Despite being designed for factory floors, loading docks, and dank, unfinished basements, the best work jackets for men are truly for everyone these days. As the likes of Paul Mescal and Austin Butler (who told GQ he wore his for a year straight) continue to prove, work jackets handily do two of the best things a garment can. First, they inject your fits with casual, off-duty-tough-guy energy. (This, to be clear, is good.) Second, they flatter you in all the right places, framing your shoulders and neatening up your waistline whether you’re pairing it with slim jeans or the kinds of wide, puddling trousers we keep yapping about.
Even better, many of the best versions come from affordable brands like Dickies and Carhartt, though you can certainly find tempting versions of the silhouette from upstart and established indie labels like Randy’s Garments and Camiel Fortgens. Here, 13 of our favorites—plenty of which I tested myself—which will all look better after you’ve worn them for a year (or seven).
The Best Men’s Work Jackets, According to GQ
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Best Work Jacket Overall: Carhartt Blanket-Lined Detroit Jacket
The Carhartt Detroit work jacket is the classic work jacket for a reason. For one, it’s been around for over 70 years—not quite as long as blue jeans or cowboy boots, but certainly long enough to put it in the upper echelon of American fashion’s essential exports. The jacket is sturdy, made of an impressively stiff, thick canvas that’s cut with three perfect front pockets, two of which have a curved opening to make shoving your hands in them on cold days as easy as possible. The insulated blanket lining (and corduroy collar) also mean that unlike many work jackets, this one’s a true year-rounder. And not many people know this, but there are also some sneaky snap buttons under the collar, should you ever want to attach a hood.
Best Budget Work Jacket: Dickies Insulated Eisenhower Jacket
The Dickies Eisenhower is just-about as old as the Carhartt Detroit, but it’s not always given the same amount of respect. Maybe that’s because it flies a little more under the radar, with its logo patch placed discreetly towards the bottom hem. The jacket—which comes in plenty of colors, though there’s some gravitas to the true black—gets its name from our 34th president, who spearheaded a redesign of US military uniforms while serving as a general in World War II. The jacket he designed, made from a much lighter (but still stiff) fabric and cut roomily, served as the inspiration for the Dickies team in the mid-20th century.
Best Upgrade Work Jacket: J.Crew Wallace & Barnes Canvas Work Jacket
The stiffness of a work jacket can be a bit off-putting, especially if you’re the type of person who rarely steps out of a sweatsuit. The only solution to this is just wearing the jacket as much as possible, which will eventually make the fabric bend and soften to your exact shape. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle, you can buy your jacket secondhand, where someone else has done the work. Or, you can just buy the (insulated!) Wallace and Barnes Work Jacket, which is constructed from super soft cotton. It still looks the part of a hardwearing, day-labor ready coat—and has the same corduroy collar and satisfying zipped chest pocket as the Detroit jacket. But this time, the fabric is silky smooth to the touch, and the cut is a bit more tailored. It’d even look great with a shirt and tie.
Best Work Jacket for Chilly Weather: Randy’s Garments Melton Wool-Check Service Jacket
Let’s now leave Main Street, shall we? Meet Randy’s Garments: While most of the major work jacket labels are based in the U.S., very few of our favorite work jackets are actually made onshore. This jacket from Randy’s Garments is a rare exception. (Everything from Randy’s Garments is not only made in America, they’re cut and sewn in New York City’s garment district.) This is pretty nuts in 2024, but the results speak for themselves. The roomy shape of the brand’s work jacket lets you appreciate the unique check pattern of its supple wool fabric, and that beautiful black corduroy used on the collar? It’s also lining the cuffs.
Best Cropped Work Jacket: Abercrombie & Fitch Cropped Zip Workwear Jacket
Over the last few years, Abercrombie and Fitch has completed a full 180 from its drift into the memory banks of noughties teens. Gone are the skin-tight shirts, ripped-to-bits jeans, and noxious colognes—they’ve been replaced by the exact kinds of roomy trousers, elegant knits, and yes, work jackets that most guys want to wear right now. Its Workwear Jacket, sold in 13 different colorways including a few with some handsome embroidery, and a few more from unexpected, beautiful fabrics (all-over black corduroy!) is cut pretty wide, but also quite short. Indeed, the crop really makes it stand out in a sea of more classic options. It’s the perfect jacket to wear when you really want someone to pay attention to your pants.
Best Work Jacket for Fashion Guys: Prada Cotton Jacket
Prada has always specialized in making high-fashion more accessible and wearable than it sometimes gets credit for—while always still flexing its design innovations just enough. Case in point: this simple (at first) cotton jacket. Bright white fabric is an odd choice for the broad, accommodating work jacket. It’s going to get ruined by any exposure to the elements, right? Prada is one step ahead of you, applying what it calls an “artisan treatment ” to pre-distress it. It’s kind of a joke, selling a jacket that appears dragged across the carpeted floor of a college dorm, but also a slick type of narrative creation. After all, you can’t really look at the coat without imagining where it’s been.
More Work Jackets We Love
Gap Canvas Denim Carpenter Jacket
Kartik Research Upcycled Cotton-Convas Jacket
Schott Union Cotton Canvas Down Work Jacket
Story Mfg. Organic Cotton-Twill Jacket
Evan Kinori Yarn Dyed Wool Check Zip Jacket
Camiel Fortgens Simple Jacket
Banana Republic Cotton-Twill Garage Jacket
What to Look for in a Great Work Jacket
These days, work jackets seem to have an undeniable stranglehold on the imagination of guys who spend all day staring at their keyboards. (There’s a political element to this, of course. Whether or not you act in solidarity with your fellow laborers under capitalism, a work jacket allows you to look the part of the everyman.) But also, they’re just a great jacket for busy lives! There’s a generally accommodating cut that doesn’t restrict your movement, plenty of pockets, and hardy materials that can easily handle a snag, or sudden shower.
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)
