The Virtually Popular Men's Pants Right Now Cost $forty

Photograph: Nabile Quenum/Nabile Quenum

The black snowfall was piled loftier exterior Five Leaves, the trendy eatery that sits at the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border in Brooklyn, every bit a immature, well-appointed brunch oversupply sat in their sunglasses and oversized coats at exterior tables, despite the xl-caste temperature. The hr-and-a-one-half wait didn't deter the crowd from gathering on a well-baked March morning, in puffer jackets, Vans Quondam Skools, and cropped pants, heads in their phones and eager to shell out $12 for avocado toast. It's here that I first noticed it: Nigh all the scruffy servers were wearing Dickies. I chalked it up to being a uniform requirement or a necessity of the job, but that didn't explain the other half of the oddball mode equation — many of the diners were also wearing the brand, as well.

It was hardly an isolated incident. Further upwardly the street, on Bedford Artery, the traditional piece of work pant was spotted again and over again, hanging loosely from the hips of skaters whizzing by and on the waists of bearded dads carrying Whole Foods numberless. Scruffy hipsters, urban lumberjacks, ii.0 workwear adherents, trend-chasing Vetements wannabes, and even post-normcore minimalists were all wearing the unassuming pants.

What gives?

Take Michael Baquerizo, for example, who, as a stylist for clients like Jack Spade, Steven Alan, and Nepenthes New York, has the means to purchase simply near whatsoever pair of pants he wants. And yet he chooses the classic 874 pant from the Fort Worth–based brand, a straight-cut pair made from no nonsense eight-ounce cotton twill, and which go for effectually 20 bucks on Amazon, where he buys them.

Baquerizo has started wearing Dickies in the by few years, for a few reasons. First, there'south the fact that they're piece of cake to come by and cheap. "I grew up in New York and New York kids accept a trend to want things that are produced in limited quantities," he says. Now, though, he wants something more readily available. "As I've gotten older, I'm attracted to things that are always being fabricated and don't alter." And then there's the fit. He likes that they have a higher-rise, that they're hard-wearing, and, perhaps well-nigh important, they're not skinny. "Slim feels a picayune fleck outdated. I'g not a skater, simply it's associated with skate mode. It's just a looser, street affair, which I gravitate to."

The skinny expect is out and denim is on the downswing, which, combined, makes this the perfect time for Dickies to be seen in a new low-cal by a new audition. Add together to that the recently exalted status of mass labels like Carhartt and Champion and you've got a perfect recipe for the humble brand'southward cultural ascendancy. Today, stylish guys on the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles are embracing Dickies' roomier fit, wider leg, and workwear backstory, making it an unexpected way hit.

"I like how they keep their shape, where other pants get mushy and wrinkled," says Marcus Manoogian, a producer for Vice. Manoogian started wearing them when he was a teenager, because they were cheap and stiff. "Nearly skaters don't accept coin growing up and it's an easy fashion to stay looking fresh." Today, he likes their versatility. "You tin practise a lot with Dickies. I like cutting them off for shorts and if y'all cuff them they stay in place," he says.

Opening Ceremony, the cool-kid downtown retailer, released a collaboration with the brand final month, where they took the classic 874 and fabricated it in pinstripes, a witty play on workwear/businesswear. "I've been wearing Dickies all my life," says Humberto Leon, the store'south co-founder and creative managing director. "Growing up in California, it'south the pant that yous wear." He is, in part, referring to the two major West Coast subcultures that accept become synonymous with Dickies over the years: skaters and urban Chicanos known as "cholos."

At the end of the day, Mr. Leon is in the fashion business organization, and it's the fit that was primal for this partnership. "The silhouette is right," he says. "It's the type of pant that we all wanted. It'south moving away from the skinny pant, it's something straight off the trunk simply not clownish. It'southward merely a expert, almost 'normal' fit, with a normal leg opening."

The mainstreaming of skater style plays a crucial part in the current Dickies mania. Skate is everywhere. Brands similar Palace and Quartersnacks are carried at the loftier-concept store Dover Street Market, while skate culture is the foundation for brands like Palm Angels, Dim Mak, and Second/Layer. Thrasher hoodies as far equally the heart tin can see. The sport was even given a weeklong celebration on Faddy's website.

