On Judging
A Jumpsuit

The car, Zuko says, could be special—its potential is so thrilling he must strip off his leather jacket, gyrate, and burst into song. In this homoerotic paean to horsepower, what else would the chorus be wearing? Their jumpsuits, which later turn into shiny silver space suits, offer a patina of masculinity with all the functionality of a leotard.

Jumpsuits hide us slyly, completely. Like any uniform, they remove our personality and swap it out for categorization: here a mechanic, there a baker, here is an artisanal candlestick maker. In the middle ages, the design of your apron implied your trade. In America, during World War II, a worksuit on a woman signaled a rosy-cheeked, industrious patriotism. Here were our best gals, their hair still meticulous, swapping aprons for a mechanic’s uniform, going to their own version of the battlefield: a factory.

Part of the appeal of workwear is the competence it communicates, whether or not that competence has been proven. Wearing a cream-colored Carhartt coverall is an act of convincing yourself you are simultaneously more delicate and more hardy than your history might dictate. Even an apron—or a nylon dress cut like one—makes the most sluggish of us feel like we could break down a side of beef in ninety seconds flat. So much streetwear gives us the warm rush of ‘90s nostalgia: the dream of, if not being a skateboarder, being skateboard-adjacent.

Jumpsuits were first made for parachuters, while the looser boilersuit was intended to keep soot from infiltrating a worker’s clothing when he climbed into a coal-fired boiler. Put one on and you feel both armed (with the ability to do at least one useful task) and liberated (from the toil of wearing multiple garments at once). You might even, in the case of this ADER error beige wukador jumpsuit, feel like a child dressed as a firefighter for Halloween, convinced she’s really taken the job. The confidence boost is a boon, even when not used to save lives: if this piece of clothing once helped men fall through the sky without dying and face blazing fires, you think to yourself, surely it can help me leave the house.

There’s a store in Amsterdam called Concrete Matter that sells workwear and outdoor gear alongside vintage European army jackets and pants. (It is a wonderful place to buy a pair of faded Lapis short-shorts allegedly worn by the Swedish military in the early 1900s.) On my most recent visit I found a Barney-purple jumpsuit, splotched with paint but resilient: it was epoxy-like, its zippers rough and exposed. My favorite coveralls always welcome stains like a dare.

The jumpsuit made me feel like a worker in a Richard Scarry book: a Crayola-hued animal with a clearly stated purpose. I brought it home and wore it, most frequently, to my ceramics studio, a space where I often feel competent but still take all the help I can get. The studio is a productive escape from screens and their particular, mind-melting toil, a place where my brain can shapeshift. One day when I was wearing it and futzing with something, a woman looked at it and asked, is that your L…G…B…T jumpsuit? My brain short-circuited, unable to process such a truly dumb question, but dying to laugh. Of course it sort of was my gay little jumpsuit. I had begun to jokingly self-identify as an “arts and crafts bisexual”, and this outfit really fit that bill, but I could never let my new nemesis be right about me.

Ceramics and sleeping with women entered my life around the same time. Both of these budding interests shook my life by the ankles in different ways, and I loved feeling the flip of my stomach, the sound of my pocket change rattling to the ground, the uncertainty of what I was doing with any of it. For a long time I felt like I was playing dress-up, wearing worksuits or cut-off black shorts, trying on a gender microexpression that I found appealing but wasn’t sure was mine yet; one that maybe some girls would like? Like Danny Zuko’s lackeys, I didn’t know how to drive the car, but I was desperate to touch it.

The protection that workwear offers doesn’t always have to be life or death. The genre skews domestic, too: an apron, though soft, is still a shield. A silky black Comme des Garcons Apron Dress looks like it was made for a butcher going into very sexy battle. The word comes from the French “naperon”, a small tablecloth: something to protect us from the consequences of our actions, something to be stained.

Let’s judge each piece of clothing by the way it holds a mark: is it vulnerable? Hardy? Does the Gucci rhombus jumpsuit look even better when splashed with something? Delicate clothing has its own power, of course: even as a thought experiment, a woman in a silky shirt gives my spine a small chill. But when I feel powerless, confused, or incompetent, I like to wear something that can handle a few splashes of failure. Like Zuko’s buddies, I can use it to gas myself up, and still be my wimpy little white t-shirt self underneath.

Marian Bull is a writer and ceramicist who lives in Brooklyn.