The work jacket does not begin on the runway. It begins with a body that gets cold, carries weight, breathes dust, stands through a shift, and comes home in the same thing it wore all day.
It was not born as an image. Heavy fabric, large pockets, a straight cut, a colour that hides dirt. Everything had a purpose. Pockets were for tools. Thick cotton was made to survive labour. Faded cuffs were not a design trick, but the result of time, sweat, washing, weather and physical work.
Fashion has always had a weakness for clothes that seem to come from places where fashion should not be the main subject. A workshop, a warehouse, a farm, a garage, a construction site, a laundry room, a kitchen, the street, a second-hand shop, a cheap workwear store. These codes keep returning to the runway, but cleaned up, edited and repackaged.
It is important not to confuse inspiration with appropriation. The problem is not that a designer takes a work jacket and places it inside a collection. The problem begins when the visual language of poverty becomes entertainment for people protected from its consequences.
Worn-out fabric becomes a joke. An oversized fit becomes styling. A faded colour becomes a trend. Signs of wear become “soul”. Meanwhile, real poverty does not receive the same romantic halo inside fashionable spaces. A person who actually looks poor is rarely read as “authentic”. They are not placed on a moodboard. They are not called effortless. They are not photographed for street style unless there is the right brand, the right irony or the right face attached.
Poverty starts looking interesting only when it can be controlled. When it can be worn for a few hours. When it comes with a price tag, a label, a stylist, a press release and the option to return it.
That is what makes the work jacket such a perfect symbol of contemporary fashion hypocrisy. It allows luxury to look less sterile, less distant, less obviously rich. But the gesture remains a gesture of wealth. You can buy a jacket that looks as if someone worked in it for ten years. You can buy artificially aged leather, paint on the sleeves, a worn collar, perfect imperfection. The only thing not included in the price is the life that should have produced that texture.
The runway has been playing with the working class for years
One of the clearest examples is Junya Watanabe MAN Spring/Summer 2018. The collection was built around workwear codes and collaborations with brands like Carhartt, Levi’s and The North Face. WWD noted that Carhartt was central to the season, appearing across jackets, coats, T-shirts and trousers.
In Junya’s hands, it looked intelligent and visually strong: work jackets, patchwork, paint, heavy fabrics, boxy silhouettes. But this is exactly where the luxury mechanism becomes visible. A garment originally tied to physical labour becomes, through designer intervention, an intellectual object. Carhartt on a worker and Carhartt in Junya Watanabe speak two different social languages, even if the shape looks similar.
The theme appeared even more directly in Raf Simons x Sterling Ruby Fall/Winter 2014. Here, the workwear aesthetic passed through the artist’s studio: paint stains, raw surfaces, garments that looked like uniform, canvas and the clothes of someone who works with their hands all at once. Sterling Ruby later developed his own line, S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA., connected to his “Work Wear” practice, where damaged surfaces, acid washes and handmade effects became part of the design language.
Galliano, Dior and the moment the joke became too literal
The most brutal, almost caricatural example of this conversation is Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring 2000 by John Galliano, often referred to as the “Homeless” or “Hobo Chic” collection. Galliano was reportedly inspired by the homeless people of Paris, turning rags, newspapers, layering and social exclusion into couture spectacle.
Here, subtlety becomes difficult to defend. This was not just a work jacket, not just utility, not just rough fabric. It was poverty brought onto the runway in the most literal sense. What means danger, cold, hunger and social invisibility for real people became drama, print, silhouette and fantasy in couture.
Galliano can be defended through theatricality, historical references, his love of characters and excess. But the collection still looks like a moment when the fashion system said out loud what it usually does more softly: someone else’s deprivation can be beautiful if it is styled well enough.
Miu Miu and the apron as luxury labour
A sharper Miu Miu example is not the worn leather jacket, but Miu Miu Spring 2026 – the collection built around aprons. Not the apron as cute domestic nostalgia, but the apron as one of the most loaded garments in the history of women’s labour: factories, kitchens, cleaning, childcare, service, housework, everything that keeps life running and is rarely treated as valuable.
Miuccia Prada made the apron the centre of the collection. It appeared in cotton canvas, leather, crochet and decorated versions, sometimes practical, sometimes almost precious. The gesture was smart because the apron is not neutral. It belongs to labour that is often invisible, underpaid or unpaid. It belongs to women whose work has historically been treated as natural, expected and therefore easy to ignore.
That is what makes the collection useful for this conversation. On the runway, the apron becomes an object of desire. It gains styling, casting, light, press, cultural meaning. But outside the runway, the same garment is tied to bodies that clean, cook, serve, care, repeat, bend, stand, carry, wipe and start again. Fashion can make the apron look intellectually charged because it does not have to stay inside the labour it references.
Vetements and the expensive cheap logo
In 2016, Vetements turned a DHL T-shirt into one of fashion’s loudest memes. A piece that looked like a courier’s corporate uniform was sold for £185 and quickly became a symbol of an era when high fashion started playing directly with the visual codes of service labour, logistics, delivery and office life.
This case matters because the DHL T-shirt works almost like the work jacket. It takes the code of labour and sells it to people for whom that labour exists as a sign, not as an everyday reality. A courier in a DHL T-shirt does not look conceptual. A fashion person in a £185 DHL T-shirt looks ironic.
Balenciaga: between trauma, poverty and spectacle
At Balenciaga, Demna made the tension between luxury and reality almost the brand’s main language. A particularly strong example is Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2022, staged in a snowstorm against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The show addressed climate crisis, war, displacement and emotional coldness, with models walking through artificial snow carrying bags and wrapped in protective layers.
This collection should not be flattened into simple appropriation. Demna has his own history of displacement, and Balenciaga FW22 was tied to experiences of loss, cold, evacuation and instability. But that is exactly what makes it relevant. It shows how thin the line can be between testimony and aestheticisation. The show was emotionally powerful. It was also still a luxury spectacle.
Margiela and the difference between deconstruction and poverty drag
Maison Margiela often appears in conversations about wear, reconstruction, found objects, traces of time and anti-gloss. But with Margiela, precision matters. His work with damaged, old or repurposed garments was not as blunt as Galliano’s “Homeless” couture. It was more often about the fashion system itself: authorship, anonymity, objects without obvious status, recycling, clothes as memory.
That is why Margiela should not be read only as “luxury pretending to be poor”. His archive works better as a more complex counterpoint. In Margiela, an old thing did not always become a costume of class. It could become a question directed at fashion itself: why is newness more valuable than age, why is authorship more important than the object, why is perfection considered more expensive than a trace of use?
Fashion loves the working class when it stays silent, looks good on references and does not remind anyone that behind worn fabric there is sometimes no style, no story, no character. Sometimes there is hunger. Sometimes debt. Sometimes a body that hurts after a shift. Sometimes a life with nothing romantic about it.
The work jacket became iconic not because it is closer to the truth. It became iconic because fashion learned how to take only the parts of truth that age beautifully.
