By Manish Puri.
When friend of PS Tony Sylvester told us he was publishing a new book, An Informal Guide to Workwear, we knew it would be beautifully written, eclectic in its coverage and as lovingly thorough in its depiction of the cultural zeitgeist as of the clothes that sprang from it.
But we also know it can be nice to read a sample of a book, to get a sense of tone and content before buying it. So we asked Tony if we could get an early copy in order to share something exclusively with readers.
The book dives into so many workwear staples: berets, jeans, Doc Martens, and more pieces of outerwear than any one man will ever need. In the end we picked Tony’s chapter on fireman’s jackets – an item that’s become increasingly sought after in recent years, yet also one that we at PS knew very little about. Here Tony traces the popular Fay jacket’s origins back to the Great Fire of London in 1666.
But first, to help set the scene, we caught up with Tony to talk more about the book and what led him to write it.
Hi Tony! Congratulations on the new book. Can you tell us a little more about it and how it came about please?
I was looking to do a very different book with a publisher and had a wonderful meeting with the fine folk at Batsford Books – an independent imprint which has been going for over 150 years, specialising in art and design titles. While they weren’t interested in the initial idea I had pitched to them, they were keen to work with me, and we figured out a topic that we all agreed could be interesting to explore.
In my subsequent research I discovered they had actually published the seminal Working Dress: History of Occupational Clothing by Diana De Marly in 1986, so it was high time to revisit the subject.
In the book you speak about growing up in a time when what you wore could signal your tribe or your politics. How did those early experiences with youth culture shape your long-term fascination with workwear and its symbolism?
I feel pretty privileged to have grown up when I did, around the wellspring of subcultures in the late 70s and early 80s – I talked a lot about this with Simon at the Permanent Style talk a couple of years back. I have a deep fascination for clothes’ ‘second life’ and how clobber gets reused and reinterpreted, often ending up as a signifier far away from its intended utility.
This is especially true of workwear, and goes back almost to its foundations, with 19th century French artists adopting the trappings of the field worker or rich Americans donning jeans and boots on weekend retreats or ‘Dude Ranches’ in the early 20th Century. Both speak to some sense of the ‘authenticity’ of the clothing imbuing something to the wearer.
In the chapter on donkey jackets in the book, you have students and skinheads in the 80s adopting the coats as symbols of bona fide working class realness, whilst the labour leader Michael Foot gets an ear bashing from the right wing press for daring to wear one to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday- a ‘crime’ it turns out he did not actually commit!
So he might not have put his Foot in it? Sorry… We’ve seen workwear go from utility to subculture to luxury fashion and back again. Why do you think certain items — chore coats, jeans, boots — keep returning and being reinterpreted?
Honestly, I personally think denim is not the most practical of materials: it’s neither a good insulator in the cold or particularly breathable in the heat, in fact it was mostly used as a cheap furnishing fabric prior to the development of jeans. But it holds so much cultural history in its warp and weft.
As I point out in the introduction of the book, Hollywood, the Civil Rights movement, and every possible archetype of American Male from the 20th century have left their mark on the humble cloth.
I think it is this broadness and diversity that gives jeans, in particular, so much scope for reinterpretation. In pure PS menswear terms, I think of Drake’s lookbooks in the early 2010s mixing up denim with chambray shirts, ties and tweed sports coats that really captured that ‘rugged sartorial’ appeal of the ‘Fuckyeah Menswear’ era.
These fits leant heavily on the “Warhol look” of the 1970s – where Andy Warhol and his business manager Fred Hughes popularised the style. According to Warhol’s biographer Bob Colacello “[Hughes’s].. Levi’s 501 looked as if they’d been altered on Savile Row… Fred was the first to wear jeans with suit jackets, but when Andy adopted the style as his uniform it became known as the Warhol Look.”
Your experience – especially in retail and music – has brought you into close contact with a lot of the workwear pieces you write about. Were there any stories that were new to you or did your research lead you to a fresh appreciation of any particular item?