Dickies also play into a blue-collar energy that's cresting in menswear, equally when the designer Heron Preston collaborated on a collection with the Department of Sanitation, or Off-White designer Virgil Abloh'south winking tow-truck printed T-shirts, or GQ Style's ode to structure worker style — even if it'south difficult to say with but how much irony this is all being deployed. "At that place's this increased utility in menswear," says Jian DeLeon, editorial director at the online lifestyle publication Highsnobiety. "The line between what they're wearing on a chore site and on the street is increasingly … it's an uncanny valley."

Only dorsum to the pants: "The hook-and-bar closure, the high waist, it'southward hitting all the correct '90s notes," says DeLeon, who was recently the menswear editor at the tendency-forecasting bureau WGSN. "In the aforementioned mode that the hoodie and classic sportswear take get elevated, Dickies have literally become a canvas." In a time when Champion vies with Gucci as the logo du jour, and Vetements is selling co-branded Carhartt denim button-ups for $1,085 and Hanes tees for $310, Dickies is perfectly positioned equally a highbrow/lowbrow span. "It'south such a weird time in fashion," DeLeon says, noting that it's difficult to pinpoint the trend'due south origins. "We're non certain who watches the watchmen or where things start. Information technology's like: This is a thing, we're not sure why information technology's a affair merely we're going to ringlet with it."

There's a convergence of seemingly random elements that, when taken together, can explicate how we arrived here. Skating is no longer some slacker pastime; now it's a romanticized sport, with dreamy Southern California undertones. "Growing upwardly skating in the '90s you were kind of a loser, it wasn't popular like today," Manoogian notes. And then there's the fact that fits, in full general, are moving away from the super-tailored to the more relaxed. Oversize is in and the 874 pant has been oversize since it was created, fifty years agone, regardless of trend. Then at that place's the nouveau-workwear free energy that's been injected into the high-fashion world, where mass brands take gotten the ineffable patina of cool, thanks to a multitude of high-depression collaborations and the exploding athleisure and streetwear markets. That they're happening simultaneously makes a curveball like this not simply possible, but practically preordained.

Dickies loom large in the mind of the American public. They're privately held and family-owned, and are mostly known for providing occupational uniforms for chefs and factory workers. They don't need to pay much listen to a handful of stylish urban millennials fetishizing their classic pant mode, which, equally fate would accept it, is celebrating its 50th ceremony this year. Those sorts of surges in popularity tin't be manufactured, like the Birkenstocks craze of two summers agone.

"We consider ourselves a heritage workwear brand, we've been that way since 1922. We always stayed true and authentic to that position," says Michael Penn, senior vice-president of worldwide marketing at the brand. On the phone, he's a obviously-talking man and makes it clear that fashion isn't Dickies' principal priority, which, of course, only helps solidify their absurd status. "There's an ebb and menses that has come from unlike cultures and tribes and people who have discovered, or rediscovered, the brand," he says.

Dickies is, at its core, a working person'due south brand, and has more often than not but hummed along, doing its own affair, and allowed others to determine the cultural relevance of a pair of pants from the outside. Yet other collaborations over the years — with J.Crew, Supreme, and, currently, Urban Outfitters — point they aren't totally out of the loop. "I think the manner the company notoriously approached it was, we're making workwear and if someone comes into our infinite and adopts information technology, like a skater, we let it be," Penn says. "Merely nosotros realized there's a consumer like the skate community that actually loves the product and embraces information technology and speaks to information technology in an accurate way, and we should listen to them and hear what they take to say," he says.

Perhaps the coolest affair virtually Dickies is how anti-manner the brand is (DeLeon calls them the "anti-khaki"). At that place's a certain cachet in manner circles in making a pair of Dickies look as skilful as, say, some designer pair of pants. If you spend a bunch of money on designer clothes, y'all'd meliorate look expert, or else what's the betoken? But if y'all tin can make a pair of humdrum compatible pants that you tin can buy on Amazon look like capital-F Fashion? Now that's cool. Information technology'due south like how Manoogian remembers his childhood, that kids, particularly skaters, wouldn't wear designer jeans — that was "for private-schoolhouse kids." "You were much cooler if you went to Marshalls and constitute some acid-launder jeans or Dickies for 20 bucks," he says. "So oftentimes, ironically, it becomes absurd because it's just what the youth are wearing and other people take notice."

The Near Popular Men'southward Pants Right Now Toll $40