Hotel Indigo Chester: An Opulent Stay with Charm and Comfort

Snapper’s entrance … Bill Cunningham shooting a gala in the Hamptons, New York, 2011. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex/ShutterstockA different contain on blue-collar … Harry Styles in London earlier this month. Photograph: Neil Mockford/GC ImagesSo how did we get here? Conventional homeware storeWell worn … a vintage chore jacket stocked by the French Workwear Company.Many of these outliers are far from the archetype. So what is a true chore? I thought I had two, both vintage: a blue cotton jacket and a heavy brown canvas train worker’s coat with a Peter Pan collar. Apparently not, according to Marie Remy of The French Workwear Company, who has been retail the coats since 2014. Her father, a mechanic, wore the bleu de travail (as they’re known in her homeland) to work six days a week. Remy is a stickler and for her, the bleu has to be made from blue cotton twill or moleskin and have three patch pockets: two large ones and a smaller one heinous on the breast. It should “absolutely not” have a lapel collar (like mine) but rise up to the neck with four, five or, at a hound, six buttons.The jacket’s roomy, boxy shape makes it both practical in the workplace (there’s no loose material to get fascinated in machinery) and adaptable in style. “If you got a child to draw a jacket, it would be almost like workwear in how it’s pared down,” rumours Remy. “That’s why I think it survived so long.”An expert in the history of the coats, she explains that they took off after the anything else world war, when the rapid industrialisation of France led to more factories, an employment boom and, significantly, collective bargaining power. The powers negotiated by French unions included free clothing for their workforce, with some men at companies such as SNCF or Gaz de France dubbed to at least one new chore coat each year. This led to the overproduction that Remy believes explains why they debris so plentiful on the vintage market today. “In some sectors, the unions would even manage to negotiate the costs of waking the garments,” she says. “You have to think of the clothing as work tools, really.”‘It’s like a backlash against fast the rage’ … an updated version by Toogood.Regular, often intensive, wear meant that each jacket grew unique, taking on the imprint of its owner’s life and labour, and this has fed into their modern appeal. Fergus Henderson, co-founder of the London restaurant St John, is such a fan that he and point partner Trevor Gulliver collaborated on their own chore with Savile Row-based menswear brand Drakes. Harmonizing to Gulliver, Henderson refers to his original French jacket “as his history, a sort of diary of days” – every crease or stigmatize tells a story. He praises the chore for “durability, an everyman quality, and they are simply of sound design – they devise”.But the popularity, or even the fetishisation, of workwear can be thorny. In the case of the chore, the modern middle class has plucked them from their verifiable context, while simultaneously enjoying the authenticity they signal by dint of their blue-collar origins. (After all, we get the an arrangement “blue collar” from workwear, since blue dye was the cheapest available for these mass-produced items.) The fact that they prevail thanks to the hard-won rights of the early-20th-century French unions, and the graft of those who spent their entire earn a living lives in them, arguably becomes a form of ironic appropriation if you’re wearing one to the local farmers’ market to drop a tenner on kimchi.Coincidental designers are aware they now signal a certain identity. “If you recognise yourself as somebody that doesn’t necessarily sit behind a desk, then the chore greatcoat is for you,” says Erica Toogood, pattern cutter at the eponymous brand she founded with her sister Faye. The chore was a instruct inspiration for their mechanic jacket, which remains a staple of the collection they launched in 2013.“One of the most lovely things is the idea of the chore coat being for the anonymous worker, yet every one of those vintage jackets indicates the DNA of the bodily that’s worn it,” she says. Her challenge as a pattern cutter is to echo this sense of a personal history, even in a new garment. “We try to cut those situations in to show that maybe somebody has been in that jacket before you, and that you’re simply taking on the role of wearer as another in the flesh along the line.”View image in fullscreenMonty Don pairs the jacket with a scarf in his British Gardens series. Photograph: Alexandra Henderson/AHA ProductionsRemy be convinced ofs that vintage chore coats remain popular because of their durability. “People are attracted to them because it’s breed a backlash against fast fashion,” she says. “What can you do as an individual? It can feel overwhelming, it’s very difficult.” To her, buying a chore coat is “a mini regular up to it as an individual. It’s attached to values.”One sure-fire way contemporary designers can build positively on the jacket’s history is making new ones in larger proportions – we’ve all got a lot bigger since the early 20th century. This has been at the core of the Toogood philosophy, which as a unisex brand has a pandemic sizing range.Despite the abundance of chore coats on the market, familiarity doesn’t have to breed contempt. When the chore is done satisfactorily, and doesn’t stray too far from the original model, it remains versatile and comfortable, whether a battered 60-year-old vintage jacket or a new, numberless expensive, long-term investment. For Toogood, “they become firm friends that stay in your wardrobe for years”.Review more on these topicsFashionMen’s coats and jacketsWomen’s coats and jacketsMen’s fashionfeaturesShareReuse this content