While you might not give a lot of thought to your jacket, apart from recognising that it keeps you warm and protected from the wind and rain, it’s one of the most versatile items of clothing around.

While a jacket can be worn over almost anything from a smart shirt and tie – when it looks formal, to a casual T-shirt, when it looks relaxed, other items of outerwear, like long coats, can look decidedly strange if worn over less formal clothing.

A high visibility jacket made of reflective material or simply with reflective strips is a good choice for the foggy and rainy weather of late winter and early spring, and is vital if you ride a bike, or are working outdoors or travelling on foot along busy roads.

The colour of your jacket says a lot about you.

•    Yellow and orange jackets suggest a sporty personality and look better on people with a tan or with darker skin tones as the yellow can wash out pale skins and make them look unhealthy.
•    Red is an exciting colour and suggests energy – it works better with casual clothing than formal.
•    Blue is the classic colour for jackets and can be teamed with almost any other item of clothing from a printed T-shirt to a monogrammed shirt.
•    White was traditionally the colour of yachting jackets so it suggests sport or smart-casual clothing. White jackets look best teamed with a strong colour and shape such as a green or brown collared polo-shirt to offer contrast.
•    Black is the colour of a smart jacket and often looks formal or semi-formal – a black jacket sometimes has a bit of a funereal feel and to get away from this solemn impression, it’s best teamed with a red or pink shirt.

It comes as news to many people that there are socks specifically designed for specific situations and specialist footwear.

Most of us have got used to the idea that there are sport socks that are engineered to stop the feet sweating and blistering and not to chafe, but did you know that there are special socks for many situations?

There are specially cushioned socks for work-wear, designed specifically for people who spend a lot of time on their feet and especially for those who are active on their feet: builders and loaders of vehicles, for example. These work socks are often called crew socks and are worn to protect the feet as well as keeping them cool, comfortable and infection free.

Steel-toe boot socks are specially designed to offer both maximum comfort and maximum safety when wearing steel-toe capped boots or shoes – the best ones have reinforcement in both the heels and the toes, an arch support which offers extra comfort and supports the foot during long hours spent standing, and an antibacterial finish, because one problem with steel-capped footwear is that it is prone to making feet both smelly and more liable to fungal infections.

Choosing and using the correct work glove can protect you from injuries, but it also helps you to work better if you’re wearing the right gloves for the job.

Light gloves are ideal for simple but dirty tasks. They keep dirt and non-toxic items like grease, or paint off your hands – the fabric may be cotton or nylon and if it has a cotton liner it also allows your hands to ‘breathe’.  The PVC dots on the palms give excellent grip for lifting smooth boxes, plastic items and particularly glassware, which can be both slippery and dangerous.

Split leather gloves offer more protection and if they have cotton or canvas backing, they keep the hands cooler than a full leather glove, while offering reinforcements on the palm, thumb and index finger. They are ideal for heavy tasks that do not require specialist gloves: for example loading vans, packing equipment or gardening and other agricultural work.

If you need to handle toxic chemicals or liquids, then you have to wear some form of plastic gloves – neoprene, PVC, polyamide or nitrile material will protect your hands and longer lengths ensure that nothing you are handling splashes up your arms.

The AA is trying to re-educate the nation, not about speeding, or parking or even drinking and driving. They want us to re-learn our attitudes to clothing.

The recent cold weather has prompted them to tell us what to wear. Their head of safety says, ‘someone who is sat in a queue for three or four hours is at the same risk of hypothermia as someone stuck on a mountainside or tent. You may not have enough petrol to keep the engine going for four hours.’

The RAC have similar concerns – suggesting that anybody who has to make a journey over half an hour in any form of extreme weather should ‘take extra warm clothes, hats, gloves and high-visibility clothes, as well as food and hot drinks.’

All the breakdown patrols have had experiences with people who felt their cars would protect them from their cold and then discovered otherwise, finding people in sub-zero temperatures wearing very little more than spring clothing and often with children in nightwear and a blanket or sleeping bag – nowhere near enough to keep them safe from hypothermia. Children should, at a minimum be wearing two layers of clothing such as a sweatshirt and jacket – clothing can be removed while in the car, but shouldn’t be packed where it is difficult to get at. Because small children have a lower bodyweight than adults, it’s important to make them wear a hat if you leave the vehicle as much of the body’s heat is lost through the head.

