Trust Us, You Should Take Your Styling Advice From a Traffic Cone

There’s something repugnant yet alluring about a violently bright shade of orange. After all, this is a color literally designed to be impossible to ignore. But while that works well for traffic cones and safety vests, it’s far trickier to translate into fashion. 

But when fluorescent orange works, it really works. And boy does the Carhartt WIP x Patta half-zip in “safety orange” work.

Call it a personal bias toward this particularly zesty hue, or simply the great campaign shoot by Accra-based photographer Nana Yaw Oduro, but the sweater stopped me mid-scroll. Its heavyweight wool blend lends an almost chunky heft, yet it’s as architecturally sound as the fictitious architect László Tóth’s viral pullover in The Brutalist. And the back-side graphic, of a cartoon mallet mid-swing, brings a bit of lightness to the piece. 

The full eight-piece release — a reunion of Carhartt's more fashion-oriented offshoot and an Amsterdam streetwear label more than a decade after their 2014 “Wild at Hartt collection” — also has vests, hoodies, and tees, plus a great beanie accessorized with workwear rivets in the same shade of “safety orange.” 

Blue collar workwear has always occupied a special place in fashion’s beating heart, but it usually translates into a conveyor belt of nice-but-safe double-knee pants or bulky, boxy work jackets — two silhouettes well-represented in this collab, to be fair. The sculptural half-zip feels far more interesting, and more aligned with what, elsewhere in workwear, Timberland is doing to its signature construction boot through Third of June and Supreme link-ups. 

And the sweater feels tailor-made to stunt on any construction site on which its wearer may or may not naturally wander. 

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