Ahead of last Sunday's French presidential election run-off, it was widely reported that eventual winner Francois Hollande had said he wanted to appeal to those blue collar workers who had backed the far-right Front National in the first round.
Say it he did, though the word he used to describe them was "ouvriers", which means labourers – the term "blue collar" is a US invention and historians are of the opinion that it was first used by The Times newspaper of Alden, Iowa in 1924 when it wrote: "If we may call professions and office positions white collar jobs, we may call the trades blue collar jobs." And so a handy catch-all term was born.
But does it mean anything today? Not really, as most modern blue collar work requires clothing of a different colour entirely. In the 1990s, the writer Douglas Coupland coined the phrase McJob, referring to low-paid, menial work such as you might find in McDonald's. So I suppose we also need to talk about red collar workers for those unfortunates drawn into the fast food industry – or even yellow collar, if their job is to dress as Ronald McDonald. Those people who do graft as labourers are mostly clad in luminous safety bibs these days, so they should be called high-vis collar workers. And most tradesmen I encounter are of the upturned collar variety. Colour here is immaterial, it's the label that counts.
France does have blue collar workers, of course. How else would we get those blue French worker's jackets which are all the rage? (Urban Outfitters does a nice one for £89, and Junya Watanabe showed a pricier version on the Paris catwalk earlier this year). But in this post-industrial era, many more of us are better described as white collar workers. Perhaps that's why utilitarian workwear in blue – the global colour of honest toil – appeals so much.
Mind you, the people in the best-paid white collar situations often mark their status by wearing pink shirts, so there's an upper strata of professionals who could be said to be in pink collar jobs. We also have black collar workers, of course, a phrase coined by some smart alec to describe those in the media and the creative industries – architects and graphic designers, mostly – who wear clothes by Prada and Yohji Yamamoto. Excluded from this group are priests, vicars and ministers who are obviously dog collar workers. Not that what they do could be described as work, exactly.
I often wear T-shirts to work, so I don't know what that makes me. A no collar worker? Sounds too much like a male stripper – then again, they often dress in evening wear so shoudn't they be wing collar workers? Or is that butlers?
The world of work may be confusing: the world of workwear, I think, is positively Byzantine in its complexity. n
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