Visibility Without Recognition

Hi-Vis, Workwear, and the Systems That Make Us Comply

The first week back at work always feels slightly brutal. You feel it in your clothes before you feel it anywhere else.

The tracksuits, hoodies and dressing gowns that carried us through that strange, suspended week between Christmas and New Year are put away. They are replaced by garments built not for comfort, but for function. Commutes restart. Offices refill. Shops, schools, construction sites and warehouses snap back into motion. The system switches itself back on, sorting bodies into roles through what they wear.

And if there is one garment that marks that shift more clearly than any other, it is hi-vis.

You see it before you register it: on building sites, along roadsides, on rail platforms. Fluorescent yellow threaded through the city.

But no one really sees them.

Hi-vis is the most conspicuous part of our visual environment, yet also the easiest to ignore. You see it without really registering it. It sits in the background, doing its job. Built to attract attention, but worn by people who often attract none.

Safety Systems Don’t Ask Questions

Hi-vis clothing exists to stabilise behaviour. It’s not fashion, it’s infrastructure. It signals roles, enforces boundaries, reduces risk. Whether on a building site or a motorway, it sends the same message: I belong here, you don’t. That’s the sleight of hand. Hi-vis doesn’t just control visibility, it controls recognition. The body is categorised before it’s encountered. You are not met as a person, but processed as a function.

The garment works precisely because it discourages attention. Fluorescence creates instant legibility without inviting engagement. It allows the system to operate smoothly while the individual fades out.

The Worker Behind the Fabric

Hi-vis doesn’t express identity; it suppresses it. These garments aren’t worn to communicate personality or style. They are designed to override both. They signal compliance, not expression. In urban space, hi-vis figures move through the city as anonymous markers of task and responsibility. You do not see who is wearing them; you see what they are for.

That invisibility is not accidental. Fluorescence was never about the person; only the task. The worker vanishes behind the logic of safety. And when something is everywhere, it becomes invisible by design.

Then it became fashionable.

Utility entered menswear long before hi-vis reached on the runway. Massimo Osti matters here not because he borrowed from uniforms, but because he understood workwear as a system of power, access and control, and rebuilt that system inside clothing. His garments carried the authority of labour without detaching it from purpose. Function was not referenced. It was retained.

The break comes later, as fluorescent jackets, reflective coats and safety vests appeared on runways and in collections, closely resembling their working originals but worn by choice rather than necessity.

Take Burberry’s hi-vis outerwear. Fluorescent panels, reflective strips, safety colours translated into luxury materials and Italian manufacture. Visually close to its railway originals, but built for entirely different conditions.

Balenciaga went further, but with less pretence: it charged thousands for a jacket designed to reference roadside danger, but not manage it.

What disappears in that translation is the body the clothing was originally designed for. The person who wears hi-vis every day, who cannot remove it, who depends on it to stay alive in hostile environments.

Turning hi-vis into a trend elevates the garment but not the worker. The look of labour is kept, while labour itself is erased. Visibility becomes performance rather than protection. Once anyone can wear it, it loses its specific meaning.

Fashion does not just borrow, it empties. It takes a visual language built to protect people and converts it into surface.

Visibility Is Not Recognition

This isn’t just about clothes. It’s about systems.

Hi-vis was designed to be unambiguous, to alert and to protect. Now it is so ubiquitous it barely registers. It has become noise inside a culture saturated with visibility, where everything is seen, yet very little is understood.

Fluorescent isn’t the same as visible.

Visible isn’t the same as recognised.

Recognition requires context, attention, and the willingness to look properly. Hi-vis bypasses all that. It creates instant perception with no engagement. When fashion absorbs it, that gap only widens.

Nothing to See Here

This week, millions of us have stepped back into systems that depend on our bodies being seen but not recognised.

Hi-vis is supposed to protect workers. Too often, it does something else instead. It reduces a person to a signal. It trains us to read function before humanity.

When safety becomes style, and visibility becomes spectacle, meaning collapses. The signal is still there, but it no longer points to the body it was designed to protect.

That is not visibility.

That is erasure.