How should a bartender dress? Are the white-dinner-jacketed staff of London’s Savoy the ideal? Or the aloha-shirt-clad crew behind the bar at Latitude 29 in New Orleans? How about the bartenders outfitted in colored mechanic’s jumpsuits at London’s 🔶🟥🔵 (A Bar with Shapes for a Name)?
At the dawn of the profession, the bartender’s uniform was a white coat, putting them in a similar category of service as the pharmacist, the butcher, the barber, the soda jerk. As the popularity of cocktails increased, the job’s status rose, becoming an indispensable position in hospitality. In fine restaurants and hotels, bartenders often wore dinner jackets and tuxedos—a tradition carried on today in iconic institutions like Hollywood’s Musso & Frank and New York’s Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle hotel, where the staff wear scarlet mess jackets with black satin lapels; single-breasted with shawl lapels at the former, double-breasted with peak lapels at the latter.
In today’s new cocktail golden age, there is no one typical uniform for a bartender. Perhaps more surprising still is how few bars these days—even the fancy ones—seem to require much of a uniform at all. The meticulous attention paid to décor, to printed material, to glassware, often passes over the sartorial element. But amid the sea of heavy leather aprons, tight waistcoats and branded T-shirts, a new generation of high-concept bars is standing out for using fashion to complement their cocktails.
Uniform: Dusty rose pink dinner jackets
Designer: Public School
Overstory sits on the 64th floor of an Art Deco building in Lower Manhattan and boasts a wraparound balcony with breathtaking views of the city. In its design, courtesy of Modellus Novus (and the building it sits within), it evokes for the modern era venerable skyscraper lounges like the Rainbow Room—from the bar’s classic-with-a-twist wide-bowled Martini glasses to the chevron wall sconces that echo the Art Deco.
The balance between the timeless and the timely is usually achieved in one of two ways: using a playful pastiche of eras—midcentury furniture juxtaposed against Victorian flocked wallpaper, for example—or stripping back ornament to shape, line and color. Overstory chose the latter. And the color that kept creeping into the design teams’ mood boards was a dusty rose pink. “The blush palette was inspired by the color of the sunset. The result is that the room sort of glows during golden hour,” says bar director Harrison Ginsberg. The bar ran with it: There’s friendly, welcoming pink in the soft plush of the stools, and the copper and brass fixtures turn rose gold at night with soft incandescent-style illumination from above and below.
For the uniforms, Modellus Novus tapped New York streetwear brand Public School. Known chiefly for more casual clothing, Public School nevertheless accepted the remit: Create a dusty rose homage to the classic double-breasted dinner jacket worn by hotel bartenders. The result is a short jacket, almost (but not quite) like the mess jackets worn on 1930s cruise ships; that is, double-breasted, but with a lower button stance and only two front buttons in brass. This uncluttered front perfectly suits the bar’s refined but unpretentious charisma. The lapel is a shawl—far thinner than an old-fashioned dinner jacket, and not faced in satin. Details designed with specific bartending duties in mind include a partially lined jacket to keep cool while working, a water-resistant fabric, and a slightly shorter cuff to keep excess fabric out of the way of the cocktails.
Uniform: Colored jumpsuits
Designer: Remy Savage, 🔶🟥🔵 co-founder, with Tanmay Saxena of Lane Fortyfive
From its unpronounceable name (inspired by a 1921 concept by artist Wassily Kandinsky) to its pared-back décor and cocktails made with a deliberately limited number of blind-tasted ingredients (in order to inspire creativity through scarcity), 🔶🟥🔵, also called A Bar with Shapes for a Name, is an inspired homage to everything Bauhaus. The early 20th-century German art and design school and movement revered nonfigurative minimalism, seeking beauty in the simplicity of line, color and texture. Its commitment to stripping back ornamentation inspired design movements from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne to the International Style.
According to 🔶🟥🔵 co-founder Remy Savage, “the uniforms are based on an artist called László Moholy-Nagy,” who “used to teach at the Bauhaus in a mechanic’s jumpsuit.” One of the Bauhaus’ central tenets was the fusion of art, craft and industry. It was a progressive, revolutionary concept, meant to bring the artist closer to the laborer than the elite bourgeoisie. One sartorial expression of this was the adoption, by artists like Moholy-Nagy, of workwear.
