The excellent and exhaustive blog, Clothes on Film has taken its annual trip through just about every film that came out this year (and some that we’d never heard of but apparently premiered anyway) to look at what clothing tells us about character. It’s fascinating.

Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth both played with reality – Helena by sticking to it and wearing genuine vintage fur, while Colin insisted on not wearing a suit jacket underneath his overcoat because it made him too bulky to be a realistic King George VI. Russell Brand played Arthur Bach in suits tailored by Martin Greenfield in New York to included a wide range of fabrics and to look like Savile Row tailoring while meeting the demands of an active character on a film
set.

Several films this year also focus on masculinity, using the most traditional symbol, the plain white T-shirt as worn by Elvis Presley and James Dean and seen in Drive worn by Ryan Gosling and even by Captain America! So plain white T-shirts for men add to their sense of masculinity, but make women feel vulnerable because of the risk of underwear showing through. Putting male staff in white and women in grey, blue or black T-shirts can create an impression of gender balance.

On TV, Boardwalk Empire also used Martin Greenfield to dress its characters in 1920s style and this focus has been particularly important in giving the impression of authority, power and prestige – according to the designers, this has involved using ‘hard’ dressing such as starch, brilliant whites and matte neutrals like beige and hats. Baseball style or soft caps were saved for lower ranking characters while harder headwear like fedoras or boaters were worn by bosses. Hats functioned to reveal who had power. That’s something that businesses tend to forget – if you put somebody in a
baseball cap, they have no authority – so let senior staff go bare-headed or give them a hat with a harder profile that denotes power.

There’s a lot to learn from film … and smart companies will use a designer who has a finger on the pulse to ensure that staff uniforms convey some of these subtle messages that help boost business success and productivity.

It’s said that Brooks Brothers has dressed more American Presidents than any other clothing line, and this month it had a Scottish showcase in its Regent Street shop.

More than 300 fashionistas attended the event which featured knitwear, tweed, cashmere, ties, embroidered and embossed items and hand-made shirts. The occasion was the Harris Tweed centenary and Brooks Brothers used the event to highlight its own nearly two century pedigree, with photos of Abraham Lincoln (who got that black coat from the Brooks Brothers store), Andy Warhol and Clarke Gable, all dressed in Brooks Brother’s clothing.

It’s not just tweed that makes Brooks Brothers different – the brand has driven the search for new clothing fashions that it can import, such as bringing button-down shirts to the USA and inventing the wash and wear suit. Branding clothes with the classic Brooks Brothers logo has kept the company in the public mind as one that delivers a formal quality along with ease of wear and laundering and it has also been careful to supply clothes for TV shows that match its brand identity such as Mad Men and Glee.

This clever association of clothing, famous wearer and innovation has really driven the brand as one that innovates and yet contains the best of American heritage. Other companies might find a very different focus for their brands – more casual companies might like a figurehead who plays a cool sport to wear a sponsored polo shirt or to find a band or actor who typify the brand values and then to offer them promotional clothing to wear in public. Whatever way you play the famous clothing game, it benefits both brand and individual to be associated with each other.

Many companies, or even colleges, end up as brands.  Laurie Essig, over at True Slant, is bemoaning the way the college she attended, Franklin and Marshall, has become one of the most wanted casual clothing brands in Europe and Japan, without the actual clothing line having anything to do with the college at all!

At the same time, HMV are hoping to turn around a declining market share by creating an ‘entertainment-inspired’ clothing range that launches in June. The line will feature rock and film imagery on music themed T-shirts aimed at the 18-30 male market and checked shirts and scarves for ‘festival-chic’ women. It’s the spearhead of a strategy that will move the company away from its traditional lines of CDs and DVDs into more ‘lifestyle’ sales.

So while your business might not seem to lend itself to establishing a strong clothing brand, it’s worth considering if the next Caterpillar boots trend or the rapidly building craze for cowboy hats could launch from, or help support, your business.  There’s a current desire for retro style aprons which any catering or hardware company could tap into, by creating branded pinnys for sale. And skinny leg jeans are being supported by husky work shirts, which is a great chance for engineering and trade businesses to put their workforce into fashionable uniforms that can also be sold or given to clients as a goodwill gesture.

Companies evolve, but uniforms don’t always seem to evolve with them – the two ways that a company really marks itself out as having lost touch with the developing world of business are having an out of date logo and having an old-fashioned uniform.

Promotional clothing allows a business to relaunch itself and to slam out a powerful marketing campaign that reinforces an established customer base, attract trade and increases sales by reminding everybody why that firm been around so long and what keeps it ahead of the competition.

