vintage american and european workwear is in high demand lately. Old highly distressed working man’s clothing. Greasy old coveralls from the 50s can go for 100s of dollars. go down a mine and pull up some battered jacket– a few hundred easy… certain vintage french workwear jackets, thrashed and patched, the “bleu de travail”, easily 100-200. american workwear with authentic wear from real work, the skys the limit.
i think this is all fairly recent trend in hipster fashion and im wondering–is it because we don’t barely do anything physical at all. I read that the classic french blue work jacket, you can easily google for an image, was NEVER worn outside the shop or factory in the 50s 60s and 70s. just left at work. you’d never be seen in such plain, worn gear in public. But now it’s fashionable. and desireable. the more beat up, in the right way, the better. you’ve appeared to work harder.
i know this was not the way people wanted to dress in the 80s.
dealing with numbers and words and nonsense….versus some romanticized past, where people had jobs toiling with real things. now, the bleu de travail, would be a eprfectly acceptable thing for a french guy to wear out–now that no common factory worker is barely even left to wear it for real.
it seems very odd that beat up vintage workwear is in fashion, but i can understand its allure. it’s interesting to think about a time when physical labor was a normal thing
Though technology has replaced some of it, there are still manual laborers aplenty in this country.
I watch some of the handyman youtube channels sometimes and they say handyman wages are going through the roof due to the lack of people going into that field. A couple of them say they make six figures a year.
Re vintage clothing. When my father died a couple of years ago, I snagged a few vintage things from his wardrobe. He still had the coat he wore when he worked at a gas station in the 1950s in Nebraska…has a big company patch on it “Quality Oil”. Very neat, I’ll never get rid of it. It is a very heavy coat so it must’ve been cold in Nebraska. I also inherited his 1950s high school letterman jacket. Unfortunately it has not held up as well as the gas station coat as the leather is severely cracked. I went over it with Bickmore Leather Conditioner a couple of times to save what I can, but it just stabilized it and it is still too far gone to wear.
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