Having found inspiration in an image of Moholy-Nagy in his simple jumpsuit worn over a shirt and tie, Savage approached Tanmay Saxena, the designer behind fashion label Lane Fortyfive. The two collaborated, tweaking the uniform until they’d perfected it. The result was a linen jumpsuit nearly identical to Moholy-Nagy’s zippered-front unit, but with a few small changes, like a snap button-down collar and sleeves rolled up a bit to reveal a white cuff. Like the original, the bar’s uniforms are cinched with an elasticated waistband that closes with an asymmetrical buttoned tab. However, instead of the drab fabrics typical of a mechanic’s uniform, each employee’s jumpsuit is a different vivid color, offering a striking contrast with the bar’s otherwise neutral-leaning minimalist décor. In an inspired stroke of artistic differentiation, the managers wear primary colors, the first three employees wear secondary colors, and newer staffers work in pastels and jewel tones.
Uniform: Asymmetrical chef’s tunics with piping
Designer: Laura Prabowo, Penicillin co-founder and co-owner
The staff uniforms are also subject to the same low-waste standards. In the three years the bar has been open, the uniform has gone through redesigns, all with the aim of perfecting a functional uniform that stays true to the bar’s aesthetic and mission. The first uniform was a unisex version of the traditional Hong Kong cheongsam—a fitted dress, typically with an asymmetrical front closure and a stand collar—made from a mixture of bamboo and recycled fiber, designed by Laura Prabowo, one of the bar’s co-owners. The result was a short-sleeved, moss green tunic with a zip front, a small stand collar and piping in gold or black down the front and sleeves.
Eventually, Prabowo redesigned the main uniform to align with the bar’s pared-back aesthetic. The new uniforms consist of a white or black tunic—staff and management alternate colors each day for laundry efficiency—with rolled sleeves, a small stand collar and an asymmetrical front closure, all piped in white on the black shirts and red and black on the white shirts. These uniforms, made from organic linen and recycled polyester, with “Penicillin” logos printed on the left breast, have a more lab-wear feel. The silhouette of the closure and collar not only evokes the traditional cheongsam front, but also takes inspiration from the white coats of the short-order cooks at traditional Hong Kong cha chaan teng cafés, the local equivalent of a diner or greasy spoon.
Uniform: Gray asymmetrical zippered waistcoat
Designer: Simone Caporale and Marc Álvarez, Sips co-owners
The Sips uniform, which was designed by Caporale and his partner, Marc Álvarez, is meant to express a slight nod to the jackets and waistcoats of classic bartending, but with a sharp twist away from tradition. Bartenders and servers wear gunmetal gray waistcoats with asymmetrical zipper closures like those seen on motorcycle jackets. The zipper—along with some wide black grosgrain-like trim on the epaulets, the breast pocket, and along one side of the vest—is intended to subvert the formality of the classic uniform, to make it less pretentious while remaining chic. “It’s an urban touch,” says Caporale. “It looks more street, not posh. But it is also something you see on Dolce & Gabbana or Gucci.”
Beneath this, the uniform is casual: black jeans and a black T-shirt. But the vests are futurist-formal. Made from a recycled synthetic material with a shiny silk aspect, they’re more durable and easy to care for than organic silk. The functional design aspects of the vest go beyond that: In some places, the trim is not merely decorative but gives added structure to the garment and reinforces the pockets made for carrying bar tools and pens. The vest’s back has an adjustable strap to better fit the wearer. And the garment’s most unusual innovation is that one side of the vest’s front hangs lower than the other; this is not only a striking change of silhouette, but is deliberately designed to partially obscure the bar towel that hangs from each server’s waist—a necessity in an establishment without a typical service bar. Of the choice of tailor, for Caporale, it was personal.
“My father had a tapestry workshop making leather seats for race cars and motorboats back in the ’80s, and when I was young I was always playing with the equipment,” he says. When Caporale walked into a nearby shop, which is owned by a woman from Ecuador, her daughter was there doing her homework at the work table. “It reminded me of my childhood, and it felt right to give this commission to a small business rather than a big company.”