One way to demonstrate your evolution is to use retro uniform items to highlight how far you’ve come in the time you’ve been established. One computer company did this by celebrating 15 years in business, in 2008 by getting all their staff to wear 1993 clothing and playing the hits of that year as their call holding music for the first month of the year, as well as having their site teams wear specially printed T-shirts that used the titles of hit TV shows and songs of 1993 to refer to the company’s ‘long’ history. Well, it’s long in computer terms!

Campaigns like this can get local press coverage too, as people love to hear about the quirky ways that local companies are behaving.

We’ve all been given a baseball cap as a promotional gimmick or giveaway, and most of the time we don’t wear them. Why not?

Because they look too new

If you want a hat that is the summer equivalent of a biker’s leather jacket, you have to do a bit of work. Squeaky clean baseball caps are great for cute children and ladies, but most men want something that looks as if it has earned its place on their head.  Obviously if you wear it a great deal it will eventually get that rough round the edges look, but if you want a vintage looking hat from new, then you can take some rough sandpaper to the seams and brim of the hat too take the edge of the newness. Then bury it overnight (yes really!) and wash it the next day in a good hot wash with some washing soda in it (remember to mark where you buried it though or you may lose it forever) and in just 24 hours you’ve got a hat that looks like its been worn all summer. Leaving your hat in the sun for a couple of days also helps to give it a weathered look.

Because they are flat billed

Some baseball caps are made flat-billed because they are easier to manufacture and ship, but if you want a classic curved brim, simply find a beer mug (the kind with a handle) dampen the brim and put it in the mug overnight. By next morning the hat will have a nice curve across the brim. Don’t do this when drunk, or you may put the bill in the mug the wrong way and end up with a hat that looks like it’s smiling.

It’s a stupid colour

This is the supplier’s fault and if your baseball cap is a promotional item then you can expect the company whose logo appears on the hat to disappear before too long – it’s a very stupid mistake to provide promotional clothing in colours that nobody wants to wear, even if that is the brand colour. Much better advice is to keep the logo in brand colours and to pick black, navy, red or white for the cap colour because those are the classic colourways that most people are happy to have on their heads.

It’s too big

If your cap is not adjustable, and it’s made of cotton, you can try shrinking it. First make it wet – if it has a plastic bill you can dip it in warm water, and then wring it out slightly before putting it on your head – wear it until it is completely dry. It will fit you like a glove.

There’s nothing like celebrity endorsement to get a business off the ground, although sometimes that can backfire, as Jamie Oliver is discovering: his new Brighton restaurant has been in the press twice this week – once because he apparently ‘stole’ a chef from Aldo Zilli, and now because a naked pregnant woman is picketing it for animal rights.

On the other hand Liam Gallagher has never been one to hide his light under a bushel and in establishing his own clothing line, he’s spoken out about clothes. On winklepicker shoes he says ‘You know them shoes that just come at you like a ****ing snooker cue! It’s like, leave it out man! You got a license for them bastards or what?’ and on celebrity clothing lines in general he’s equally forthright  ‘I’m doing it cuz there’s a lack of stuff out there of the things I would wear …. I’m not into the skinny look. That’s what I’m here for, to ****ing get rid of that s***.’

So what does his line deliver, apart from the need to delete expletives when repeating his words on our blog?  It’s called Pretty Green after the Jam song and, as you might expect, it has a mod feel to it: skinny jeans (although they aren’t skinny jeans, obviously because Liam’s not into that, as he’s said), some T-shirts that look quite retro and, of course, parkas.

And in case you thought this was a British phenomenon, Justin Timberlake has put his name to a tequila blend this month too.

The thing is, Liam’s clothing line and Justin’s tequila will sell to their fans, because that’s what fan means – being a fanatic about what your star does. But for the rest of us, a stronger focus on excellent products, value for money and superlative service are going to remain important – because that’s how our customers will become our fans too.

Embroidery is an ancient artistic technique that is still used today to make a piece of clothing more distinctive. Until the invention of screen printing, there were only two ways to get fabric to carry a message – it had to be either woven in as tapestry or embroidered on with thread, and modern embroidery contains a range of high technology methods and materials to allow the embroidery machine to create intricate patterns that seem three-dimensional, complex writing that can mimic anybody’s handwriting, or detailed images with subtle shading and textures.

Embroidery has a wide range of uses from the creation of elegant logos in metallic thread which give a touch of high style to company uniforms, especially those used in hotel and spa environments, through to bright three-dimensional blocks of colour that make up a company’s logo and stand out against a dark blue or black T-shirt or barkeeper’s apron – both these techniques have particular use in situations like bars, restaurants and other locations that are often low-lit.

