Troy Patterson reminds us that Rosie the Riveter did not shop at J. Crew or RRL. But there is something strange and unstoppable about the mainstreaming of workwear: quality divorced from its origins.
In the course of his 1882 tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde visited the silver mines of the Colorado mineral belt, returning with a key observation on the American costume. ‘‘In all my journeys through the country, the only well-dressed men that I saw,’’ he told lecture audiences, ‘‘were the Western miners.’’ Admiring the height of their boots, the breadth of their hat brims, the drape of their cloaks, Wilde said, ‘‘They wore only what was comfortable, and therefore beautiful.’’ This tribute to an aesthetic allied to a blue-collar work ethic was a premonition of the triumph of bluejeans and the practical fashions that followed. The process began to gain speed 25 or 30 years ago: the trek of Timberland boots from lumberyards to city streets; the appearance of sundry sophomores in service-station jackets emblazoned with the names of anonymous grease monkeys; the appreciation of comfort by white-collar workers who were increasingly released from the constraints of their neckties and skirt suits. … Young ladies wear overalls and jumpsuits not to protect their good clothes but rather because those are their good clothes. It has been not quite a year since the neologism ‘‘lumbersexual’’ dribbled into popular discourse to identify those city-dwelling men who seem to have been moved by a wind blowing from the Great North Woods. And when the weather turns, children, too, will be bundled in buffalo plaid, swathed in a durable aura of Americana and heritage. Wilde worried that his ‘‘picturesque miners’’ would, upon growing rich and going East, ‘‘assume again all the abominations of modern fashionable attire.’’
He was right, though.
