Menswear's Most Unlikely Trend of 2016: Construction Worker Style Goes Mainstream

As customers re-embraced over-the-top luxury, other went in the polar opposite direction with affordable basics from old school workwear brands—and that could be a very good thing in the long run.

This year was chock full of surprises, some good, some bad (though most were very, very bad). In the world of menswear trends, no surprise was bigger than the one trend that took hold of designer-obsessed hypebeasts and average Joes alike: construction worker style. That's right, it wasn't Gucci-inspired embroidery on everything, self-lacing sneakers, or even skate rat style. It was Carhartt jackets, Dickies pants, Champion hoodies, beat-up dad hats, relaxed-fit jeans and work boots—or high-priced facsimiles thereof—that men across the board embraced in their closets. It's one of the most prevalent style moves we spotted on runways and in the streets, even among the fashion elite.

Sound familiar? It might. Back in 2014, "normcore" was the buzziest and most blog-able word of the year. This new wave, for which we're still open to naming suggestions (Construction Core? Rust Belt Core? Dunkin' Core?), certainly has a tangential relationship to normcore. Both, after all, are about rejecting the traditional meaning of luxury in the name of electing to wear garments and gear people thought to have no interest in fashion would choose to wear. And while both trends share a similar origin story of how they got into the mainstream, normcore's new cousin has its roots in true blue-collar workwear, not big box store basics.

There are two ways this year's least expected trend took hold: via style-minded men incorporating genuine workwear clothes in their wardrobes and via fashion-forward brands or retailers offering similar styles with aesthetic upgrades. In the latter category, Vetements collaborated with Levi's, Alpha Industries, and Champion—producers of clothing that wouldn't be out of place on a job site—on items that subverted standard issue construction gear and were a lot more expensive than your average pair of red tabs. The same could be said of Yeezy Season 3's dusty palette, tactical-inspired boots, and boatloads of camo. You can now track down some of the same brands in a Wal-Mart as you can in an Urban Outfitters. Been Trill co-founder Heron Preston took things a step further by collaborating with the New York Department of Sanitation of a collection of upcycled clothing and gear from the field. Even our street style lenses started pointing away from fashion week and towards neon-hued T-shirts of local NYC iron workers.

(From left to right: Dickie's and Dickie's-inspired pants from Noah and Casely-Hayford.)

It's not that we don't understand the appeal of rugged workwear items in 2016: When it's an original, the pricing is democratic, the design is refreshingly no frills, and the pieces are made to be pragmatic. And in 2017, wearing inexpensive, well-made workwear and its logos telegraphs a particular set of political messages more than they would have at this time last year. There's something positive to see there. Slipping into a CAT hoodie or zipping into a mechanics jumpsuit may be about getting in on the ground floor of an easy-to-execute, affordable fashion trend. But whether conscious or not, it also says something important. At the end of the day, whether or not a Carhartt jacket was worn simply for its aesthetics is somewhat irrelevant. A person still has to hand over money to acquire the item and in a sense put their voting dollars behind the brand.

This year, that meant a vote for timeless style. It meant a vote for regular, not ball-busting fits. It meant a vote for affordability in a world where $500 jeans have become, at least from a fashion industry perspective, the norm. In some cases, it meant a vote against the very appropriation of this look by brands like Vetements. (Why buy a $3,000 Alpha Industries bomber when an original is only $150, or an $800 pair of Valentino boots when the Timbs their based off of cost $190?)

But most of all, it could be said that this trend was a vote to stop the revolving door of consumerism, replacing conspicuous consumption and planned obsolesce with something that's always been built to last. Agree with its design merits or not, the construction worker style trend was as much a backlash against the current fashion climate as anything. Only time will tell if, like the clothes its built on, this trend is made to last.

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