This fall, work wear is the prevalent theme both on and off the runway.  Trend forecasters and fashion heads alike claim workwear to be the new prevailing trend.  Which makes most of us wonder, “where do these trends hail from?”  Concurrent with history, fashion repeats itself.  Fashion is cyclical, but as I’ve noticed, the interim between trends is shrinking in closer and closer.  Before you know it, the lifespan of a trend will be over before it hits the racks.  Style and trending is inevitably dynamic, and as it should be, but until that day comes, where designers are driven to insanity trying to keep up and change up, let’s relish in what’s granted today…for we will never know where we are headed if we don’t take note of where we’ve been.

Work wear today can be loosely identified by the boots (be it Timberlands, Red Wings, or any of the like), heavy denim, and rugged wool/woven shirts.  As we’ve seen, the plaid shirt is anything but surreptitious; everyone has at least one, or two or three, in every color way and every pattern.  History reveals that this acclaimed pattern came was birthed in the late 1800s, when the logging industry takes off in the US, centered in the Pacific Northwest.  In the 1900s, the mythological Paul Bunyan emerges, illustrating the trials of being an American lumberjack.  Following in suit, Pendleton introduces the wool plaid shirt…an all American staple.  Of course, to make a fashion a long burning success, the trend setters of society need to patronize such trends.  And that they did, beginning with Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassidy, who in turn set the look for trend as masculine and rugged.

Of course, work wear wouldn’t be work wear without including the garbs of blue-collar men.  Newly inspired work wear takes it’s inspiration from the industrial revolution, inciting in the 1800s, where workers wore cotton, wool, and caps.  In the late 1800s, Levi Strauss was at the forefront of the denim brigade, creating denim workpants to sustain the laborious man during that day in age.   World War II’s predominant use of utilitarian uniforms also contributed to the growth of this trend.  The famous Irving Penn also popularized work wear through his 252 portraits of blue-collar workers in the 1950s.  And of course, we all realized work wear in the 1990s when Dickies, Carhartt, & Caterpillar premiered in almost every early 90s hip hop video.

So now you know.