Carhartt? There was only one place to go for answers.
Carhartt was founded by Hamilton Carhartt in Detroit in 1889. “Ham”, as he was known, had heard from local railroad workers that their existing work clothes were not tough enough to handle long, strenuous shifts. Capitalizing on this hole in the market, Ham bought some canvas, a few sewing machines, and got to work. He created a supremely durable, reliable, and sought-after product.
Throughout the twentieth-century, Carhartt’s progress mirrored that of the United States writ large. During both World Wars, the company stepped up to help with what they knew best: Carhartt produced army uniforms during WWI, and supplied the military with coveralls, jungle suits, and workwear during WWII. Hardship struck Carhartt during the Great Depression just as it did the rest of the country. Consumers tightened their belts and relied on their hard-wearing Carhartt pieces to not need replacing. In the prosperous postwar years, Carhartt thrived and massively expanded as their garments became popular far beyond factories and worksites. In the 1980s and 1990s, hip hop pioneers and film crews donned Carhartt whenever they could.
Dave Moore works hard to preserve the legacy and lore made possible by not only those thousands of workers, but also the thousands who have come before them. He was hired in 2014 to establish and sustain Carhartt’s archive (and yes, I am green with envy- this being a dream job). I was surprised as Dave welcomed me into the Archive Lab, nestled within the recently redone Carhartt headquarters… struck not only by Dave’s humility and approachable sense of humor, but by the telling array of clothing spanning the opposite wall.
This was a tiny museum of garments, each with its own profound and complicated set of meanings. Take, for example, this beige Ford Motor Company coat. If you saw someone wearing this coat around Dearborn Michigan in the early 1900s, the assumption would be that they work at Ford’s nearby River Rouge plant. In this case, it was a very correct assumption: when Carhartt acquired this piece per Dave’s request, the work ID from the Ford employee--a foreman--was still in the pocket. A century ago, the meaning of a Carhartt jacket was a pretty straightforward sign: this person works in a setting where their clothing must withstand wear and tear. In fact, the location of the workplace is written right there on the jacket itself.
As he guided me through the archive, Dave talked about the people who mailed him their Carhartt jackets. He showed me products that had been altered, and coat shoulders that had been fortified to better carry bushels. But one shredded Active-Jac that looked like it should have came with an anecdote about its use in the field, actually had a letter about how this jacket helped a man drive his wife and child home from the hospital for the first time.
In the note, the new father voiced his anxiety and uncertainty about parenthood and about the future, while also describing the simultaneous comfort he found in that piece of clothing on that drive home. Which was beautiful (Dave mentioned how much the note resonated with him when he became a father), but I would never have guessed that “function.”
To get all semiotic for a second (I didn’t spend all my university time in the woodshop), when I was looking at the “signs” of each jacket, the “signified” became less connected to the “signifier.” To quote Princeton Professor Daniel Chandler, the signifier is “the form which the sign takes” and the signified is “the concept it represents.” So, looking at the very clear example of that Ford Carhartt jacket: the signifier is the label that says FORD. The signified is “this man works at Ford.” Seeing the shredded jacket would not have signified “father who just brought his kid home from the hospital.” The jackets were all armor for this nutty thing called living. And try as I could tell what each jacket was “for”- sometimes you simply could not know.
Dave has done a whole lot in eleven years as Carhartt archivist. The curation of human stories that he has built the archive around is what’s most impressive. When an archivist encounters an object, a sign, questions have to be asked. Curiosity is the most powerful vector when seeking meaning. Channels of communication must be open in order for the object’s history to be understood. Why did someone keep this jacket for so long? Why did someone put up an American flag on their porch? It’s not that there are right answers. It’s that to eradicate space for discussion is to erase people’s stories.
As I left Dearborn, I noticed there were American flags flying above firehouses, city halls, rest stops, Dollar Generals, and ice cream parlors. They protruded out over well-kept lawns and extended from buildings that seemed abandoned. I thought about signs and meanings as I drove past billowing American flag after billowing American flag. Some flags were old and faded, some looked brand new. Much like clothes on bodies, flags don’t just suddenly appear on poles. And there were too many flags in too many different settings for them to all be referencing a single meaning, a single signified.
Thank you to Dave, for not only expertly holding this coat, but also for being such a gracious host.
 | A guest post by |
An observation of the ubiquity of the Stars & Stripes in Dearborn and southeastern Michigan; Dearborn has the largest Arab-American population of any city in the United States, and the largest mosque in the country. It's heartening to know that these Michiganders display their pride in being part of the broader American experience.
Fun read, thank you. I'm a mostly-suburbanite who spends 5 or 6 weeks a yr in my Carhartt on a ranch. Their basic jacket is a multi-tool...barb wire will not ruin it, use a sleeve as a mitten for bbq or fires, throw down as a picnic blanket, carry a hurt dog (small dog), wrap cold water bottles as insulation, a safety damper on tow/snatch line, use on a dusty road to get under the atv or truck. It is lousy in biting cold wind (I don't have the insulated version), that is where a hoody under a Carhartt jacket is the perfect combo.