In Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar, the only thing to get more screentime that Matthew McConaughey is his sandy-coloured Carhartt jacket. But its appearance is no accident...

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If Interstellar, Christopher’s Nolan’s thrilling, screaming, dystopian vision of one man v the apocalypse teaches us anything, it’s that crops might fail, but Matthew McConaughey’s career will never slow down.

His role as Cooper, a Nasa pilot-turned-farmer in an agrarian world, is another fine example of his McConaissance – another nail in the romcom coffin of Mr “all right, all right, all right”. But coming at it from a fashion perspective, the real star of the film is in fact McConaughey’s Carhartt Weathered Duck Detroit.

Now bear with us. It’s just a jacket. Yet the sandy-coloured, multi-pocketed number is also one of Carhartt’s most iconic, and its unbroken, hour-long appearance on Cooper, before being borrowed years later by Murphy (Jessica Chastain), his grownup daughter who wears it right until the film’s denouement, is no accident.

We know this for two reasons: one, the prominent, centre-screen branding (the tag is a whopping four metres high if you lucked out with Imax tickets); two, the state of the jacket, which becomes progressively and metaphorically more battered as the plot hurtles its wearers towards famine and death.

The film might be a commentary on climate change and family values, but given its agelessness, using Carhartt is a smart move. Identifiable by the tag (square sewn patch) and the colours (various shades of field), something that the film’s scenography elevates, you don’t need to own anything Carhartt to know what it means and why it exists.

The company, based originally in Detroit, has been around since the 1890s; should we find ourselves hurtling towards the end of the world, chances are we’ll all still be wearing Carhartt. It’s also an interesting bit of costumery, Carhartt being a brand that transcends popular culture owing, perhaps, to its wide-reaching, generation-spanning customer base. The cut is deliberately generous, which lends itself to the more barrel-chested among us. Equally, owning this jacket was a rite of passage for teenage boys where I grew up who liked its baggier fit.

Carhartt is known for its canvas work gear, a look AdWeek associates with people who “create things with their hands instead of an app”. Craftsmen, blue-collar workers, skaters and hipsters have been wearing it since the 1890s, roughly in that order. Most recently, it’s become uniform of the lumbersexual, a rare breed of metrosexual with an aptitude for putting up shelves. Thanks to the triple-stitched seams and heavy-duty fabric, it’s quite possible some of them have been wearing the very same jacket.

With reported revenue of around $600m (£380m) in 2013, it’s one of the few brands untouched by the recession, gliding between tribes, each one reclaiming it as their uniform. Its latest incarnation, on blue-collar-hero Cooper, is a notable revival because it’s recently been derided for its hipster association. As its marketing chief, Tony Ambroza, explained: “Hipsters seem to like what we stand for and that they can’t find our clothes at mass-market retailers” – although it probably didn’t help that, in London, the company’s factory shop used to sit in the heart of hipsterville Hackney (and was ransacked by looters during the 2011 riots), and that, in the US, the company launched a craft beer with New Holland Brewing.

But this is how Carhartt operates. Part of its shtick is its ability to jump between demographics. In a winning marketing move in the late 1980s, hip-hop label Tommy Boy Records handed out promotional jackets to key industry players. The Weathered Duck Detroit went on to appear in the video for House of Pain’s Jump Around while, according to the New York Times, the jacket became a favourite of crack dealers who wore it because “they needed to keep warm and they needed to carry a lot of stuff”. This may explain its subsequent streetwear explosion, and why, alongside Stussy and Bape, it’s still huge in Japan. Back in the US, Carhartt sponsors blue collar events, is a vocal supporter of trade unions, yet still works with fashion’s elite – last year saw collaborations with Adam Kimmel and APC.

“The thing is” explains Carhartt spokesperson Kashif Bashir, speaking about the Detroit, “this jacket will never really went out of fashion.”

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