PREMIUM PROLETARIAN: Dickies Joins The Luxe Workwear Brigade

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Add Dickies to the list of classic American brands who have boarded the premium bandwagon. The maker of durable work apparel for 88 years has announced a capsule collection to be launched in July called Dickies 1922. The line is named for the year the company was founded and will, as expected, be accompanied by an offbeat promotional campaign featuring New York musicians photographed wearing the clothes. The four piece collection will include two shirt and two pant styles based on archive pieces and will be made with the same quality and methods that the company would have used in the 1930s of completely American sourced materials in one of the label's Texas factories, according to WWD.

Dickies follows a host of companies who have launched more exclusive labels or repositioned themselves and managed to capture the attention of key retailers and bolster their own business including L.L.Bean, Levi's, Woolrich, Pendleton, Timberland, Land's End, Red Wing, Wolverine, Sperry and Filson among many others. As a maker of clothing like coveralls and painters' pants for construction work and other kinds of labor, Dickies may be the most plebian of these brands, which paradoxically makes it all the more appealing to an upscale customer hungry for authenticity in clothing. Dickies will score extra points for using domestic materials and production to replicate archival styles. It's this slightly twisted logic that will allow the company to charge $175 to $200 for the line while much of the rest of its products retails for under $50.

In a similar but unrelated effort, the company will be promoting its basic 874 work trousers as a fashion item. A mainstay of its product line, the pant has remained unchanged for decades, but Dickies will be adding new fabrics and updated fits in an effort to get it in front of a younger, hipper customer (in other words, getting it into Urban Outfitters).

Dickies Creates Vintage-Inspired Capsule Collection (WWD)
Dickies (Official Site)