A one-piece garment consisting of trousers with a bib front and shoulder straps—a garment of labor that has been adopted by every generation since the twentieth century as a uniform of authenticity.
Dungarees were standardized by companies like Lee and OshKosh B’Gosh, and by the early twentieth century they had become the default uniform of American manual labor. The garment’s association with honest work gave it a cultural currency that its creators never anticipated.
In the 1960s and 1970s, dungarees were adopted by the counterculture as a rejection of conventional fashion. To wear dungarees was to align oneself with labor, with simplicity, with the values of an imagined pre-agricultural simplicity. In the 1990s, dungarees—now called overalls—returned as a fashion item, worn by teenagers and celebrities as a gesture of studied casualness. The dungaree has completed a full circle: from labor to rebellion to fashion, carrying at each stage the symbolic weight of the work it originally represented.
