Dickies Are on Top of the World. Again.

During a recent family visit, my pants sparked an interrogation. My uncle, who loves cargo shorts and owns a window-washing business, noticed the Dickies label on the back of my pants. I wear Dickies on the job! he said. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing with a pair. A fair question. That I, along with people like Justin Bieber, A$AP Rocky, and Kaia Gerber, now reach for the same pants as my middle-aged window-washing uncle says a lot about where fashion is in 2018. Dickies pants are fashion’s ultimate Rorschach test. You might see a rugged item meant to be worn day in and day out to your blue-collar job. Or maybe you see a pair of pants that, with just a bit of tailoring, fit perfectly into 2018’s weird-pants moment. Which side you land on reveals an awful lot—about the implications of fashion’s workwear fetish, how the line between what’s cool and what’s whack is so often dictated by context, and how heritage brands capitalize on fickle trends. Read more at GQ.