Why we love to dress for the job we don’t have

By Leah Dolan, CNN

You’re a copywriter, a communications manager, an elusive creative director with indeterminate responsibilities. So why are you dressed liked a 20th century French rail worker?

Today, some 70 million employed Americans will probably work from behind a desk. Yet our obsession with clothes from a different kind of working life just won’t quit.

Between 1910 and 2000, blue-collar jobs such as mining, construction and manufacturing shrunk from 76% of the US workforce to 25%. Still, the workman image reverberates ad infinitum through the chore jackets, cargo pants and heavy-duty boots stocked in metropolitan shops, designer showrooms or spotted on the streets of fashion capitals like London, Paris and New York.

The term “workwear” probably includes more clothing than you think, too. In his upcoming book, “Blue Collar Modernism,” menswear editor David Hellqvist gives a potted history of fashion’s biggest labels and their connection to occupation. Jeans, the bedrock of contemporary dressing, have their roots in the Californian mining industry of the 19th century. Even the small copper rivets that bookend our jean pockets, a feature so ubiquitous in modern denim it mostly goes unnoticed, were designed to reinforce the seams against ripping and keep the garment hard-wearing. The technology was patented as early as 1873. Elsewhere, Dr Martens were derived from a military boot, while Barbour’s well-to-do waxed jackets were first created as oil-skin outwear for fishermen and sailors in 1894.

Utilitarian work clothes first left the factory floor in the early 20th century. Artists were an early group of adopters who helped recontextualize coveralls, jeans and chore coats, according to fashion historian Sonya Abrego. “Looking back, it can seem kind of edgy and cool and fashionable to us,” said Abrego, author of the 2022 book, “Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture,” in a phone call. “But they were really trying to make an anti-fashion statement.” Not to mention the fact these artists were still working people, completing a physical task that required some level of functional dress. Abrego points to a photograph of Jackson Pollock taken in his studio in 1949 for Life Magazine, kneeling on an enormous canvas dripping paint from a brush. “It’s all about the movement around the canvas,” she said. “And he’s got on jeans and a chore coat, it just goes together.”

The Second World War helped globalize the working man’s garb further. Many of the American soldiers fighting overseas wore denim, often provided by Levi’s. The brand was recognized by the War Production Board and even had their costs set by the Office of Price Administration. When the war ended, Europe seemed besotted with this new, all-American textile — which had been catapulted into pop culture with films like “Streetcar Named Desire” (1952) and “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955). In fact, so enamored were the youth of Europe that in 1959 the New York Times reported a teenager in East Berlin was arrested for buying blue jeans in the city’s Western enclave. His sentence was two months, to “serve as a warning” to others hoping to try on this new democratic style for size.

Almost 70 years later, workwear is one of fashion’s most enduring love stories. But why? These clothes are infused with a sense of nostalgia and reflect a quality of craftsmanship largely absent from affordable clothing today, thinks Abrego. “The connection to labor speaks pretty strongly,” too, she said. Maybe people are honouring a family history of trade, despite not working in these jobs themselves today. The draw is particularly strong for men’s fashion. “We’ve always looked to these kinds of professions for inspiration,” said Hellqvist. “Many of us aspire to be those kinds of men, who can fix things and do things. I know I certainly can’t, but I can pretend to be that guy.”

With his book, Hellqvist set out to broaden the definition of workwear beyond the obvious legacy brands of Levi’s and Carhartt. “It’s not like miners in the gold rush anymore,” he said, “it’s office workers in the city.” Instead, Hellqvist covers the subculture’s history with a light touch and zooms out into a curated, highly shoppable list of labels he believes are pushing forward this style of dress in new ways. On his radar are Japanese brand Auralee (platformed by Lyst this summer as a rising star in data from the latest menswear shows); Fera, a British farmcore brand specializing in understated quilted vests and re-worked cotton Harrington jackets and Mfpen, a Copenhagen-based brand making relaxed tailored suits from deadstock fabric.

Most of the designers included are, however, simply “inspired” by workwear, said Hellqvist. These next generation brands emulate the look of workaday garments without the purpose of a trade in mind or a “problem” to solve through clothing. But “the way they choose fabrics and the way they think about clothing in terms of functionality” keeps them in the lineage of predecessors like Dickies, Ben Davis and Vetra, he said.

One contemporary brand keeping traditional job-driven design alive is Service Works, a London-based chefs-wear label founded by Tom Chudley in 2020. After more than a decade working in restaurants, Chudley told Hellqvist he became sick of the “plastic poly-cotton” that was “rubbing up and down my legs for 10 hours a day.” His clothing line makes traditional chefs pants in cotton canvas, aprons, chore coats rebranded as “Trade Jackets,” shirts, T-shirts as well as cotton double pleated trousers that can be worn by waiters and other catering staff. These garments are the defacto uniforms of London’s small plates scene, but they also have a fashion following from 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 who pay a great deal of money to wear something that was worn by a sharecropper to sit at a desk all day,” said Abrego. Though 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 or true way to dress or present oneself,” she said. “If you want to wear cowboy boots and you don’t live in the West – go for it.”

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