What’s Up, Snailiens?

I know what you’re thinking!

“Oh, maybe I’ll buy a pair of Dickies 874s, but I better do my due diligence and see if they’re worth it. I’ll just type it into Google… whoops, there’s an Iron Snail article. I better read that one.”

Here it is, everyone, welcome to the Dickies 874 review!

Why These Pants Are Actually Pretty Wild

Dickies 874 is possibly the most fascinating pants from a technical level ever to be invented because they were the first to do something: make it imperative that they are a blend.

They can’t be just 100% cotton, and they can’t be 100% polyester – they have to be a blend because of a certain feature that Dickies gives to their pants. They started doing this in 1967, and then, they recently flipped their blends, so now it’s way more polyester than cotton, which isn’t good or necessary.

It makes the pants way worse, but we’ll get into that later because there is a solution involving buying a different pair of pants, which I’ll tell you about.

Let’s Talk About How These Actually Fit

Okay, part one: fit. You may be asking, “How do these pants fit, Michael? Tell us more about Dickies 874 sizing, please!” Well, they fit well if you get the correct size. I did not get the correct size for these pants – I actually got three sizes up because I really wanted kind of bigger, straight-fitting pants. I kind of like the look.

I suggest you stick to the size because they just fit better. I’m usually a size 29, but I went with a 32. They’re generally a straight fit, and there’s a very, very relaxed taper, but so relaxed that you basically can’t see it. So size according to your size like you’ve done since you were a tiny baby, and they should fit well. That’s it, pretty simple on the Dickies 874 sizing front.

Dickies vs. Carhartt – Let’s Break It Down

It’s hard to write a Dickies 874 review without talking about Carhartt. The weird thing about Dickies is that we all kind of know Carhartt as that workwear brand that got really popular and everybody loved, and then all of a sudden, Carhartt WIP was invented, or I guess the license for Carhartt products was bought by a European company who then made it more stylishious, and then that was that.

And Carhartt is still very trendy around a lot of people, but there’s a different market which is the Dickies market. And Dickies are less expensive than Carhartt, so if you’re getting a pair of Carhartt pants, they’re like $50, Dickies 874 work pants are like $30.

Quick Comparison: Dickies 874 vs. Carhartt Work Pants

The Quality Situation

There are some quality concessions, which really don’t matter if you just want these for fashion pants. I don’t know if they matter for, you know, heavy workwear jobs because I don’t have a heavy workwear job, but I assume it would.

The biggest difference right away that you’ll see is Carhartt uses triple stitching along their seams, or along a lot of their seams, which basically makes the stitching so tough on Carhartts that the fabric will fail before the stitching, and it’s very, very difficult to get Carhartt fabric to fail. So, all in all, they’re very, very tough pants.

Let’s Get Into the Technical Details

Carhartt also uses a flat-felled seam which is much stronger than what Dickies does to keep their pants together. I don’t assume it will be a big problem, and I bet a lot of people don’t actually ever see this problem come to fruition, but it’s just not nearly as strong as what Carhartt is doing.

Also, the material, which we will get into, which is the most important part of this article, is different. Carhartt typically sticks with 100% cotton, which means it’s missing one detail that Dickies has, but the fabric breathes better. It doesn’t pill, which Dickies do a lot – mine are full of pilling.

The Real Deal About Dickies Material

Dickies 874 work pants are made of twill, just like denim. They’re made out of an eight-and-a-half-ounce twill, which, if you know denim weights, jeans are typically around 12 to 14 ounces.

So these are lighter than denim jeans, but you wouldn’t be able to feel it. It could be the blend, which is cotton and polyester, which prevents wrinkling – that’s the polyester’s job in that blend or one of the polyester’s jobs.

But then the fascinating thing, as I was saying before, is what comes with Dickies is a permanent crease.

You can wash these Dickies as many times as you want, and they don’t wrinkle, but for some reason, there is a very important wrinkle always there, and that would be the little pleat on the pants.

