I’ve been wearing Dickies or ben Davis pants every since the 9th grade ( just a few years ago). They went hand in hand with my skate board and loppy sided bangs. Then a decade later while working in a shop on Haight Street all the ” cool” kids were wearing them. Today 2011 there is nothing more durable or out lasting then some good Dickies Workwear mixed in with my mature style of dressing to bring my look together. I never knew anything about Dickies besides they sell them at hardware stores as well as hipster shops in the Haight/ Ashbury SF CA
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“We recently caught up with the head of European Dickies, Juergen Alker, at Dickies Hamburg HQ for an interview about the brands heritage, their collaborations, projects and why they didn’t have an archive until two years ago.”- By Jason Dike
Love Your Workwear
So what happens to heritage now? It’s been a busy year for the word, nearly every blog post, magazine article and press release mentions the H word at least once. The New York Times put it into it’s most overused fashion words list which, seeing as NYT aren’t usually first on the fashion pulse, is really saying something. So, the question remains, where do we go from here?
That’s not a question Dickies ask themselves. They see themselves as a workwear brand and always have. And, more importantly, they see workwear as it is – light years away from fashion or lifestyle brands. Up until a few years ago, they didn’t even have an archive. “Their archive was a cellar in a school building they owned” says Juergen Alker, who runs the streetwear wing of Dickies. “Down there was almost nothing, just a few items. It was just like a normal old cellar – pretty spooky actually. Now they’ve started a real archive and they’re buying back pieces from Ebay and looking around vintage markets in order to get a little more history back to the company. When it was being made no one was thinking that they might need it in the future. We just do workwear, things change over time and you develop new stuff and you just don’t think you might need it again.”
They belatedly started their own archive and since then the European wing of Dickies, based in Hamburg, have been taking inspiration from Dickies archive rather than creating new products. “We don’t really design anymore, we just take pieces and twist them a little bit”.
February 11, 2011
Accidental Bear 