The photographs were taken for a company annual report and show around 200 employees of an engineering works in the Midlands over a fortnight in 1974. Nobody in them is dressed for a camera. It is one of the most useful documents about clothing we have looked at this year, precisely because it was made for a completely different purpose.
The proportions look familiar
What is striking is how contemporary it looks. Wide, flat-fronted trousers with a full break. Short, boxy jackets. Heavy footwear with a visible sole. Layered shirts under overshirts. Almost every element currently being sold as new is present here, worn by people with no interest whatsoever in fashion, because those proportions are what heavy work required.
The garments were also built to a standard that has largely disappeared from clothing at that price. Triple-stitched seams, replaceable buttons, cuffs and knees reinforced as standard. These were bought by employers who expected them to last years and who would notice if they did not, which is a form of quality control the consumer market has never replicated.
“Nobody in that photograph chose those trousers. That is exactly why they look right.”
A menswear archivist
What gets lost in the copy
The current versions keep the shape and drop the specification. A modern overshirt in the same silhouette will typically have a lighter cloth, no reinforcement and a button sewn on with four stitches instead of a shank. It looks identical on a rail and behaves completely differently after a year, which is the whole story of workwear revival in one sentence.
The photographs also record something the revival never includes: everything is repaired. Elbows patched, knees reinforced with a second layer, buttons visibly replaced with non-matching ones. Nobody has attempted to make the repairs invisible or decorative. They are simply what happens to clothing that is expected to keep going.
What the photographs cannot tell you
It is worth being honest about the limits of a source like this. These are company photographs, taken with permission, on days people knew they were being recorded, which means we are almost certainly seeing a slightly tidier version of the workforce than existed on an ordinary Tuesday. Several people are visibly in a clean set of overalls that has not done a shift.
What survives that caveat is the structural information — proportions, construction, the presence of repairs, the relationship between what different grades of worker wore. Those are not things anybody thought to stage, because in 1974 nobody imagined a magazine would be reading a company annual report for its trouser cuts. The unselfconsciousness of the source is precisely what makes it useful.
The archive that holds these has around forty similar collections from companies across the region, almost none of them digitised or catalogued beyond a box number. On the evidence of this one set, that is a substantial and entirely unexamined record of how most people in Britain actually dressed for most of the twentieth century, sitting in a building that closes at four on weekdays.
There is a final detail in these photographs that took us a while to notice. Almost nobody is wearing anything that fits badly. In a workforce of two hundred, across every build and age, the clothes sit correctly — which is not because 1974 was better at sizing but because these were work garments issued in a proper size range and then altered locally, and because people wore the same things long enough for the wrong ones to be weeded out. Fit, it turns out, is mostly a function of time rather than of money.
The company closed in 1991 and the photographs sat in a local archive until somebody digitised them last year. They are freely available, almost nobody has looked at them, and they contain more useful information about proportion than most of what will be published this season.
