Gary from 'Factory'
It takes a special kind of person to work in a factory, doing the same drudgery day after day, week after week. And Gary, from Spike TV's new Sunday comedy Factory, is definitely special. Still smarting from the girl who spurned him in high school, he now spends his days with his buddies, trying to avoid doing any work at their job.
Life in Wetdirt, Ill., doesn't require a lot of costume changes, so it becomes moderately easy to accept the work shirts the guys wear as uniforms and, if we must get philosophical, as cloaks that blue-collar America uses to avoid individuality altogether. Still, there's something charming about wearing a work shirt all day long -- being pretentious will not be listed as one of your faults.
If we follow the guys' lead, short-sleeved work shirts in dark navy go with everything from khakis to chinos to jeans. The real trick to this look is authenticity -- which they serve in heaping helpings in Wetdirt. So we suggest adding a work shirt to your wardrobe from one of the leaders in duty wear. Carhartt makes apparel that can take a beating, and the dark navy tends to hide the bloodstains when you mistakenly get too close to the pneumatic drill press. Carhartt's short-sleeved canvas tradesman work shirt is made of 5.5-ounce cotton and has triple-stitched seams. It features a button-down collar and two front utility pockets with buttons.
Another leader in work wear is Dickies, and Gary can look the part of diligent employee while in the snack room wearing a Dickies short-sleeved ripstop work shirt. This one features 6.8-ounce ripstop cotton for a little extra heft.
Of course, the key to a work shirt isn't really the shirt at all. It's the name tag that's sewn above the left front pocket. Like the guys, go with a white oval with red stitching, which can be added at any embroidery shop in your area or purchased online. Whether you actually use your own name is up to you -- sometimes it's convenient to have people think you are someone else.
The look continues with a T-shirt under the work shirt. Gary mixes it up with a variety of colors -- burgundy, blue, white -- but prefers ringers over solids. Ringer means that the bands around the neck and sleeves are a different color from the body of the shirt. Banana Republic has some terrific fitted ringers in a wide range of colors that last longer than a factory lunch break. American Apparel also has a good selection.
Since you already have the jeans or chinos and probably even have a ringer T-shirt in your closet, the only thing you need to pull Gary's look together is the work shirt and name tag. Conceivably, this could be the cheapest look we've researched since the anchors on Naked News. And as Gary would say, cheap is good.
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