The advice from emergency services for people driving in bad weather is to wear at least three layers of clothing – this should be something like thermal underwear, a T-shirt and a jumper and then to have a winter weight coat or jacket in the vehicle, along with a hat and gloves. It’s important to ensure that the vehicle also contains something waterproof and high-visibility for every member of the family in case you have to leave your car and stand behind a motorway barrier while you wait to be rescued. Don’t forget that if you travel with pets, they also need to be protected from bad weather.

One of the biggest bargains around this winter is a ski holiday – prices are falling faster than a novice on the piste, as the credit crunch bites home in the mountains too.  If you fancy some winter exercise and you’ve nabbed a ski holiday at rock bottom prices, there’s still the issue of clothing to consider.  But remember, there’s really no need to invest in expensive ski clothes for your first ski holiday.

All you need is a couple of warm well-fitting jumpers or sweatshirts, a fleece jacket and a waterproof and some well insulated trousers (not denim, which chafes) as well as a winter jacket that you fleece will fit under. Waterproof trousers are a good idea too. Finally you need some good gloves and some high visibility wear such as a hat or jacket.

If you buy ski clothing that can be used in any cold weather conditions, you’ll be doubling your investment – you save money by not paying fancy prices and you gain clothing you can wear on a winter walk or trip to the pub. As an example, a fleece jacket can be used as an insulating layer during cold weather, and worn by itself on spring days.  If you’re concerned about fashion and think you might want to invest in your own skis at some future point, buy ski clothing that is neutral in colour such as black, grey or brown, so that whatever investment you make in skis, there won’t be a colour clash.

At this time of year thousands upon thousands of council workers, up and down the land, trade in their high-vis waistcoat for their high-vis jacket. Cyclists and bikers, who’ve been taking their life in their hands all summer, remember with pleasure their high visibility waterproofs, and young people find their school coats have sprouted reflective armbands or even whole children’s high-vis vests in luminous yellow.

High visibility clothing saves a life a day, so ROSPA claims, and this includes road accidents, industrial accidents, and injuries to those in the response services who have to deal with everybody else’s problems.

Children’s Hi-Vis, in particular, are responsible for many fewer young people being hit by cars as they walk home from school in the dusk. Safety clothing doesn’t only save lives in potential accidents. Actually putting on high vis clothing or safety wear causes the person concerned to think about the task they are about to perform, meaning that the focus on potential risks more carefully than they would if they were casually dressed.

But high-vis is also high impact, and having a workforce that is clearly identified as professional and ‘on the job’ can reduce delays in a hundred areas from deliveries through to site inspections or even getting projects signed off. Why, because we’re all trained to respond to certain signals, and when we see a person in high-visibility gear we assume they’re either in charge or in a hurry, so we tend to deal with them before we deal with other people who are less obviously marked out as being busy or important!

Miguel Caballero comes from a country where clothing can save your life, and he trains new employees by shooting them! Colombian-born Caballero tests his garments by firing at his staff as they model the clothing – the ultimate test of both the wearer and the clothing.

In 1992 he was studying at university during his country’s vicious civil war, and many of his fellow students in Bogota were the children of politicians and business leaders – and wore bullet-proof vests around the campus.

His clothing combines style with utility and is worn Steven Seagal, King Abdullah of Jordan and Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez. Caballero clothing is lighter than military style vests: a bullet-proof leather jacket weighs only 1.2 kilos. Perhaps somebody should have told Harriet Harman and then we’d never have seen her wandering around Peckham in that cumbersome stab-proof vest, because his collection includes shirts, formal blazers, raincoats, and even bullet-proof ties.

But there is one drawback – a polo-shirt that will absorb the bullets from a mini-machine gun is rather expensive … starting at £5,000 and washing instructions are extremely complex!

