A firm based in Halifax, Yorkshire, has undergone a rebranding and as a result, it’s helped fund the Yorkshire Air Ambulance (YAA).

Casual clothing saves lives

The construction company had dozens of bags uniform clothing with the old logo, ranging from health and safety wear, through to fleeces and hats and casual clothing – and it recycled them all through YAA which works with a partner to actually sell all donated clothing overseas. This process raises up to £250,000 for the charity to fund the flying ambulance service which helps save the lives of people like distant hill farmers and those stranded by weather or accidents in Yorkshire’s picturesque but remote areas.

Back to school for teachers

On the other hand, uniform could be a painful issue for schools. The new Education Secretary Michael Gove wants a dress code for teachers because he thinks both parents and pupils respond better to a smartly-dressed teacher.

But while headteachers can establish a dress code they are not able to impose clothing rules that could be considered as sexual, racial or religious discrimination. And that’s not the only problem – in 2008, a maths teacher was fined after insisting on his right to wear trainers and tracksuit bottoms rather than a suit. His argument was that he had taught at the school in question for a decade and a half without discipline problems and should be allowed to continue as he was. While the matter was resolved, it doesn’t bode well for the future – we expect children to try and contravene rules about uniforms, but not teachers!

Andy Murray has switched his clothing supplier to Adidas this year, which may be related to his having worn retro Fred Perry clothing: a subtle polo-shirt and relaxed shorts combo, last year, in tribute to the last male Brit to win the tournament – his failure to win it himself was partly attributed to ‘pressure’ so maybe his new Adidas kit will help him relax.

Pressure of a different kind has been seen at the World Cup – England’s players may not have survived the pressure – and whether the manager will is still open to question, but pressure clothing has been the big feature of the footballers kit this time around.  Strictly speaking it’s called compression clothing  and it helps athletes resist fatigue because it encourage oxygen circulation around the body, meaning that the blood carries away lactic acid from tired muscles. Lactic acid is a major cause of cramp and so anything that helps tired players to cope with the schedule (finalists will have played 7 games in 30 days) is going to be considered both a practical and a psychological aid.

Meawhile, Serena Williams has been piling the pressure on to her opponents at Wimbledon – playing in long acrylic fingernails and huge dangling earrings is seen by sports psychologists as the reigning champion saying ‘Do what you like, I can beat you wearing party clothing.’  She’s worn a stunning range of casual clothing, from red and white outfits through to sparkling silver nails, and it all helps keep her opponents on the back foot.

In New York, a female banker is taking her former employers to court over sacking her because she was ‘too attractive’.  Debrahlee Lorenzana is claiming that Citibank fired her because her pencil skirts and fitted suits were distracting male colleagues from their work.

According to her complaint, she was ordered not to wear high heels because they drew attention to her figure and stopped men from working, but female colleagues who wore similar clothes were not told to change their appearance because, according to Ms Lorenzana, they were less attractive than her. She was also given a list of the clothes her employer wanted her to stop wearing to the office – she was asked by her employer not to wear: turtleneck tops, pencil skirts, fitted business suits, or other properly tailored clothing and that she shouldn’t wear high heels either.

So what’s the law? Well it varies from country to country, but it is discriminatory to insist that people dress in a fashion that is different to their colleagues, so if everybody else is wearing casual clothing, you can’t insist one person dresses formally if they are doing the same job. On the other hand, work-specific clothing can be insisted on, particularly if people do jobs that have health or safety implications: catering staff must dress in a way that guarantees hygiene so aprons and hats are not just required but legally stipulated, and builders and other construction workers need to have safety clothing that protects them, and the public, from harm.

Clothing can be used to educate, inform or even raise funds:

Campaign Clothing

On Friday 26 March, people in the greater Cleveland area chose to wear a custom printed T-shirt saying “HIV Positive”. The shirt-wearing phenomenon was recorded on  Facebook as an attempt to get everybody with whom the shirt-wearers came into contact to think about what it means to have HIV or AIDS and how the rest of the world reacts. The shirts were designed to challenge the silence and shame that descends on people who are HIV Oositive or have AIDS. The AIDS taskforce director said, “We don’t stigmatize people who have prostate cancer. Why HIV?”

