LONDON — Cult streetwear label Carhartt WIP unveiled its installation “Sedimental Works” on Thursday, taking over the basement of Tate Modern to celebrate the cultural impact its Active jacket has accumulated over the past five decades.
A wardrobe essential for generations of streetwear fans on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, the Active jacket is made with heavyweight canvas and comes with a poplin-lined body and nylon-lined sleeves. A woven square label featuring its signature C logo is placed on the left side of the kangaroo pocket.
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The style has inspired the recent resurgence of utility fashion, most prominently seen on the runways of Miu Miu.
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Now, the jacket’s history is being carefully examined through an immersive experience — bringing together light, sound, and material to evoke the social and emotional atmospheres that have surrounded the jacket over the years — curated by the Paris-based creative practice Ill-Studio.
Thomas Subreville, director of Ill-Studio, said he approached the curation of the jacket as an act of excavation.
“Instead of reconstructing history chronologically, I wanted to reveal how meaning accumulates over time, how a simple garment becomes an archive of human gestures, social change, and aesthetic tension,” he added.
While the jacket itself has remained more or less the same in the past half a century, Subreville pointed out that the meanings attached to it have constantly shifted, from workwear to streetwear, from protection to identity, and from function to iconography.
By influencing each other, the jacket formed what Subreville called “a nonlinear history.”
“I wanted to acknowledge that these cultural layers coexist rather than replace one another. The exhibition stages them simultaneously, as overlapping sediments of time. The goal was not to document progression, but to expose the synchronicity of moments and how every memory still resonates inside the present,” he added.
Subreville believed the installation should also act like the culture around the jacket: “unstable, layered and polyphonic.”
“You cannot trace a single meaning because each visitor reconstructs their own version from fragments. The space does not speak about the jacket; it speaks through it, allowing its multiple cultural lives to coexist in the same environment,” he said.
As for what makes the jacket a timeless icon, he said the style’s strength lies in its consistency.
“That tension between permanence and impermanence is what gives it longevity. Timelessness has little to do with design perfection and everything to do with adaptability. The Active jacket absorbs the culture around it without losing itself. It becomes a surface for projection, for work, rebellion, identity and belonging. Its endurance is not aesthetic but psychological,” he said.
On a personal level, Subreville considered the jacket a representation of a kind of collective authorship, a form that has belonged to so many people that it almost transcends individuality.
“It is a social object, a uniform for multiplicity. It does not perform or adapt to trends; it endures by remaining itself. That resilience feels human to me. Meaning is built through use, through experiences, through time, not through image or rhetoric,” he added.
On the opening night, there were live performances lined up with a cohort of music artists from different backgrounds, including classically trained, experimental cellist Abi Asisa, South London avant-garde singer Klein, Brixton act Wu-Lu, known for a mix of grunge, punk, jazz and shoegaze, and Erika de Casier, a Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter known for her heady take on contemporary R&B and avant-pop.
Carhartt WIP was established in 1994 by Edwin Faeh and today operates more than 100 stores in Europe, Asia and the U.S.
It is the European streetwear-inspired subbrand of the venerable Carhartt label, which was founded by Hamilton Carhartt in Detroit in 1889 as a workwear brand, and it is still owned and operated by his descendants.