You are an advertising copywriter, communications manager, elusive creative director with undetermined responsibilities. So why are you dressed like a 20th century French railway worker?
Today, some 70 million employed Americans will likely work behind a desk. Yet our obsession with clothing from a different kind of working life just won’t stop.
Between 1910 and 2000, blue-collar jobs such as mining, construction, and manufacturing fell from 76 percent of the U.S. workforce to 25 percent. Yet the image of the worker echoes endlessly through the work jackets, cargo pants and rugged boots found in metropolitan stores, designer showrooms or spotted on the streets of fashion capitals like London, Paris and New York.
The term “workwear” probably also includes more clothing than you think. In his upcoming book, “Blue Collar Modernism,” menswear editor David Hellqvist tells the story of the biggest fashion brands and their connection to the occupation. Jeans, the foundation of contemporary dressing, finds its roots in the Californian mining industry of the 19th century. Even the little copper rivets that fasten our jean pockets, a feature so ubiquitous in modern denim that it goes mostly unnoticed, were designed to reinforce the seams against tearing and keep the garment durable. The technology was patented as early as 1873. Elsewhere, Dr Martens were derived from a military boot, while Barbour’s well-heeled waxed jackets were first created as waxed skin outerwear for fishermen and sailors in 1894.
Utility workwear left the factories in the early 20th century. Artists were one of the first groups to adopt it and helped recontextualize jumpsuits, jeans and work coats, according to fashion historian Sonya Abrego. “Looking back, it might seem pretty bold and cool and fashionable to us,” Abrego, author of the 2022 book, “Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture,” said in a phone call. “But they were really trying to make an anti-fashion statement.” Not to mention the fact that these artists were still workers, performing a physical task that required a certain level of functional dress. Abrego shows a photograph of Jackson Pollock taken in his studio in 1949 for Life Magazine, kneeling on a huge canvas dripping with paint from a brush. “It’s all about the movement around the canvas,” she said. “And he’s wearing jeans and a work coat, they go together.”
The Second World War helped to further globalize workers’ clothing. Many American soldiers fighting overseas wore denim, often supplied by Levi’s. The brand was recognized by the War Production Board and its costs were even set by the Office of Price Administration. By the end of the war, Europe seemed fascinated by this new, all-American textile – which had been catapulted into pop culture with films like “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1952) and “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955). In fact, European youth were so enamored that in 1959, the New York Times reported that an East Berlin teenager had been arrested for buying jeans in the city’s western enclave. His sentence was two months, to “serve as a warning” to those hoping to try this new democratic style.
Nearly 70 years later, workwear is one of fashion’s most enduring love affairs. But why? These clothes are imbued with a sense of nostalgia and reflect a quality of craftsmanship largely absent from affordable clothing today, Abrego believes. “The connection to work is also very telling,” she said. Maybe people are honoring a family history of doing business, even if they don’t do those jobs themselves today. The appeal is particularly strong for men’s fashion. “We have always looked for inspiration in these kinds of professions,” Hellqvist said. “Many of us aspire to be that kind of man, able to fix things and do things. I know I definitely can’t, but I can pretend to be that guy.”
With his book, Hellqvist set out to expand the definition of workwear beyond the obvious legacy brands of Levi’s and Carhartt. “It’s not like the miners in the gold rush anymore,” he says, “it’s the city office workers.” Instead, Hellqvist covers the history of the subculture with a light touch and zooms in on a curated, highly shoppable list of brands that he believes are pushing this clothing style forward in new ways. On its radar are Japanese brand Auralee (highlighted by Lyst this summer as a rising star in recent menswear runway data); Fera, a British brand specializing in understated quilted vests and reworked cotton Harrington jackets, and Mfpen, a Copenhagen-based brand making casual suits from undead fabrics.
Most of the designers included, however, are simply “inspired” by workwear, Hellqvist said. These next-generation brands emulate the look of everyday workwear without having a business goal or “problem” in mind to solve through clothing. But “the way they choose fabrics and the way they think about clothing in terms of functionality” keeps them in line with predecessors like Dickies, Ben Davis and Vetra, he said.
One contemporary brand that continues traditional work-oriented design is Service Works, a London-based chef’s clothing brand founded by Tom Chudley in 2020. After more than a decade working in restaurants, Chudley told Hellqvist that he was tired of the “plastic poly-cotton” that was “rubbing my legs up and down for 10 hours a day.” His clothing line makes traditional cotton canvas chef pants, aprons, chore coats renamed “Trade Jackets,” shirts, T-shirts, and cotton double-pleated pants that can be worn by servers and other restaurant staff. These clothes are the de facto uniforms of the London small plates scene, but they also have a fashion following for those outside the industry and are sold at retailers like End and Nordstrom.
There is, of course, something ironic and even ahistorical about wearing blue-collar clothes in a white-collar world. There are those who balk “at people paying a lot of money to wear something that was worn by a sharecropper to sit at a desk all day,” Abrego said. Although personally, she doesn’t find it “that much more off-putting or hypocritical than anything else.”
“I don’t really think there’s an authentic, real, true way to dress or present yourself,” she said. “If you want to wear cowboy boots and you don’t live in the West, go for it.”
Gn tech