The campaign began with a small wholesale order of 100 T-shirts but in the end, more than 500 were purchased by individuals who want to demonstrate their support for those who are dealing with the disease. It is hoped that the campaign will spread across the globe, the cities of Chicago, Toronto, Atlanta, and Columbus have already expressed interest in running their own HIV Positive T-shirt day.

Kids in Business

In the past few weeks, children up and down the UK have been taking part in the Make Your Mark with a Tenner challenge run by Enterprise UK. Essentially they are lent £10 for a month, which they must use to make as much money as they can. The idea is to inspire young people to make a profit and make a difference to the community at the same time.

In Sheffield, four ten and eleven year olds got together to pool their ten pound stakes in a joint venture: Sonny, Emily, Bethany and Holly combined a lunch-break juice stand with an offer personalise classmates’ PE shirts. They printed names and celebrity images like Beyonce and Steven Gerrard onto the polo-shirts. It did cause them some problems, working out how to write the names backwards so that they printed forwards – and once they spilt some juice on a shirt, but overall they made a profit of £72 which they are donating to the relief effort in Haiti and the Tickled Pink breast cancer charity.

There are dozens of ways to customise casual clothing – here are four of the best!

1.    Print it – if you want a customised polo shirt or sweatshirt, you can make your own iron-on transfer or use a custom site to make a one off top with your preferred photograph or graphic on it. If you’re printing more than two or three, it’s often cheaper to buy a new T-shirt from the site and have it printed, than to customise an old one.

2.    Bleach it – if you add bleach to a coloured but otherwise plain T-shirt using a cotton bud, you can get some intricate designs. You can even mash up an existing design by adding your own bleached elements to it – this works really well for words which end up having a great graffiti feel to them.

3.    Cut it – this works best with a big old T-shirt that has extra room so that you can make the ties without it being too constricting. First lay your teeshirt flat. Cut away the seamed edge of the neckline (including the tag) and then trim down the neckline to your preference. You can keep trying it on and snipping away until you like it. Then simply slice right down of the back of the T-shirt – you can mark this with chalk before you cut to keep it very neat. Then make a shallow snip in the top two edges by the neckline and use that to tie the neckline together. Repeat this process  with the bottom ‘corners’ and then tie the T-shirt. This is great for wearing over a swimming costume or bikini.

4.    Sew it – even the most inept person can add beads to the sleeves or hem of a T-shirt or to the pocket of a cotton shirt. Remember that this kind of treatment does make it more difficult to washing your garment though.

There are more ways than you might think to use clothing to raise funds:

1.    Design and print a batch of T-shirts that you can expect to sell – fifty, a hundred or more. Wrap them up, labelled according to size, and sell them to raise funds, by offering a T-shirt lottery. In some of the wrapped T-shirts there will be ‘golden tickets’ rewarding the buyer with a prize. If you can get the prizes donated, you’ll be raising lots of money from lots of people and generating awareness of your cause too.

2.    If you’re an environmental organisation, run a competition that rewards the best use of an old item of clothing – you might see smart shirts being turned into bags, or ties into skirts and so on. You may be surprised at what people come up with, and by auctioning the top ten or fifty recycled items for charity, you’ll raise funds too.

3.    Try and get a famous designer to work for you for free. The ‘Fashion Targets Breast Cancer’ range of T-shirts have brought in more than £6.5 million in the past fifteen years. They were designed by Ralph Lauren to commemorate Nina Hyde, the editor of the Washington Post, who died of breast cancer and have been worn Yasmin Le Bon, Jodie Kidd and Elle MacPherson among others.

