The Anti-Chic: Blue-Collar Brand Attains Coolness
In one of fashion’s weirder pairings, punk rockers and skateboarders have for years stocked their closets with Dickies apparel, a brand of work clothes with deep blue-collar roots.
Now, with rock groups such as Limp Bizkit and Alien Ant Farm wearing Dickies, the brand’s appeal has broadened to ensnare a growing number of male consumers for whom “anti-fashion” is a fashion statement.
Williamson-Dickie Manufacturing Co., based in Fort Worth, says it logged in each of the last three years triple-digit increases in sales of young men’s apparel, lately one of retail’s toughest categories. Los Angeles-based Apparel Limited Inc., which four years ago snagged the license to make a Dickies Girl line, projects that retail sales of its products will hit $100 million this year.
But while hip young consumers are snapping up Dickies at trendy Hot Topic and PacSun stores, Williamson-Dickie doesn’t seek out hipsters for design tips. Instead, it consults with plumbers, builders, mechanics and electricians, the folks who have kept it in business for eight decades.
“Our designers are the guys who dig in the dirt, crawl under the cars and plow the fields,” spokesman Jon Ragsdale said. “That’s who we go to get new ideas.” Longer shirttails to cover plumbers’ bottoms and deeper pockets to keep mechanics’ tools from falling out when a worker is wedged under a car chassis have been some of the worker-inspired innovations.
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Durable and Cheap
Young male shoppers say they like Dickies basic work pants -- with their roomy, stovepipe legs -- because they’re durable, plain and cheap.
“I’ve been skating in these for about a year and they’ve held up really well, said Andy Summers, an 18-year-old Long Beach resident, showing off the $18 pants he wore to work Wednesday at Vans Skate Park in Orange. “Kids ... don’t want to pay $30 for a pair of pants at the mall.”
Robert Horn, a 40-year-old teacher from Huntington Beach, likes the brand partly because it’s not buffeted by the whims of fashion.
“It’s not trendy, it doesn’t shift year to year,” Horne said. “I loathe stuff like that.”
Dickies’ surging popularity has some surprising beneficiaries.
Orchard Supply Hardware, for example, doesn’t generally reap any benefit when a particular apparel style shifts into vogue. But the San Jose-based chain expanded its Dickies line over the last 18 months as young shoppers increasingly warmed to the pants, shorts and two-tone jackets that OSH has been selling to janitors, mechanics and other workers for the last 18 years, said Kathy Sweeney, divisional merchandise manager. In fact, young shoppers have gotten so interested in the clothes that OSH will run its first back-to-school ad in August, she said. The company, a unit of Sears, Roebuck & Co., wouldn’t break out sales figures.
This is not the first time Dickies has enjoyed an upsurge in popularity. The brand has claimed a variety of devotees in the past, including the street gangs of L.A.. The phenomenon is an example of “brand hijacking,” which occurs when consumers infuse meaning into a product that the manufacturer never intended, said Alex Wipperfurth, a partner at Plan B, a marketing firm in San Francisco.
It occurred in earlier decades when filmgoers in the 1970s and ‘80s turned the film “Rocky Horror Picture Show” into performance art and when defiant young men two decades ago politicized Doc Marten boots, he said.
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Political Statement
The German-made shoes with the inch-thick sole “were the political statement of the counter-culture,” Wipperfurth said. “They’re the only brand I know of that were at the right and left of politics. Skinheads wore them, punks wore them. Any youth that was defiant wore them as a statement, and the company itself was never political.”
Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is another brand that’s currently enjoying a resurgence, he said, because it’s cheap and has “time-warp flashback value” for some consumers. “It was the first time they ever threw up on something in college, so it had sentimental value.”
Even Hush Puppies had a fling with hipness about five years ago, but the shoe’s maker was probably the last party to know it. “Because the company didn’t fully understand, they admitted publicly: ‘We don’t really know why we’re hip again,’ ” Wipperfurth said.
Ragsdale says young shoppers like the “authenticity” of Dickies products. Still, he sounds a little stumped when he talks about the brand’s mushrooming popularity among trendsetters.
“I think we’re hip because we don’t make products for them,” he said. “We’re enjoying it, but it’s kind of odd.”
Don’t think, however, that the 81-year-old company is naive. When the brand heated up on the streets of L.A. in the early 1990s, Williamson-Dickie briefly toyed with an urban streetwear line before figuring out it was “off strategy,” Ragsdale said.
