--- title: "How Detroit Workwear Became Carhartt WIP" url: https://quietmenace.com/style/carhartt-wip-workwear-to-streetwear/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Style published: 2026-10-20 updated: 2026-10-20 topics: Workwear, Streetwear, Skate Culture, Heritage Brands --- # How Detroit Workwear Became Carhartt WIP > An importer in Europe wanted the real American thing. Thirty years later his version of Carhartt sells collabs with sacai and runs over 100 stores. In 1997 a shop opened on Neal Street in London's Covent Garden selling duck canvas jackets and double knee pants under a name from Detroit. Nothing in it was made for a railroad yard or a building site. It was the first store of Carhartt Work in Progress, a European company with an American license, and it has been confusing tourists in Carhartt's home country ever since. The short version is that there are two Carhartts. One is the Michigan workwear company that has been dressing tradespeople since the nineteenth century. The other is the label most people under 35 in Europe and Asia mean when they say the name. They share a logo and a lot of DNA. They are run separately. ## Two sewing machines in Detroit Hamilton Carhartt was born in 1855 in Macedon Locks, New York. In 1889 he started making overalls in Detroit out of duck and denim, with two sewing machines and five employees, and he aimed them at the railroad men who needed clothes that would not tear on the first shift. The company grew fast. By 1910 it had cotton mills in Georgia and South Carolina and factories in Detroit, Dallas and San Francisco. For a short spell it even built cars. The products that matter to this story came later. The Chore Coat was first advertised in 1923. The Detroit Jacket arrived in 1954, short in the body with slash pockets and a zipped chest pocket, and some version of it has stayed in the range almost continuously since, according to [Popular Science](https://www.popsci.com/gear/carhartt-detroit-jacket-re-engineered). The hooded Active Jacket followed in 1975. Hamilton Carhartt himself had died in a car crash in 1937, and his sons took over a business that would spend the rest of the century making very good clothes for people who did not care what they looked like. ## The importer who wanted the real thing In 1989, the year Carhartt turned 100, an importer named Edwin Faeh started bringing American products into Europe under what he called the All American Concept. Carhartt was one of the brands. Around the same time, the clothes were picking up a second audience. Carhartt WIP's own [history](https://us.carhartt-wip.com/en-us/history) dates it to 1992, when rappers, graffiti writers and street kids took to the jackets and pants for the same reasons a pipefitter would. They lasted, and they looked like work. Edwin and Salomée Faeh set up Work in Progress in 1994 as Carhartt's exclusive European distributor. Two years later, in 1996, WIP secured a license to manufacture Carhartt products outside the United States. That license is the hinge. It meant a company in Europe could take the American archive and cut it for a different customer, one who was going to wear a Detroit Jacket to a club, not a loading dock. ![A grey hoodie with a heart-shaped Carhartt WIP patch](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1776122090121-a3435870a860?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Carhartt WIP plays with the logo in ways the Michigan company never would. Photo by Branislav Herc on Unsplash* ## Why Europe got a different Carhartt The first WIP collection landed in 1997, the same year as the Neal Street store and the launch of skate and BMX teams. Two years earlier Carhartt had already turned up on screen in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, the 1995 film about three young men in the Paris banlieue, which gave the clothes a cool that no catalog could buy. From there WIP built the brand like a culture magazine. In 1999 the illustrator Evan Hecox started drawing the ad campaigns that defined its look for years. In 2000 the company started Combination Records, an open platform for electronic music, and showed its first women's collection. Rugged Magazine followed in 2003, and Carhartt WIP Radio in 2008. The skate team went to Mongolia for the 2007 film Dirt Ollies, and the 2015 book From Dirt to Dust went back. Videos, a team and a magazine is the same playbook London's [Palace](https://quietmenace.com/culture/palace-skateboards-history/) would later run, and WIP's heavy fleece sits in the same family tree as the Champion [Reverse Weave hoodie](https://quietmenace.com/style/hoodie-history-champion-reverse-weave/). Collaborations started formally in 2010, and the list now reads like a fashion week schedule. A.P.C., Converse, Nike, Vans and Vetements were among the early partners, the sort of company a skate label like [Stüssy](https://quietmenace.com/culture/stussy-history/) had been keeping for years. New Balance and the British designer Toogood in 2022. A sacai collection in 2023 that reworked the classic shapes. WIP opened in SoHo, New York in 2011 and on La Brea in Los Angeles in 2019, which means the European spin on Carhartt is now sold back to Americans a few miles from shops that stock the original. ## Back to Detroit The detail that makes WIP more than a licensing deal is how often it points home. The brand lists Detroit and Berlin techno among its design influences, and in 2017 it collaborated with Underground Resistance, the Detroit techno collective. In 2019 it ran capsules honoring Motown and Fela Kuti. For a label whose yellow C still reads as late 1990s rap video, the music references are a long way from decoration. It also makes things. A 2023 film, Many Hands, One Double Knee Pant, followed production of the pants at one of three WIP-owned facilities in Tunisia. That is a long way from two sewing machines in Detroit, and a fair answer to the charge that WIP is just a logo on a fashion jacket. The fabric is still the point. Duck canvas starts stiff and takes months to soften, the same slow break-in that makes [raw denim](https://quietmenace.com/style/raw-denim-selvedge-guide/) worth the effort. If you are buying one jacket, buy the Detroit and wear it hard. More of the workwear and heritage story is on our [heritage brands hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/) and in the [Style section](https://quietmenace.com/style/). In 2025 WIP marked the Active Jacket's 50th anniversary with an installation in the South Tank at the Tate in London. Fifty years after it was made for job sites, a hooded work coat got its own room at an art museum. --- Filed under: [Workwear](https://quietmenace.com/topics/workwear/), [Streetwear](https://quietmenace.com/topics/streetwear/), [Skate Culture](https://quietmenace.com/topics/skate-culture/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/) Hero image: Photo by Kiko Camaclang on Unsplash (Unsplash License)