4.    Set up a fashion show, offering both young designers and potential catwalk models a chance to strut their stuff, for a small fee, and then get the paying audience to vote for the best designs in a range of categories: formal, casual and party for example giving scope for everything from Armani-style suits to ballgowns to hoodies.

5.    Get a famous person to autograph an item of clothing for you – a polo-shirt with a snooker player’s autograph was recently auctioned, raising £7,000 for a small local charity.

It may not be everyday streetwear at the moment, but soon your T-shirt may be smarter than you are – at least on a Monday morning! Seen at London Fashion Week, the new clothing from Cassette Playa looks like plain black T-shirts, but imprinted symbology, a little like a bar-code, means that the garments can be ‘read’ by viewing them through a mobile phone with the requisite app, and then text, graphics and even video can appear on the front of the shirt, and the design can even appear to include hats and hair.

Not only that, but the design function can be programmed so that it cycles through a wide range of outfits each time it’s viewed on the same phone, or simply to changed at a specific hour from day-wear to night-wear! This allows a casual sweatshirt to convert to a smart tuxedo when viewed through the phone, for exampole.

One trainer brand already has Augmented Reality embedded in its shoes, which allows the wearer to access games on the company website, using the shoes as a game controller!

In the world of fashion, AR might be used to show the size, washing instructions and history of the garment – including a map of where the fibres were sourced, the chemical make-up of the dyes used in it, and the distance it’s been transported from field to factory to shop.

And in the workplace, AR clothing might be used to cycle advertising about products, or to carry constantly updated messages about a company’s brand or services. It could be used to show maps of a building so that an individual heading for an interview could ‘save’ the map to their phone instead of having to remember instructions, or in hospitals could be used on receptionist’s tabards to display information about expected delays when waiting for treatment to those sitting in the waiting room. On polo-shirts worn by serving staff it could display the day’s specials instead of printing a menu.

It’s become traditional for celebs to design T-shirts for charities, and the Beckham family have taken this a step further. Apparently David and Victoria Beckham have involved all three of their sons in designing the T-shirts that will be sold for Sport Relief this year. The specially designed T-shirts, for men, women and children, will be sold to assist vulnerable people in developing countries.

David Beckham said, ‘Victoria and I are excited to be involved with Sport Relief again this year. Our family had a great time designing the T-shirt range and we hope it will raise much needed funds for many important causes …The most important thing is that the money raised will make a genuine difference to people’s lives.’

Of course not every charity can acquire the services of David Beckham and family, but if you have a local celebrity who might design a casual top such as a polo-shirt for you, work with local businesses to create a clothing challenge. You ask the local star to design the garment and get a limited number printed. Then local businesses challenge their employees to sell a certain amount of stickers or tickets – each sticker or ticket is recorded and the T-shirt designer will then draw one name out of a hat and that one lucky winner will get a free limited edition shirt, but in addition, for every twenty tickets or stickers sold, the seller will also obtain a limited edition garment. This serves three purposes:

1. It raises funds for a local good cause
2. It encourages employees to learn about that charity and to tell others about it in order to ‘earn’ their item of clothing
3. It obtains local publicity when the draw for the lucky winner takes place.

And you can always arrange for the sale to take place between two similarly sized local businesses which adds competition to the mix and is more likely to make people feel they want to ‘win’ by selling more.

A minor media sensation has been developing around the way Barack Obama dresses. Recently he’s been featured visiting Egypt, talking to reporters, and holding urgent telephone conversations with security advisers in the wake of recent terrorist attempts. Unlike all his predecessors, who conducted this kind of photo opportunity in full formal clothing, on each occasion, President Obama was wearing a well pressed but casual polo shirt.

The messages given by ‘leadership’ clothing

It might seem trivial, but such matters never are – somebody will have sat down with the President and made the decision to move away from shirts and suits to casual clothing. The message they almost certainly wish to convey is that this President does things differently – even down to what he wears. The underlying information given by his choice of polo-shirt is that he is young (remember Tony Blair rolling up his shirt sleeves during a conference speech and the way this suggested he was ‘go-getting’ and practical?), he is down to earth, and he doesn’t need to rely on the trappings of power (formal clothing like that worn by Reagan and the two Bush presidents) to be powerful.

