Category is, Blue Betta Work!
By Fitz Cain
On the sixth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, which aired earlier this year, one episode challenged the queens to walk the runway in their best blue-collar, working girl look. The competing queens served up imitations of everything from a sanitation worker to a crossing guard, putting their own draggy touch on well-known blue-collar uniforms. It’s a peculiar pairing — drag queens and blue-collar workers — but these queens sold it.
Well, it’s not just the queens of Drag Race who have repurposed workwear for fashion. Over the past year in particular, I’ve seen a rise in workwear being sported for style rather than practicality. Walk for five minutes on USC’s campus and just count the number of sweaty wifebeaters or baggy Wrangler jeans: and I think it’s pretty safe to say these students aren’t headed to a construction site to earn a living.
These archetypical jobs (construction worker, hunter, carpenter, lumberjack, etc.) work with their hands, use brute strength, and are commonly filled by men. They’re indicative of a hypermasculine person in a hypermasculine environment. But more often than not, the workwear trend is not being embraced by big, muscular straight men. Rather, this aesthetic is being harnessed by non-hypermasculine people in a way that borders on cosplay.
I, myself, have taken to adopting this look. I love my trusty camo hat and I often find myself sporting way more pockets than I have stuff to fill them with. So what connection does a feminine gay like myself, or the runway-planning producers of a show like Drag Race, feel to this rugged apparel?
Well, none. And that’s the point.
For many terminally online Gen-Zers like myself, the word camp has been overused near the point of becoming meaningless. Originating from 20th-century drag culture and descriptive of a style marked by irony and exaggeration, camp has been repurposed by modern cyber-youth to describe everything from Biblical stories to Karlie Kloss’s so-not-camp-it’s-camp 2019 Met Gala look. Campiness excuses any cringiness, marking it simply as satire — whether this satire was intentional or not.
Yet on I must trudge, making the brave claim that this workwear trend is indisputably CAMP.
Now, a twink wearing a trucker hat and a pair of Carhartt jeans is certainly not measuring up to the over-the-top campiness of the Met Gala or on the main stage of Drag Race, but it does carry the same tongue-in-cheek commentary. And the juxtaposition of a painted nail or beaded necklace with a pair of fermer’s overalls is inherently gender-playful.
When a feminine-presenting person of any gender throws on a pair of carpenter pants and a pair of clunky work boots, it’s a rejection of the idea that one needs to be hypermasculine to wear hypermasculine clothing. It’s also a reclamation of the hypermasculine work environments whose cultures traditionally reject non-masculine people.
But the association of this apparel with hypermasculinity goes beyond a blue-collar workplace. “You look like a Republican,” I’ve had friends cheekily remark when noticing my own attempts to make workwear fashionable. The association of the working class with conservatism and ignorance is ever-present in the irony of this trend — but it’s also flawed.
The “Blue Betta Work” Drag Race runway was part of a larger ball challenge inspired by the ballroom scene of the 1970s and 80s, in which mostly trans and gender-nonconforming people of color would host “balls” where they competed for trophies in a number of themed categories.
One of the most infamous is “executive realness,” where ballroom participants would don their snazziest suits and attempt to best resemble a white-collar businessman. Since the world would never accept them on Wall Street, they made space for themselves through fantasy. “Blue Betta Work” riffed on this category.
But in reversing the roles, modern trend-followers run the risk of accomplishing the opposite, effectively making room for elite youngsters to “cosplay poor” and ridicule the working class. This possibility has made the workwear trend leave a sour taste in some people’s mouths.
How I see it, the goal of the workwear trend shouldn’t be to give a middle finger to blue-collar workers. The adoption of these trends by queer and/or non-hypermasculine people should serve to parody the culture of toxic masculinity, not the individuals wrapped up in it. But there is an inherent and unavoidable class tension present in this style.
Many, if not most, people following the workwear trend do their shopping at secondhand stores or get their apparel straight from manufacturers like Dickies or Carhartt that market their items at reasonable prices to workers. However, this trend has not gone unnoticed, or unexploited, by larger companies.
Take Urban Outfitters for example, which seems to market to a young, alternative crowd and has started using workwear as inspiration for pricier originals. While many work pants on the Dickies website go for $30-40, it’s difficult to find any in this style for under $70 on Urban Outfitters’.
Traditional workwear brands have faced the unique challenge of finding the balance between capitalizing on new consumers while not alienating their original blue-collar audience.
This past summer, Dickies had two fashion-focused partnerships: a collaborative pop-up shop in Los Angeles with Fred Segal and custom handbags made for singer Halsey’s About Face makeup line. Both of these endeavors exhibited an openness to embracing a new fashion-oriented consumer base.
In a recent interview with Fashionista.com, Dickies VP of Marketing Kathy Hines explained what the brand is doing to stay true to their roots in workwear. According to Hines, Dickies is committed to maintaining its identity as a workwear brand. One way they do this is by having two separate product teams: one focused on practical workwear, one on fashionable workwear-inspired apparel. Dickies also tries to center the worker as their primary consumer.
“We call our workers our athletes, because they are: They bend, they lift, they’re doing heavy-duty things that require performance,” Hines said. “Keeping that front and center and always knowing that we’re there to serve the workers and enable them to do their work more effectively with our performance workwear, that really serves us well.”
