Carhartt's Downtown Dirtbag Jacket Has Gone Mainstream
In late May, Dakota Johnson was seen during the filming of new flick Materialists with co-stars Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. As is it was a particularly crisp spring evening, Johnson (or her character) had slipped on a light layer.
That Johnson tossed contrastingly rugged outerwear over her light floral dress wasn't itself revelatory.
But the piece that she selected was: instead of a petite cardigan or matching shrug, Johnson layered up in a rugged, worn-out Carhartt Active Jacket.
This is the garment's biggest big-screen moment ever. Though Johnson is hardly the first celebrity to wear the style and probably isn't even granting the Active Jacket its film debut, she is likely the first person to wear the jacket on-camera within the context of its downtown cool status.
That is, Johnson is wearing the Carhartt jacket as it's worn by most young people today, free from its blue collar context but with extant emphasis on its utilitarian appeal.
In hindsight, the Active Jacket almost makes too much sense as a contemporary style icon.
It's design remains unchanged since Carhartt unveiled the Active Jacket in 1975, informed by a wildly prescient cropped-length cut that hits right at the waist, both flattering and remarkably on-trend; its lining and easy wide fit makes it more of a workwear cardigan; vintage iterations are made doubly appealing by real-world distressing innate to a well-loved work uniform; perhaps most appealingly, these vintage hooded Carhartt jackets rarely sell for much more than $100.
As recently as only a few years ago, this exact Carhartt jacket was a not-so-best-kept secret handshake for the genre of dude eventually known as the Nolita Dirtbag, canonized and routinely mocked by an Instagram account of the same name.
This jacket was part of a trope-y wardrobe that's since gone on to define a populous niche of streetwear since fleshed out by many, many iterative collections (other well-mined components include ironic dad hats, cigarette-burned double knee pants, Salomon sneakers).
By now, though, Carhartt has become as synonymous with luxury as with workwear in certain circles.
The Detroit clothing company's signature staples have long since been appropriated en masse by younger shoppers tapping into rising demand for lived-in blue collar gear, drawn by no-brainer comfort and no-frills design.
There's still such effervescent demand for the look that even mega-retailers sell curated selections of vintage Carhartt, further mainstreaming the aesthetic.
Carhartt's humble boom has prompted luxury labels like Prada, its evocative sibling line Miu Miu, Givenchy and Valentino to cash in on the Active Jacket's approachable shape with high-end iterations priced about where you'd expect yet no less popular than the original: Miu Miu's $3,000 "Denim Blouson" has since sold out while an embroidered iteration retails for over $12,000.
The popularity of the Active Jacket — and, as such, this style of jacket — is epitomized by its appearance on Dakota Johnson's shoulders in Materialists.
One might say that the hooded Carhartt jacket is reaching new heights but, honestly, it's more accurate to see this as cultural affirmation. This thing has evolved beyond trend cycles into a contemporary classic, no dirtbag required.