So how does it get there? There are a lot of ways to get a permanent pleat on pants, which is very important – we’ll get into that later. What Dickies does, or did and still does, I believe, is they just melt part of the pants and it stays like that forever.

So, that’s why the polyester cotton blend is so important. If you’ve ever ironed anything, which I have, considering I am the Iron Snail, when you’re clicking the little wheel on the iron, you could set something to polyester if you’re ironing polyester, which is very, very low temperature, or like cotton, linen, stuff like that, which is a much higher temperature.

The Science Behind the Crease

So what I think Dickies does is they get the pants. They fold them however they want, or whatever, and then, when they press with an iron or whatever it is on a more industrial level, they essentially melt that part of the polyester and not the cotton.

So now the polyester fabric is always kind of shaped like the shape of that pleat because it’s just melted plastic in that shape instead of the more free-flowing polyester fibers that we use for fabric.

And originally, when Dickies did this with the 65% cotton blend, it was fine, but since they had to keep up with that comparatively very low price point of 30 dollars, they had to cut some costs, and the first thing to go was like 30% of the cotton.

Let’s Talk About Pilling

The problem with that blend is that pilling occurs. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to find out the exact reason for pilling, but from what I can find, pilling occurs when there’s an imbalance in strength between two materials in a blend, and that would be that polyester is stronger than cotton.

So when a cotton thread normally snaps on a lot of pairs of pants, it’s not an issue because it’s all cotton, but since this is a blend, the polyester does not snap, and then that cotton basically spins and wraps around the polyester, and you get pills.

And these pants pill like crazy, and it also looks like they kind of fade to this chalky color. Obviously, you can get a pill machine and take them all off, but I figured I would keep mine on just to show you that is – I feel like that is the number one sign of a low-quality garment.

So pilling isn’t really something that I like that much, and I don’t think vintage Dickies did. If you can find vintage Dickies and it’s 65% cotton, 35% polyester, you’ll probably be good, and I was actually going to suggest that you get vintage Dickies instead of modern ones and find them from the 70s and stuff, but I really can’t find any.

So if you find some, those are probably good, but if you can’t, you’ll probably have to get an alternative if you want the highest quality pants without pilling.

Here’s What You Should Buy Instead

But if you want something that looks like Dickies 874 work pants but they’re a little higher quality, they’re no polyester or something like that, here’s what you need.

You can break it up – the first thing you want is a twill weave pants, which are chinos, jeans obviously, something like that, and very, very lightweight, so probably not jeans because chinos or the Dickies, for example, are eight and a half ounces. So you want a twill weave that is lightweight.

Some polyester content actually would not be that bad if it was less than 35% or 35%, just because it’ll give it that non-wrinkled look easier. But also you can do this with 100% cotton. You just might have to keep it ironed a bit more.

And then the other thing that you want is a permanent pleat, which – here’s the thing, you could go with Stan Ray, you can go Levi’s chinos, Taylor Stitch Boss Duck is phenomenal, I have that, or you can just go Carhartt work pants in general, and you can get a permanent pleat added in.

And I think there’s a bunch of different ways to do that – the one that I saw that was pretty popular is they would add silicone, like a little silicone line to the inside of the pants, and it holds the pleat perfect, and it’s heat resistant and water resistant and everything like that.

So you can do that and essentially turn a pair of Carhartts into a better pair of Dickies. It just might look a little weird because usually, Carhartts are made out of duck fabric which is a plain weave – twill is different.

So I guess I’m going against what I said, but anyway, you can get work pants that have a nice drape to them and add the pleat in yourself and get higher quality pants with that same look.

Watch This Review

Wrapping It Up

I wish Dickies made a higher-quality version of the 874s. I was surprised to see that they didn’t, but if they did that, that would be really cool. Even if it was just 65% cotton, they switched it back to how it was.

Well, that’s the end of my Dickies 874 review. I hope you are all well. I will see you soon!

This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.