Innovators and establishment figures

Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB, features in an Intel advert wearing the ‘anti-fashion’ garment, the woollen tank top, over a shirt and tie – an affectionate way of showing his ‘alternative rock star’ status for geeks. Similarly Steve Jobs, found of Apple, is famous for his chinos and cool T-shirt dress code, which he wears to meetings with heads of international industry. Breaking clothing codes is a sign of an innovator.

On the other hand, bankers were recently advised to wear something other than their suits and ties during G20 protests, so that they couldn’t be picked out by protestors. But in general we want people in ‘conservative’ professions: bankers and doctors and psychiatrist, to dress conservatively. We don’t want to feel that they are innovators because we don’t want our money, or health or our minds to be experimented on. In these professions, establishment clothing is an asset because it gives us confidence that they are going to take care with the things that matter to us.

Keeping or breaking clothing codes

So breaking a clothing code can be a good way of indicating that a person or company is ready to try something new, or has got a new focus – but innovating new clothing styles professionally can also be a risk, and if you’re in a profession where you’re expected to be sensible with other people’s possessions or wellbeing, innovation can send the wrong message and must be managed with care if you are not to lose the confidence of the people who rely on you.

If you think that buying wholesale t-shirts in bulk and re-selling them in smaller numbers for a little profit in a competitive marketplace is not a viable business proposition, then there are other ways you can profit from the fantastic prices offered by wholesale clothing businesses. With a little work you can transform a blank t-shirt into something unrecognisable from the original, and provided it is popular enough you can generate a great deal more profit than you might otherwise have done. There are several ways in which you can add value to traditional wholesale clothing. Any of these methods can be used to mass-produce a line of clothing for regular sales or to craft special one-off garments to order for individuals.

The first way in which you could alter plain clothing like a blank t-shirt or polo shirt is by tie-dyeing it. With the popularity of ‘retro’ styling (and you can‘t get much more retro than the hippy days of the 60‘s) tie-dyed tees are sure to be a quick seller, and they are easy and cheap to produce. You can find tie-dye shirts selling for large amounts on eBay (£25 for some!) which leaves you a large margin, especially considering the cheap clothing you can get from the wholesalers and minimal cost of conversion from blank tee to finished article. There are websites to help you learn the basics of tie-dyeing with Instructions and some Top Tips.

If tie-dyeing is a bit too ‘far out’ for your tastes you can stencil your own graphics onto a blank t-shirt or polo shirt. This technique is perfect for small runs of unique designs as the stencils can be re-used countless times and with different colour combinations. Stencils are the perfect way to transfer simple designs onto blank t-shirts and can be a great seller. Again, it is easy to find A Guide to help you do this, and there are even Videos Demonstrating Stencilling Techniques to be found.

If you want to create designs that are a little more intricate than stencilling allows you should look into printing your designs using one of a variety of methods. Be aware that this is a large and expensive undertaking though – a great article on staring your own t-shirt design business which can help you decide if this option is best can be found Here. There are some DIY Screen Printing methods but the quality might suffer and they are not suitable for anything other than tiny runs or individual made-to-order designs.

If imprinting your design onto a wholesale blank t-shirt doesn’t appeal to you then there are a variety of ways to embroider your design and create a trendy new tee. You can follow tradition and embroider a pattern into your t-shirts, but this can be time-consuming work if you do not have the right equipment and is only suitable for small runs. Alternatively you can sew pre-made fabric designs onto a blank t-shirt which will be quicker to produce but will not have the same feel as an embroidered design.

These methods are by no means the limit for taking advantage of the cheap clothing offered by wholesale blank clothing providers, they are just a few ideas to get you started. The only limit to creating a fabulous new t-shirt range is your imagination, so you should get out there and start designing!