Bizarre British fashion

In Britain, fashion trends usually start in London and gradually extend beyond the capital; it might take more than a year for a style of clothing that is fashionable in London to become fashionable elsewhere

The bizarre fashion for wearing colourful overalls passed quite a while ago, nobody apart from house painters with a nervous or muscular disability that prevents them from applying paint accurately – without splashing it all over the place, wears colourful overalls.

The guy in the photograph is pretty pioneering, he is wearing his colourful overalls in what is normally a non-colourful-overalls area of Britain, in a working class town that’s about 150 miles from London.

An overall view of the UK

Here, and elsewhere in Britain, overalls are invariably plain white, blue or brown, and tend to be worn for work – including precision painting – rather than worn as a fashion statement.
The people that wear them are ‘colour-coded’; white overalls are worn by painters and decorators, blue overalls are worn by people engaged in the manufacturing and engineering industries and brown overalls are worn by carpenters and joiners.
The practice of wearing overalls for work isn’t widespread in Britain; painters and decorators invariably wear white overalls, people engaged in the manufacturing and engineering industries quite often wear them but carpenters and joiners hardly ever wear them.
The practice is very slightly snobbish, it is used to identify an elite – the skilled craftsmen. True craftsmen wear appropriately- coloured overalls, they are colour-coded. Non-craftsmen don’t, they don’t have access to the code.
At least that’s the reasoning; in reality very few skilled carpenters for example wear brown overalls, they are more likely to wear jeans.

An overall view of America

In the US, working class towns are sometimes described as ‘blue-collar towns.’ This seems to suggest that everybody in these places is engaged in the manufacturing or engineering industries, because blue is the traditional colour for these industries. At least it is from a British perspective – from the perspective of someone who is accustomed to a colour-coding system.
But obviously this can’t be the case, there has to be painters and decorators and carpenters and joiners employed in these places.
It’s just that they all wear blue collars.
Seriously, ‘blue collar’ is obviously just a shorthand term, a quick and easy way of describing manual workers in general. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate; can you imagine what it would be like having to describe a working class town as a white, blue and brown overalls town instead of a blue collar town?