Everything You Need to Know About…The Chore Coat

Surely, we can all appreciate having the right tool for the job. Enter: the chore coat.  Once a required uniform for blue-collared professionals and now finding its way into the closets of men with a taste for utilitarian and timeless style, we’re glad to say the tough-skinned coat is still thriving.

Regardless of your trade, whether you’re a burlier, get’er done kind of guy or a softer-handed “union delegate” (as Ray Liotta once described himself to Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas), the chore coat is for everyone. Between its newfound purpose in the current day to its re-emergence on the fashion block, now is the time for men of all stripes to embrace this storied garment.

Intrigued by its ambiguous origins and definitive good looks, we went to work on the history and stylings of the chore coat, so you don’t have to.

Over the years there have been many iterations of the garment, though the earliest account of this hearty workwear piece goes back to late 1800’s France. Common labourers from factory workers, railroad engineers, gardeners, and even shopkeepers needed an outer layer capable of handling the job they were doing. The French got busy and supplied their men with coats worthy enough to call their own - while no particular designer is credited with its creation, brands like Le Mont St Michel, Champ de Manoeuvres, and Vétra were early adopters, specializers, and contributors to the style.

Intended for the rugged nature of physical work, these jackets had to be nothing less than indestructible, so they were typically crafted from a robust and tightly woven cloth like cotton twill. Standard features of this coat were laden with roomy patch pockets to hold tools (often one or two on the chest and two on the hip), and heavy-duty construction with reinforced copper rivets and double stitched seams. As for the fit, they were boxy and fell straight off the shoulders like a cliff, while the hem ended somewhere between the hip and upper thigh.

This coat was famously produced in a benzoate based blue dye to mask all the grime, dirt, grease, and any other combination of murky substances one might stumble across as a 19th-century working class Frenchman. Aside from the physical attributes of this blue dye, it was also very inexpensive to produce. In fact, just about every working man in France repped this jacket – it became widely referred to as “bleu de travail”, translating to “worker’s blues”.

Inevitably, the modest blue work coat made its way to America and earned a new name for itself - the chore coat (the coat to do chores in, of course). Much like France, there’s no clear originator of the western version, though Levi’s, Carhartt, and L.C King’s Pointer Brand are among the usual workwear suspects.

As opposed to dyeing it in the French’s blue-indigo hue, the Americans took a different route - denim, canvas, and herringbone fabrics were introduced to the workforce, along with drab finishes like Carhartt’s famous “duck brown”.

The now Americanized coat saw the same uses as its French counterpart, though you may have recognized its stint in prison – your favourite convicts Paul Newman and Tim Robbins wore chore coats in Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank Redemption, respectively. The examples they donned were blue denim, albeit muddy and tattered, we must say - they still looked pretty fly.