Workwear Essentials

Workwear Essentials is the shelf of small, useful things at Robert's Department Store in Mamaroneck, New York — the items nobody plans a wardrobe around and everybody ends up needing.

Snap-on duck hoods sit at the front of it. A lot of work coats are better without a permanent hood, because a hood gets in the way under a hard hat and collects rain when it is down, and then there are about ten days a year when the coat is considerably worse without one. A hood that snaps on solves both, lives in a bag or a cab the rest of the time, and makes a good coat more useful for very little money.

Hi vis vests are the other staple. They get borrowed, lost and left in vehicles, which is the argument for owning more than one, and the ventilated versions stay wearable through a genuinely hot shift where a solid one becomes a layer of trapped heat by mid-morning. Size a vest to go over a jacket rather than over a tee, because the version needed in winter has to fit over everything else.

Alongside those sit the plain and printed everyday tees: the shirts that become the work shirt, then the weekend shirt, then the thing kept in the garage for painting. Nothing in Workwear Essentials is complicated, and that is exactly why it gets used.