Pockets, Buttons and Hangers: Designing a new uniform for health care professionals

Uniforms have been the subject of much scholarly debate, focusing primarily on their role as disciplinary devices (McVeigh 1997, Craik 2005, Black 2013). This article takes a different approach by focusing on uniforms as part of a large-scale system, which has to reconcile traditional sartorial concerns of how to dress and present the body with the demands for simplicity and rationality made by modern day industrial laundry processes. It does so by studying how a new uniform for health care professionals in a Danish region came into being as a negotiation between a number of heterogeneous actors, who fundamentally influenced the final design. Conflicting demands between the garment’s ability to accommodate the user’s bodily existence and the need for lean and rational maintenance processes form the ‘crux’ of this type of design. The aim of this article is to explore the complex interplay between the different actors involved in the design process and to discuss the uniform as a design product that combines the meticulous functional analysis of industrial design with concerns about self-presentation and identity of fashion.