While there’s plenty of possibilities for gender-play, irony and political and social critique within workwear-inspired fashion, behind it all should be a sentiment of respect and reverence for individual blue-collar workers. As long as people — and brands — tread lightly and don’t punch down, the power of work uniforms can be harnessed to give a new meaning to working the runway.
Well, it’s not just the queens of Drag Race who have repurposed workwear for fashion. Over the past year in particular, I’ve seen a rise in workwear being sported for style rather than practicality. Walk for five minutes on USC’s campus and just count the number of sweaty wifebeaters or baggy Wrangler jeans: and I think it’s pretty safe to say these students aren’t headed to a construction site to earn a living.
These archetypical jobs (construction worker, hunter, carpenter, lumberjack, etc.) work with their hands, use brute strength, and are commonly filled by men. They’re indicative of a hypermasculine person in a hypermasculine environment. But more often than not, the workwear trend is not being embraced by big, muscular straight men. Rather, this aesthetic is being harnessed by non-hypermasculine people in a way that borders on cosplay.
I, myself, have taken to adopting this look. I love my trusty camo hat and I often find myself sporting way more pockets than I have stuff to fill them with. So what connection does a feminine gay like myself, or the runway-planning producers of a show like Drag Race, feel to this rugged apparel?
Well, none. And that’s the point.
For many terminally online Gen-Zers like myself, the word camp has been overused near the point of becoming meaningless. Originating from 20th-century drag culture and descriptive of a style marked by irony and exaggeration, camp has been repurposed by modern cyber-youth to describe everything from Biblical stories to Karlie Kloss’s so-not-camp-it’s-camp 2019 Met Gala look. Campiness excuses any cringiness, marking it simply as satire — whether this satire was intentional or not.
Yet on I must trudge, making the brave claim that this workwear trend is indisputably CAMP.
Now, a twink wearing a trucker hat and a pair of Carhartt jeans is certainly not measuring up to the over-the-top campiness of the Met Gala or on the main stage of Drag Race, but it does carry the same tongue-in-cheek commentary. And the juxtaposition of a painted nail or beaded necklace with a pair of fermer’s overalls is inherently gender-playful.
When a feminine-presenting person of any gender throws on a pair of carpenter pants and a pair of clunky work boots, it’s a rejection of the idea that one needs to be hypermasculine to wear hypermasculine clothing. It’s also a reclamation of the hypermasculine work environments whose cultures traditionally reject non-masculine people.
But the association of this apparel with hypermasculinity goes beyond a blue-collar workplace. “You look like a Republican,” I’ve had friends cheekily remark when noticing my own attempts to make workwear fashionable. The association of the working class with conservatism and ignorance is ever-present in the irony of this trend — but it’s also flawed.
The “Blue Betta Work” Drag Race runway was part of a larger ball challenge inspired by the ballroom scene of the 1970s and 80s, in which mostly trans and gender-nonconforming people of color would host “balls” where they competed for trophies in a number of themed categories.
One of the most infamous is “executive realness,” where ballroom participants would don their snazziest suits and attempt to best resemble a white-collar businessman. Since the world would never accept them on Wall Street, they made space for themselves through fantasy. “Blue Betta Work” riffed on this category.
But in reversing the roles, modern trend-followers run the risk of accomplishing the opposite, effectively making room for elite youngsters to “cosplay poor” and ridicule the working class. This possibility has made the workwear trend leave a sour taste in some people’s mouths.
How I see it, the goal of the workwear trend shouldn’t be to give a middle finger to blue-collar workers. The adoption of these trends by queer and/or non-hypermasculine people should serve to parody the culture of toxic masculinity, not the individuals wrapped up in it. But there is an inherent and unavoidable class tension present in this style.
Many, if not most, people following the workwear trend do their shopping at secondhand stores or get their apparel straight from manufacturers like Dickies or Carhartt that market their items at reasonable prices to workers. However, this trend has not gone unnoticed, or unexploited, by larger companies.
Take Urban Outfitters for example, which seems to market to a young, alternative crowd and has started using workwear as inspiration for pricier originals. While many work pants on the Dickies website go for $30-40, it’s difficult to find any in this style for under $70 on Urban Outfitters’.
Traditional workwear brands have faced the unique challenge of finding the balance between capitalizing on new consumers while not alienating their original blue-collar audience.
This past summer, Dickies had two fashion-focused partnerships: a collaborative pop-up shop in Los Angeles with Fred Segal and custom handbags made for singer Halsey’s About Face makeup line. Both of these endeavors exhibited an openness to embracing a new fashion-oriented consumer base.
In a recent interview with Fashionista.com, Dickies VP of Marketing Kathy Hines explained what the brand is doing to stay true to their roots in workwear. According to Hines, Dickies is committed to maintaining its identity as a workwear brand. One way they do this is by having two separate product teams: one focused on practical workwear, one on fashionable workwear-inspired apparel. Dickies also tries to center the worker as their primary consumer.
“We call our workers our athletes, because they are: They bend, they lift, they’re doing heavy-duty things that require performance,” Hines said. “Keeping that front and center and always knowing that we’re there to serve the workers and enable them to do their work more effectively with our performance workwear, that really serves us well.”
While there’s plenty of possibilities for gender-play, irony and political and social critique within workwear-inspired fashion, behind it all should be a sentiment of respect and reverence for individual blue-collar workers. As long as people — and brands — tread lightly and don’t punch down, the power of work uniforms can be harnessed to give a new meaning to working the runway.