Blue-collar workers: how denim has smartened up its act

Bossing it in the boardroom is all in the jeans this season

Wool Denim blazer, £625, and trousers, £305, Max Mara (available from Thursday; 19-21 Old Bond Street, W1)

23 May 2017

Along with departmental neighbourhoods and inbox zero, office denim is a relatively modern addition to the workwear lexicon. Then again, it’s also difficult to recall a time before it was entirely acceptable to embrace a casual Fridays dress code on days when you don’t have one foot in the weekend.

Joining the same team as trainers, track pants and even the odd pair of post-spin class leggings as items recently integrated into the modern business strategy, denim is now as routine to office life as the 3:15pm tea break.

Issues arise however, when you’re called into an urgent meeting with the CEO wearing bleached boyfriends with more rips than the canteen’s served portions of lukewarm shepherd’s pie. To avoid such situations, it pays to recruit a separate denim wardrobe for your nine-to-five - one that sees the humble staple smartening up its act.

To give your denim a promotion this season, start with Max Mara (above). The Italian brand best known for creating the finest camel coats in the business has turned its attention to making denim work harder with the creation of Wool Denim - a hybrid fabric made entirely of Australian merino but designed to resemble denim - in collaboration with the Woolmark company.

Max Mara AW17 at Milan Fashion Week

1/23

“Women these days like a relaxed, practical look, and denim has always provided a solution to this need,” says Laura Lusuardi, Max Mara’s global fashion director. “Denim, however, still remains too casual for the Max Mara Collection, so we needed to find a fabric that was easy to wear yet at the same time sophisticated. Wool Denim combines these two characteristics perfectly.”

To showcase its versatility, the brand has added a double-breasted trouser suit crafted from the pseudo-denim fabric to its current CV. Smarter, softer and an altogether more considered approach to pulling on your Sunday-night curry-stained skinnies, the result — due to land in its flagship Old Bond Street store on Thursday — is a two-piece capable of causing even the most conservative boardroom dweller to reach for a dose of double denim on Monday morning.

But the Italians aren’t the only ones pushing a smart approach to denim to the top of the agenda. On British soil, home-grown brands Toast and MiH Jeans are both flying the flag for office-friendly denim this season: Toast with paperbag-waist skirts, boat-neck tunic tops and sleeveless shifts crafted from dark, indigo-dyed denim; MiH with button-down shirt-dresses and belted kimono jackets.

Drawstring- waist denim skirt, £95, Toast

Another solution for incognito desk denim is to go down the non-blue route, such as the stone-hued natural denim separates included in Margaret Howell’s latest offering, while contemporary workwear heroes Paper London — a brand founded by former lawyer Philippa Thackeray along with designers Kelly Townsend and Lea Carreno — have proved that wide-leg jeans can become your conference room calling card when teamed with an attention-grabbing gingham knit.

On the high street, brands are also expanding their remit from festival-ready cut-offs and mum jeans by enlisting more business-minded staples.

Denim tunic top, £55, and tailored jeans, £69, COS

Among the front-running candidates are COS, which is offering tie-side tabard tops designed to be worn over a shirt, and dark-wash jeans featuring a tailored cut, and Mango, whose belted, long-sleeve tunic is the perfect partner for this season’s dress-over-trousers look.

Belted denim dress, £49.99, Mango

Ditching your grass-stained Stan Smiths for a backless loafer and trading your sweatshirt in for a sharp blazer are other ways to ensure you don’t look like you’ve taken a wrong turn on the way to the beer garden.

@miss_mccarthy

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Blue-collar workers: how denim has smartened up its act

Max Mara AW17 at Milan Fashion Week

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