Take a look inside Dickies’ private archive room, which holds over a century of stories
In the new top-floor offices of Dickies in downtown Fort Worth is a room that only two employees can access.
Ann Richardson, the clothing company’s chief archivist, and Corinna Wright, the senior design manager, will give tours of the room to visiting customers on occasion, but in most cases it’s not open to the public.
The room, known as the Dickies archives, is filled with old pictures and clothing spanning the company’s 102-year history. Some of the pants and shirts have dirt stains and holes, while most are pristine. The photos show former Dickies owners and celebrities wearing the brand. Multiple old magazine advertisements are framed on the walls.
Richardson points to a photo from the 1980s of Madonna dressed in Dickies.
“Dickies became cool,” Richardson said.
The archives started in 2009 in Dickies’ former headquarters on West Vickery Boulevard, a red-brick campus built in 1924 just two years after Dickies established its workwear brand in Fort Worth. The room was about 245 square feet.
Last year, the company moved out of the old campus and into the top floor of a six-story building at 500 Taylor St. The archive moved as well, into a much bigger space at the new headquarters — 1,000 square feet.
“We actually had a lot of the product that was still left there and around that time, we started to come up with having a collection of those items,” Wright said.
The archive also includes clothing worn by everyday customers. One pair of pants survived a tornado. Another outfit belonged to a grandfather who wore Dickies almost every day. Then there’s the pants that were shredded by a tiger.
“We often get garments that are worn and used with their story to it,” Wright said. “When we get those stories, those are just so meaningful to us, and that’s what this archive is all about.”
This story was originally published June 20, 2024 at 2:24 PM.