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Limited Promotion
And it has figured out other ways to hype its cool factor.
Its Web site features a “Dickies in Music” section with photos of rocker Avril Lavigne wearing a “self-designed Dickies tux” at this year’s Grammy Awards and a shirtless Serj Tankian, lead singer of the hard rock band System of a Down, on stage in Dickies work shorts.
The company acknowledges that it sends some products to celebrities when requested but says it never pays anyone to wear its products.
The family-owned firm, which started as a bib overalls business, has made other concessions to reflect the changing times. It introduced a “double knee cell phone” pant about four years ago, Ragsdale said. Further, Dickies now has some shorts with a 13-inch inseam, plenty long enough to pass the test of coolness.
“For us, it’s a stretch, when most of our shorts are 8-inch and 10-inch,” Ragsdale said.
Clearly, the company’s not bent on trailblazing, at least not outside the estimated $1.7-billion work wear market, where it makes the bulk of its money, it says. Privately held Williamson-Dickie would not disclose sales figures.
City of Industry-based Hot Topic Inc., which sells counter-culture attire that includes wide studded belts, has tried for the last three years to get the apparel manufacturer to widen the belt loops on its men’s pants, said Cindy Levitt, general merchandise manager.
“They said ‘Nope,’ ” she said.
Stodginess has its advantages. Dickies, for example, is well-positioned to cash in on the ongoing retro craze. It still sells matching pants and shirts reminiscent of a 1950s-era gas station attendant. And its $35 “Eisenhower Jacket” -- which looks like something Ralph Kramden used to wear in “The Honeymooners” -- remains a strong seller, Ragsdale said.
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No Fall Collections
“We don’t release new collections,” he added. “It’s like whatever we have in our line that has a long history and is authentic is what is most popular.”
The link to the “working man” is one factor that draws Horne, the teacher, to the brand.
“Whenever I wear these I feel I’m wearing the same pants the guy in the garage is wearing,” he said, brushing the lint off his navy blue Dickies shorts. “I’ve got respect for the guy who works hard and provides for his family. And this is what he wears.”
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Owner-Customized
That doesn’t mean, however, that wearers treat Dickies reverently. Rather, they often whack the pants off at mid-calf or rip the sleeves off their coveralls.
Jeremy Gaither’s Dickies pants have a well-defined life span. Brand new, he wears them to hang out with pals. When they start looking worn, the hardwood molding maker wears them to work. Finally, they’re transformed into shorts.
“When they get beyond that, I just toss them away,” the 23-year-old Anaheim resident said. The process takes about five years and costs under $20.
Dickies Girl is, by necessity, much more fashion conscious, said Masud Sarshar, Apparel Limited’s chief executive. The au courant line includes low-slung pants and capris -- in stretchy or stiffer fabric -- miniskirts, warm-up suits and tube tops. Prices range from $15 for a T-shirt to $90 for a lined jacket.
Trends entice females, Masud Sarshar said, while males generally are less interested.
“I’m the creative director of Apparel Limited and you look in my closet and I have 12 of the same pair of pants and 24 of the same T-shirts,” he said. “Girls need more.”
Likewise, while the juniors line shows up in Teen Vogue and SG, a magazine for surfer and skater girls, the men’s clothes are advertised in Family Handyman, Car Craft and North American Hunter.
Still, word gets out to the right people. In the recent film “Bruce Almighty,” God -- played by Morgan Freeman -- wears Dickies, Ragsdale said.
“God is wearing Dickies’ match set,” which young shoppers call “hook-ups,” he said. “That’s a great endorsement for us.”
So far, the brand has not ranked high on national “coolest brands” surveys, said Michael Wood, vice president of Teenage Research Unlimited, which could just mean that Dickies has plenty of room to grow.
“There’s buzz about the brand,” Wood said, coming from “the right people.”
On the other hand, teens could turn on Dickies, as they’ve turned on plenty of other things before, experts say.
“You can’t appoint yourself cool,” Wipperfurth said. “It’s kind of a stamp that’s bestowed on you.”
Ragsdale shrugs off such possibilities. After all, he figures, Williamson-Dickie will still have the mechanics and plumbers.
“If we become uncool, we’re the same product we were before we were cool,” he said. “We are not trying to re-create who we are.”
