Mei Sze Tsang designs workwear for bricklayers

Entitled ‘BRICKMAN’ (like Ironman, she explains), the project reimagines workwear for bricklayers. It all began on the bus. She noticed the man sitting next to her was covered in cement residue. Curious, she asked what he did for a living. As soon as he told her he was a bricklayer, inspiration struck. They ended up having a meaningful conversation, after which Tsang decided her new friend deserved the perfect uniform for his job. She ended up designing a summer and winter uniform for him, each of which contains a shirt, jacket, and trousers.

Tsang began her work with a close examination of what bricklayers typically wear to work. She soon realized that most workwear is generic and irrespective of different kinds of physical labour. Most of the vests weren’t very durable. Jackets ripped open at the arm seams, evidencing a poor range of motion. And trousers weren’t made from waterproof fabric, leaving them susceptible to decay from water, bacteria, and chemicals. All in all, it amounted to a lack of durability and specificity, resulting in injury and lots of garment replacement.

The joints of the body bear the brunt of the bricklayers’ work, she came to learn. They regularly shoulder bricks weighing around forty kilograms each. They carry the bricks on a special box called a hod, which has a sharp edge that digs into the carrier’s shoulder. “There’s always a big hole on their shoulders,” she says. It disturbed her to hear that after years of labour, many of their shoulders were so calloused that they had grown numb to the weight they carry. Inspired by shoe soles, she devised a shoulder pad with a deep groove down the middle in which the edge of the brick can rest. Sitting atop the jacket, the shoulder pad straps across the body and so can easily detach. Like the shoulders, the knees face a lot of strain too as the bricklayers crouch and kneel. Tsang built a rubberized kneepad into the legs of the trousers and cleverly concealed it with a gusset.

As the uniforms slowly began to take shape, she had the bricklayers try on samples in their canteen and offer criticism. The sessions worked like extracurricular tutorials. “They gave really good feedback,” she says. They were honest about what they liked and what they did not. She was surprised by how enthusiastic some of them were. “Wow, I could wear this to the nightclub!” she remembers hearing.

“I made my toiles using bed sheets.”

The pandemic hit in the midst of her design process, so she had to finish refining her designs at home. “I made my toiles using bed sheets,” she says. Each jacket toile took eight or nine iterations to perfect. “I struggled with the patterns a lot. They have to be ergonomic, and they have to be precise,” she explains. Tsang also had some difficulty accommodating bureaucratic regulations. For example, legal protocols mandate the placement of light-reflective tape on construction worker vests for maximum visibility: around the chest, midriff, and shoulders. She figured out she could manipulate them slightly to accord with her pattern-cutting.

In addition to close in-person research, Tsang employed digital approaches in her design process. She 3D-scanned a bricklayer’s body and virtually developed a pattern on his body with CLO software. More impressive still, she used thermal imaging to model the heat distribution on the workers’ bodies and took that data to create a computer-knitted t-shirt from special cooling viscose yarn that topographically cools the body in proportion to the recorded body temperature data. The technique could allow everyone to have a t-shirt custom-tailored to their body’s heat distribution.

Though Tsang considers herself a product designer of garments rather than a fashion designer, she still takes interest in the aesthetic dimension of her work. As a workwear aficionado with a minimalist streak, she sought to provide all that was functionally necessary in an elegant way. Motorcycle jackets inspired her approach of both functionalism and sleek form – everything in place, nothing superfluous. When one bricklayer wanted extra cargo pockets, she said no. “They don’t need them,” she says, having already accounted for all the tools he would need on the job.

“Tsang judges the success of her work not by its ability to stand out but to blend smoothly into its wearers’ lives.”

The final designs look like practical workwear with slightly futuristic details. The trousers, for example, are two-toned to highlight their pattern-cutting. Unlike most designers, Tsang judges the success of her work not by its ability to stand out but to blend smoothly into its wearers’ lives. In a video documenting her work, she asks her bricklayer friend how he feels in her designs. “I can barely feel them,” he told her.

Tsang intends to continue designing for people overlooked and underserved by the fashion industry, particularly blue-collar workers. She would happily stay in school for longer –“I wish I could do my master’s for twenty years,” she laughs. But for now, she is researching manufacturing options to bring her uniforms to other heroic bricklayers.