Mauricio Chazaro, director of Miguel Caballero Ltd, arranges the bulletproof leather jacket for display

The hutongs (alleys to you and me) of Beijing have a new police force – of sorts.  They are called ‘Public Security Volunteers’ and there are more than 400,000 of them – arranged into neighbourhood groups that are serving the Olympic security forces which include a mixture of police, over 100,000 ‘counter-terror troops’ and more than 300,000 CCTV cameras. The PSVs patrol litter-dropping, inappropriate clothing and spitting in the street – but by the locals, not the expected foreign visitors!  Despite the attempt to distinguish the new PSVs from the old ‘neighbourhood committee’ by giving the new volunteers a snazzy red and white striped polo-shirt to wear when ‘on duty’, there’s a lot of concern in the populace – the former committees were a mixture of spies and party members who reported on the irregular activities of their neighbours, and caused many a midnight arrest or disappearance for ‘re-education’.    

The PSV polo-shirts are a big sign of changing China – they are sponsored by the Yanjing beer company, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and while every volunteer has been given one, less than half actually wear them. The other half have been put on the black market, still in their original wrappings, as part of the

Beijing Olympic memorabilia business. That too, would have been impossible (or an arrestable offence!) a few years ago.  The concern that the new volunteers have caused can be directly related to their entrepreneurial flair. Those who have flogged their polo-shirts still need to distinguish themselves from ordinary citizens … so they’ve dug out Cultural Revolution-era red armbands to wear, and those armbands remind nervous Beijingers of the knock on the door in the middle of the night …

Beijing street cleaners in new uniforms

Well, sometimes they become ‘vintage’ or ‘collectable’ (1970s McDonalds workwear is selling for a goodly price on eBay) and sometimes it just gets dumped in rubbish bins or charity shops, but Festival Place shopping centre in Basingstoke has something else in mind.  Their old uniforms are to be recycled. More than 600 items, including: 

• 350 shirts
• 140 pairs of trousers
• 50 jumpers and cardigans
• 20 Hi-Viz coats
• 30 Hi-Viz waistcoats
• 30 ties
• 60 fleeces
• 20 blazers
• and four suits, have been collected. 

They will all be sent to Devizes Textile which will sort through the items, sending the best quality clothing to Africa to be reworn, and recycling the rest into items for industrial use. Danny Williamson, company partner at Devizes Textiles, was equally happy to help. He said, ‘This is the first shopping centre that we have worked with and we look forward to working with them in the future to help reduce Basingstoke’s landfill.’

Workwear, and work colleague, photograph courtesy of Robstephaustralia

Charlie Porter is associate editor of GQ, the magazine for naughty but intelligent men. Writing in The Guardian, he says ‘Men are supposed to want things simple. Yet with clothing we put ourselves through the most complicated rituals. While women can zip themselves into a frock in seconds, men waste precious minutes clumsily knotting ties, or fiddling with the folly that is the cufflink. Most men can complete these dreary ceremonies with their eyes shut; indeed, it often looks as if they have. But the autumn/winter 08 menswear shows are offering a thrilling new solution to the male work-wear conundrum: the jumpsuit.’

According to Charlie, he fell in love with a jumpsuit designed by Miuccia Prada at this year’s catwalk menswear extravaganza and wears his stark blue Prada with pride, but it’s not the first time he’s succumbed to the desire to look like Elvis. He also has what he calls ‘a roomy, workwear one by Dickies’ that he wears ‘… on days when I want to feel amused by my clothes and don’t care what anyone else thinks’.

Hmmm, he’s a brave man, but I wish he’d call a jumpsuit by its proper British name – the boilersuit. If you think the ‘workwear as smartwear’ revolution is for you, then jumpsuits (or boilersuits) are on sale from Prada, Calvin Klein and Mulberry this autumn. Or just pull on the one hanging behind the shed door and tell people that it’s GQ’s latest tip.

On a totally different note, Totally Workwear in Southport, Australia have a defiant new item on sale – steel toe-capped flip-flops. They call them thongs over there, which leads to much hilarity on the beaches when you’re invited to ‘kick off your thongs’ – but the rugged Australian workman apparently wants to wear his flip-flops to work, hence the tongue in cheek (or strap between toe?) design.

Jumpsuits courtesy of badlogik