White collars, blue collars — does it still matter how we dress for work?

There are expressions we have used for so long that we stop wondering where they came from.

White collar. Blue collar.

Some people work in offices, others work with their hands. Some are managers, bankers, lawyers, accountants. Others are mechanics, builders, technicians, people in manufacturing.

But why white and blue exactly?

The answer, as often happens with me, turned out to be about clothes.

Before a profession had a LinkedIn profile, it had a shirt

In the early twentieth century, clothing showed quite clearly which part of the working world you belonged to.

Office staff and people in administrative roles wore white shirts and white collars. This is a garment you can comfortably wear when your working day does not involve machine oil, dust, soil or coal.

White was, in fact, a kind of luxury.

Not necessarily because the shirt itself was expensive, but because you could afford for it to stay white.

The phrase "white collar" appears in written English as early as the beginning of the twentieth century and later settles in as a label for office, administrative and managerial professions.

On the other side are the people who do physical work.

Their shirts are very often made of blue denim or chambray — a durable, practical fabric suited to everyday wear. Blue has another enormous advantage: dust, stains and traces of work simply show less on it.

In 1924 the American newspaper Alden Times spelled out the divide almost literally: if professional and office positions are "white-collar jobs", then the trades can be called "blue-collar jobs".

And so two shirts turned into two social categories.

Clothing said what you did before you opened your mouth

This is the part I find especially interesting.

Clothing was never only a matter of aesthetics.

It was an information system.

From clothes you could tell who worked outdoors and who worked in an office. Who dealt with clients. Who belonged to a particular profession. Who was the boss. Sometimes even who was allowed through a particular door.

And of course — who stood where in the social hierarchy.

Except that today this system has become seriously confused.

The CEO is in a T-shirt, the receptionist is in a suit

Picture the following situation.

You walk into an expensive hotel.

The person at reception is in an impeccable navy suit, shirt, leather shoes and a name badge.

A moment later the owner of a multi-million-euro technology company crosses the lobby — in jeans, a T-shirt and trainers.

If we used the rules of a hundred years ago, we would probably get it wrong about which of the two has the higher social status.

And this is now completely normal.

In the tech sector a reverse signal has even appeared: the person who has enough status can afford not to demonstrate it through traditional business clothing.

At the same time, professions we would once have placed outside the "white collar" category are becoming ever more highly specialised.

The surgeon works with their hands and wears scrubs.

So does the dentist.

An engineer may spend half the day at a computer and the other half on a production floor.

An architect may arrive at a meeting in trainers, while the person serving you coffee in a five-star hotel wears a waistcoat and a tie.

So what colour are their collars?

Perhaps it no longer matters.

But workwear has not disappeared. It simply does a different job.

A hundred years ago clothing very often showed class and profession.

Today it increasingly shows the brand and the context.

And that is a fundamental difference.

A receptionist's uniform should not say: "I am a receptionist."

That is obvious anyway.

It should say something about the hotel.

Is it luxurious?
Is it modern?
Is it classic?
Is it artistic?
Is it minimalist?
Does it feel young?

The same is true for a medical clinic.

Scrubs are no longer simply "the clothes medical staff wear".

The colour, the cut, the fabric and the way they are combined can make a clinic look technological, calm, premium, family-friendly or sterile and institutional.

And this is where it gets interesting for me

Today we have far more freedom in how we look at work.

And thank goodness.

I do not think we should return to a time when your profession automatically decided which shirt you were allowed to wear.

But once we remove the old rules, a very interesting question remains:

What do we want our clothes to say instead?

For an individual, the answer can be personal.

For a business, however, it has to be strategic — and that is essentially what business image is about.

Because the client is still looking.

Still drawing conclusions.

And still collecting dozens of small visual signals in order to decide what kind of company is standing in front of them.

Only now they are not looking at the colour of the collar.

They are looking at the whole picture.

And if that picture runs through what the team wears, the next logical question is why a logo on a garment is still not a company uniform.