The History of Chore Coats: Pockets, Work and an Unlikely Parade

THE HISTORY OF · CHAPTER TWO

A useful jacket with a surprisingly eventful past: French factories, American harvests, beer-stained student clothes and a parade against expensive trousers.

A chore coat looks like a fairly sensible answer to a fairly sensible problem. You need a jacket, you need to move your arms, and you need somewhere to put things. Add buttons and a few large pockets. Job done.

Then you start following the history, and things become less sensible. There are university students inventing an outfit for spilling beer on themselves. There are businessmen threatening to throw each other into a canal. There are workers complaining that everyone dressing like a worker is making work clothes more expensive.

The jacket has spent a long time moving between people who need it for work and people who simply like the look. Today's canvas chore coat sits somewhere along that route. To understand it, it helps to start with the ordinary working clothes, before the outfit became an outfit.

What makes a chore coat a chore coat?

The name now covers a family of straightforward work jackets. The familiar ingredients are a button front, a turn-down collar, a fairly roomy body and patch pockets. A patch pocket is exactly what it sounds like: a separate piece of cloth sewn onto the outside, with the top left open. No secret entrance to find.

There is plenty of variation within that family. Some jackets have three outside pockets, others four. Cloth can be blue cotton, denim, tan canvas or natural twill. Sleeves and collars vary too. It is more useful to recognise the idea than to insist on one official recipe.

That matters when looking backwards. The modern shop category gathers together clothes that had different names, makers and users. A French work jacket and an American denim work jacket can have plenty in common without requiring one neat moment when somebody invented the whole category.

The French connection: blue jackets with actual jobs

The French bleu de travail is an important part of this story. The phrase is broader than the little blue jacket in a vintage shop: it can refer to working clothes including trousers, overalls and work blouses.

In its exhibition guide, Marseille's Mucem places the spread of the cotton moleskin work jacket in the industrialisation of the mid-19th century. Its outline of the familiar jacket includes three outside pockets and another inside. Moleskin here means densely woven, brushed cotton. No moles were asked to contribute their coats. Mucem's guide, pages 10–11, is a useful starting point for both the garment and the wider meaning of the name.

The surviving clothes make that history more interesting than a perfectly tidy diagram ever could.

This jacket belonged to the working world of the arsenal in Rennes. Look at the generous body and the pockets sitting plainly on the front. The museum identifies its place of use, although the accompanying article does not give an exact date for the garment. That little bit of provenance already tells us more than calling it “authentic vintage” would.

In 2010–11, the Musée de Bretagne made a deliberate effort to collect working clothes. Historian Carole Tymen worked with 22 individuals and ten companies or organisations, bringing in 180 objects and recording the stories around them. Blue workwear was the type most often offered. The collection crossed occupations, rather than treating the factory worker as the only person with working clothes worth saving. The museum's account of the collecting project is a lovely reminder that an everyday jacket needs someone to keep it before it can become a museum object.

The Citroën factory jacket in the same collection makes a useful comparison. It is longer, and the chest pocket has a flap. The little red chevrons connect it to a specific workplace. Put the two jackets next to each other and the idea of one unchanging French workwear uniform becomes rather less convincing.

The men in this Saut du Tarn steelworks photograph add faces to the clothes. Some wear jackets open over waistcoats; others have loose work blouses or aprons. Even within one workplace, there is plenty of variety.

They also explain some of the appeal of old working clothes. Details belong to a task, a wearer or an employer. Once those clothes move into a different wardrobe, the details remain, even when the original job does not.

Across the Atlantic: denim, duck and plenty of room

American workwear provides another part of the chore-coat story. Carhartt, founded in 1889, says its archive contains advertisements for its chore coat dating to 1917. Carhartt's own history records that early advertising. It gives us a useful documentary marker: a date for the company's surviving adverts, rather than a birthday for every jacket with patch pockets.

A contemporary shop advert shows how these clothes sat in an everyday working wardrobe. On 7 August 1920, J. C. Penney advertised to harvest workers in Oregon. Alongside Pay Day overalls were matching heavy-denim “jumpers”, described as roomy and offered in all sizes. Here, a jumper means a work jacket, which is worth remembering before imagining someone harvesting in a knitted pullover.

The same advert offered striped overalls with matching jackets, white duck carpenters' overalls, brown duck aprons and motor suits in khaki or denim. Duck is a firmly woven canvas fabric. There was a selection of fabrics and outfits for different jobs, sitting together on one newspaper page. You can inspect the original Penney advert in the Daily East Oregonian, preserved by the University of Oregon.

“Plenty of room” is an appealingly direct bit of salesmanship. A work jacket has to accommodate a person doing things. Reaching, bending and wearing another layer underneath are all easier to understand than a grand speech about timelessness.

Jack Delano’s photograph of Sam Cell at Proviso yard shows that room being put to use. Cell bends over a railway wheel assembly in a button-front work jacket, with fabric to spare through the body and sleeves. It is a useful view of the jacket doing its job.

That roomy outline is still part of the attraction. You can wear a chore coat over a shirt, put something in a pocket and leave the house. It does not ask you to assemble a historically accurate railway outfit first.

Princeton's solution to beer stains

Work clothes were finding other uses surprisingly early. Princeton's account of its “beer jackets” traces the tradition to the Class of 1912. Students adopted blue denim overalls and workmen's jackets to save their ordinary clothes from beer stains and the associated cleaning bills. The outfits later became white, giving classmates somewhere to put names and decorations.

According to the university's museum, the revived tradition in 1919 also answered high clothing prices. The Class of 1920 added black armbands to mourn Prohibition. By 1925, one class design showed a tiger being crushed by four textbooks, a complaint about the university's new Four Course Plan. All of this is recorded in Princetoniana's history of beer jackets.

It is a pleasing detour for a work jacket: practical stain management on one hand, a wearable complaint about homework on the other. It also shows how readily a plain jacket can become a canvas for belonging to a group.

In 1920, the price protest came with pockets

The banner photograph comes from a stranger chapter. In April 1920, wearing overalls became a way to protest against expensive clothes. Historian Jonathan Goldman describes the New York parade on 24 April as a mixture of price protest and publicity, organised by the Cheese Club, a group with connections to the theatre and publicity business. This was workwear moving into public spectacle. Goldman's account at the Gotham Center for New York City History follows the people and promotion behind it.

There is a lot to look at in the photograph. Jackets mingle with overalls and hats. Small vehicles share the street with the crowd. The sign against profiteering gives a fairly direct explanation of why everyone has turned up. The clothes carry a message about money, whatever work their wearers usually do.

The enthusiasm spread well beyond New York. A report in the Sunday Oregonian on 18 April described a club of business and professional men in Wheatland, Pennsylvania, threatening members who failed to wear denim with a dunking in the Erie Canal. The report records a threat, so we cannot supply a satisfying photograph of a soaked accountant. Even so, it is quite an escalation from an office dress code.

On the same page, a dispatch from Springfield, Illinois, reported a less amused response. The local Federation of Labor condemned the movement, arguing that it was pushing up the price of clothes workers actually needed. Both reports appear on page 18 of the original newspaper. The complaint is evidence of how workers viewed the craze, rather than a measurement of its economic effect.

That objection gives the story its bite. Choosing to dress for a day's protest is one thing. Needing an affordable set of clothes for every working day is another. The same jacket can mean thrift, solidarity, publicity or simply getting through a shift, depending on who is wearing it.

It also makes the modern popularity of workwear feel less unprecedented. People have been borrowing working clothes for other purposes for a long time. Sometimes they have had a drink in them. Sometimes they have brought a placard.