Doing the research was by far the most fascinating part of the whole process; especially the more theoretical and philosophical underpinnings – my wife Dr Cyana Madsen was a treasure trove in this regard as one of her specialist areas is biography in worn clothing – she was able to point me in the direction of Roland Barthes’s 1967 book The Fashion System and other notable writers on clothing and the dressed body.
There is a certain level of myth busting in the book which was equally gratifying – boring things like patents can really clear up any misunderstandings on the age of certain items, and I particularly enjoyed wrestling with the thorny issue of the term ‘corduroy’.
You’ve lived through several revivals of workwear — from the skinhead scene to heritage menswear to today’s 1990s-inspired moment. What do you imagine the next chapter of workwear might look like, and what might it say about the era we’re entering?
I’m sort of fascinated how the 70s designer era is mingling with the 90s revival and creating the catwalk workwear of Sacai’s Carhartt collab and Louis Vuitton’s chore coats and Timbs. It feels like late-stage capitalism at its nadir or zenith – depending on your worldview I suppose!
In the TV version of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the post-apocalyptic denizens all cling to the clothing that has survived mankind’s demise – lots of ultra-tough cordura and synthetic workwear staples dress the ragged survivors. Perhaps that will be the next and final legacy?
Well, I’m off to stockpile some synthetic workwear for what I hope is the very distant future. But looking to the near future, we wish you all the best with the book and thank you for your time Tony.
Extract: Fireman’s jacket
The roots of the fireman’s uniform come in the wake of the Great Fire of London in 1666. This was a boom time for fire insurance, and private companies raised their own brigades of part-time firefighters, who would be issued with their own livery – caps, coats, breeches and waistcoats in the chosen colour of the company. The priority here was visibility and marketing rather than life saving.
It was not until the early 19th century that the private firms began to be reined in under public control, and in 1833 the London Fire Engine Establishment was brought together from disparate firms into one streamlined conglomerate. Sobriety became the order of the day, and heavy serge grey Melton wool tunics and trousers were issued. The livery lived on in rows of brightly polished brass buttons bearing crests with crossed hatchets. Nationwide, this new standard took hold.
As technology developed, the most important part of the fireman’s ‘bunker gear’ (so named as it was hung next to the individual’s bunk at the station house ready to be sprung into action) was his protective coat. In late Victorian times, this consisted of a ‘fearnought’ – a coarse woollen duffel coat doused with water before each mission. The 1930s brought waterproof rubber coats into the mix, in the trademark yellow we still associate with firefighting.
My favourite development in the evolution of the fireman’s jacket came on 26 July 1962. An enterprising chap named Jess A Brewer applied to the US Patents Office for a newfangled clip fastening, one of a bevy of safety measures for firemen’s clobber patented around the same time. The idea was that a begloved fireman could still fasten and unfasten his coat at will, without getting snagged up.
The idea follows the lobster clasps of World War II-era US Navy deck jackets, but oversized and far more resilient. So, firemen on the East Coast of America adopted a style of coat using this closure method – a thigh-length jacket with an extra panelled placket with the heavy clips and a high rolling collar to protect the neck. This remains pretty much standard to this day, in no small part because, aside from being practical, they look pretty badass.
This might seem a little humdrum and even cumbersome an item to appeal to a more fashionable crowd, but a civilian version started appearing in Ralph Lauren collections for men and women from the 1970s.
In the next decade, two Italian brothers, Diego and Andrea Della Valle, found themselves in rural Maine and happened upon the local firefighting troop in their rugged finery. The brothers were the chairmen of their family-run luxury leather goods brand Tod’s. Quite taken by the distinctive metal fastenings on the troop’s jackets, they tracked down the makers and began to import them back into Europe. Some 40 years on, their sub brand Fay’s signature Quattro Ganci (from the Italian word for ‘hook’) coat is an icon of high flying Italian sprezzatura.
An Informal Guide to Workwear by AW Sylvester is available for pre-order now and will be published by Batsford Books on November 6th. Illustrations by Michael Parkin.
Image of Tony courtesy of @jkf_man
