John Elliott x CAT Is an Out-of-Left-Field Collab That Genuinely Works
You’d be forgiven for not seeing it coming. It was, after all, not your standard kind of mashup. But there it was—on the runway, no less. The Caterpillar logo. You know the one: bold block letters, triangle in the middle. You’ve seen it countless times, no matter where you live. On a bulldozer, or a backhoe. At a job site in Montana, or maybe New York. But never in a fashion show.
And then there it was again. And again. At New York Fashion Week earlier this year, John Elliott debuted an entire capsule collection with CAT, ranging from sweats and tees to cargo pants and outerwear. It hits stores this week. And even though the pairing sounds a little odd at first, according to the designer, the coming-together was completely natural.
“It really started with the inspiration for this season,” Elliott says. Fall 2019, he explains, “was drawn out of a nostalgic place.” His brand’s women’s designer, Cara Campagnoli, had recently joined the team, and Elliott soon learned that they had a shared background in Northern California. Their grandparents had even been friends. They started talking family and discovered that both remembered their parents’ dreams, back in the day, of owning a little house on the coast.
“What if we started to tell this story about this imaginary house?” That, Elliott tells me, was the question that informed the whole collection. Then, another one: “‘What if we actually were to do this on our own?’ We thought about the tools we’d need and the function of actually constructing this house. That’s where the curiosity really sparked an interest to work with CAT.”
From there, the John Elliott team reached out to Caterpillar, a marked reversal of the normal roles when a fashion brand and a gigantic company team up. CAT was into the idea. Next step: travel. “We felt like, in order to do justice to CAT, it would be a smart move for us to go through their workwear archive in Boseman, Montana,” says Elliott. So they packed up, headed out of L.A., and spent two days “not only going through their archive, but going on job sites and driving around dozers.”
The trip gave Elliott and his team some necessary perspective, but it also raised some tricky questions. For instance, how to balance the brand’s fashion point of view with the function-above-all mentality at CAT. And, trickier still, how to elevate the latter brand without straying too far from its workwear roots.
“It’s a gentle balance,” Elliott says. “You have to think about it and be respectful of it. But at the same time, it’s your job to push and to push the CAT logo into an area that it hasn’t been before.” In the case of this collab, that sometimes means the logo is emblazoned on sweats with a unique—and not-inexpensive—“double-dye” technique that’s done in Japan.
Elliott is keenly aware of the thorniness of taking a brand with $20 logo tees to a much higher price point—he recalls being teased about it by his dad’s friends while attending his sister’s wedding this spring—but he also believes it’s a necessary step. Those affordable options already exist, after all. His task was to create something that incorporated real functionality and the fashion bona fides to walk the runway.
A perfect example: “We developed a waterproof, iridescent material that’s from Italy, and quite literally will function on a job site. It just so happens to be strikingly beautiful,” he says. In a long overcoat, it was a standout of the fall 2019 NYFW show.
On September 25, more than half a year later, the CAT collection is finally becoming available to the public, with prices ranging from $148 to $698. (That coat, by the way, is a little delayed. It'll arrived next week, in all likelihood.) Elliott is excited to see the response and says he’s already registering some excitement from fans. But ultimately, the project itself—from its unexpected nature to the new avenues it demanded he explore—seems to be the thing that’s really got him riding high.
“I don’t think very many people saw this coming, but at the same time, the brand is definitely going to be better for it,” he says. “It’s one of those things that I’ll definitely look back on, and look in my closet, and be like, ‘I can’t believe I worked on that, let alone own it.’”
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