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True blue: why the chore jacket just won’t quit

It has clad everyone from French mechanics to Harry Styles. What is it about the chore jacket that makes it so enduring – and can a modern version ever be truly authentic?

They march across my Instagram feed, from workwear-inspired brands LF Markey, Folk or Uskees, down through high street stores such as Zara and John Lewis, as well as at hyper-expensive label The Row – your French machinist might have muttered a piquant “dis donc!” at its chore, with pockets too close together and a £1,500 price tag. Even brewers are getting in on it, with Guinness launching a collab with Native Denims: its off-white body with dark buttons is perhaps supposed to reflect the colouring of their fiendishly popular pints, but instead looks like white fabric that has been washed with black socks. The fact that they exist thanks to the hard-won rights of the early-20th-century French unions, and the graft of those who spent their entire working lives in them, arguably becomes a form of ironic appropriation if you’re wearing one to the local farmers’ market to drop a tenner on kimchi.

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