Although Fall/Winter 2026 is Carhartt WIP’s newest collection, it all looks surprisingly old. Hoodies sport flecks of paint, canvas work jackets are discolored through fading, and pants are littered with rips and tears and holes. 

This workwear has been pretty obviously worked in! Or so you’d think. 

WIP, the younger European streetwear label born from American workwear OG Carhartt, knows there’s a booming market for ragged vintage Carhartt and a swelling niche of fashion artisans carefully reproducing the patina of those well-worn examples, because it’s making its own. 

Highsnobiety got a first look at all the pre-thrashed goods during the brand’s New York showroom earlier this year. There, hoodies appeared stained by a Carhartt WIP label that’d been ripped off and bucket hats were fashioned from tattered indigo denim. 

But now the lion's share of those pieces has landed online, with items like the paint-covered distressed denim trucker jacket priced at $285. That’s a little more than your average Carhartt gear, but people flog crumbling old workwear for much more. Even for four figures, sometimes. 

Carhartt WIP does some pretty funky stuff, like “paper” workwear lunchbags and four-figure work leather hoodies, but it's never destroyed its own clothes so thoroughly before. Literally, the effect is described as a “destroy wash” by Carhartt WIP. 

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Looks like all those vintage dealers waxing lyrical about someone’s grandpa’s old work gear are right: your Carhartt should be destroyed. 

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