Workwear is in — or maybe I'm just late to it.

Every eighteen months a fashionista rediscovers the chore coat and announces that workwear is having a moment.

I'm that fashionista. I just bought my first set of workwear pants, and I'm hooked — they fit better and they are clearly better products. Once you're in the workwear store, your eye changes from fit to quality materials.

Workwear has been having a moment since women walked into American factories in 1943 wearing their husbands' overalls. It had a moment in the '70s with boxy silhouettes and denim. It had one in 1992 when skaters adopted Dickies 874s because they didn't rip. It had one when Tupac and the Fugees wore chore coats, another when normcore made ugliness a virtue, and it is having one now.

A trend that never ends is a category. The useful question is what specifically is happening to it in 2026 — because two very different things are currently wearing the same word.

Workwear you wear to the office should be its own category — formal, semi-formal, its own shelf. What I mean by workwear is heritage utility: Carhartt, Dickies, Filson, Ben Davis, Stan Ray. Duck canvas, twill, rivets.

The resale market is the honest signal

Runways lie. Resale doesn't.

Vintage Carhartt now routinely clears $200, $400, and in the right configuration well past $600 on Grailed and eBay. USA-made, blanket-lined, brown duck, in that order. Blanket-lined brown duck is as close to the top of the market as you can get in resale.

But the detail that tells you everything is the sizing premium. Small and medium USA-made Detroit jackets in good condition command 20–30% more than the same jacket in large — because the men actually buying Carhartt in the 1980s and '90s skewed big, so smalls were never made in volume.

The scarcity of small workwear is a direct artifact of who used to wear it. Which is a fairly blunt way of confirming that the people buying it now are a different population.

Workwear derives its meaning from labor. When the buyer isn't doing the labor, what's being purchased is a costume — and the industry has been happy to sell it. Pre-distressed jackets carry a premium. Brands charge extra for wear that someone else's grandfather would have earned for free. Carhartt, Dickies and Wrangler moved from hardware stores to Urban Outfitters walls.

The clothes really are better made. A carpenter and a graphic designer buying the same jacket both get a jacket that outlasts everything else in the closet. And the workers themselves tend to find the whole thing more funny than offensive — bemused that people pay $400 for a beaten-up version of the coat they got free with a job.

If you're buying

1. Buy used. The vintage market is deep, the construction is better than current production, and you skip the pre-distressing surcharge entirely.
2. Chore coat over Detroit jacket if you only get one — longer, more layerable, reads less costume.
3. 874s or Ben Davis for trousers. Wrinkle-resistant twill with a permanent crease that has, for thirty years, worked equally well on skaters, baristas and stylists.
4. Skip: hi-vis as fashion, pre-distressed anything, logo-forward pieces. All three age at the speed of the trend cycle rather than the speed of the fabric.
5. The test: would you still wear it if nobody could see the label? If yes, buy it and wear it into the ground. If no, you're buying a season.