Embroidery is also useful in creating promotional clothing for company events as it can conveys information but also gives an air of luxury and classic styling to any clothing, but especially on shirts, blouses and corporate clothing. The scale of embroidery is usually intricate and detailed, which makes it particularly suitable for monograms on cuffs and collars or on bathrobes or caps.

In ‘bespoke’ businesses, those that have a low staff turnover and a reputation of style and luxury to live up to, have names ‘detailed’ which means embroidered on the clothing, looks classic and understated and gives a much better impression than a name badge. If that seems out of your cost range, you can consider embroidery patches which can be made up in bulk and then sewn onto suitable garments or bags or other merchandise. It’s a highly personalised approach that is popular with customers because it looks rich and elegant.

Meryl Streep courtesy of Adonis Chen

There have been a series of articles about the vintage hotties who are currently wowing the world: Sharon Stone and Helen Mirren, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, all of whom have had major cinematic hits at a point in their lives when female movie stars used to become almost invisible. Their clothes have garnered as much attention as their performances – with Sarandon’s red dresses and Streep’s swing coats turning up on catwalk models half their age or less. But one thing few of them have been photographed in … is a T-shirt.

That doesn’t mean women over a certain age shouldn’t wear T-shirts – two of the UK’s finest talents: Judie Dench and Julie Walters, both made red carpet appearances in formal-style T-shirts this year, and Meryl Streep brought the long sleeved jersey T-shirt back into high prominence in The Devil Wears Prada, but it does mean there are new rules to be aware of.

Midriff baring is best left to the under thirties who have abdomens of steel – even the faintest wrinkle or bulge will look glaring if your skin peeks out from under your T-shirt.

The arms matter. In cap or short sleeves, you have to be sure that there isn’t some arm strangle going on – sleeves should be relaxed, not clamped around a body area that does tend to show one’s age at the best of times. For spaghetti straps, make sure you don’t end up with a back fat bulge – it’s not seemly. And while the very young can probably get away with three or four straps on each arm, for vintage ladies it’s probably best to just wear one set of straps and a good supporting, strapless bra.

Oversized T-shirts (Dawn French apart) are not good for public appearances unless you’re on the beach. It just gives the impression that you’ve surrendered to your age, or that you’ve had a senior moment and pulled on your hubby’s T-shirt by mistake. A fitted T-shirt is alluring, especially one that’s specially shaped to the female figure

T-shirts with clever slogans are great, but if you’re over twenty, you need to step back and ask if the message is so important that you want it across your chest. What’s cute in a teen can seem like a brash statement in somebody with age and authority on their side – Katharine Hamnett may have made a career out of T-shirt messages but be very sure that the words you wear really do define the person you wish people to see.

  Karen Davidson, great-granddaughter of Harley-Davidson co-founder William A. Davidson is creative director of general merchandise for Harley-Davidson and supervises design for the company’s two decade old MotorClothes division. Since 1947, when the first Harley leather jackets appeared, the biker ‘uniform’ of black leather jacket, jeans and T-shirt has been a classic, but now things are changing – the traditional ‘leather’ has been joined by leather treated to be water resistant, and even by cottons and synthetic materials.

As bikers have aged, they have also wanted more from their clothing, like shirts that work on the bike and in the office too.  And the customer mix has changed: men purchase about 60% of the clothing and women buy 40%. This has meant creating brighter colours and new styles along the classic lines. Pink leather jackets were introduced a couple years ago and fitted Harley T-shirts are a big seller. Now the line is expanding again to include grommets and appliqués to personalise both T-shirts and jackets. 

Harley-Davidson T-shirt courtesy of jorgemejia

But not just any old T-shirt.  It was the elite troops of the Colombian Army who deceived the terrorist group ‘Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’ (FARC) into handing over hostages who’d been kept in the jungle for nearly six years. And one of their tools was a Che Guevera T-shirt. 

The left wing terror group had become expert in kidnapping during its war with the Colombian state but Colombian Army members infiltrated the very highest levels of FARC and were able to bring a helicopter to a jungle rendezvous, claiming they were taking the hostages to an international meeting to show FARC’s power.  The most senior member of the infiltration team spent nearly half an hour on the ground with the terrorists, laughing and joking, and clad in a Che Guevara T-shirt, which seems to have helped the FARC soldiers accept that he was ‘one of them’.   

Once back in the air, the amazed hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, a former candidate for President of Colombia who had been kept in isolation for over five years, were told their ‘captors’ were actually their rescuers.

Che courtesy of slavin fpo