Fifty Years of the Most American Jacket in Existence

The denim jacket is as American as the cheeseburger and roughly as controversial—fashion has spent decades alternately worshipping and burying it, wearing it ironically, wearing it sincerely, then insisting the sincerity was ironic all along. The 1967 Type III Trucker from Levi’s has outlasted every one of those cycles without apparently caring.

To mark the jacket’s fiftieth birthday, Levi’s turned a space on Chausseestrasse in Berlin into a temporary exhibition—photographs and custom-made Truckers tracing the garment’s life as a cultural object. The curatorial premise was honest: the Type III works as a blank canvas precisely because it has no aspirations toward elegance. It was a working jacket that absorbed decades of personalization and came out the other side as an icon.

The photographs brought in a loose generation of European creatives to respond to it—among them the Russian publication Central Park Magazine, Belgian rapper Coley, the Dandy Diary crew, and photographer Vitali Gelwich. What made the selection interesting was the range of interpretations: the jacket as armor, as nostalgia object, as fashion piece, as street-level necessity. Fifty years of projection onto one silhouette.

I keep coming back to why the Trucker endures when so many other supposedly timeless pieces quietly fade. Part of it is the democratic history—it was never expensive, never aspirational in the luxury sense. You wore it because it worked. Everything that came after, all the styling and the fashion-week appearances and the collaborations, is built on top of that original indifference to being fashionable. Maybe that’s the only kind of classic that actually lasts.