Fashion students are often drawn to big, well-known clothing brands. If you want to show them how exciting workwear can be, you need to introduce them to this unique field in a creative way. And what could be smarter than letting them design their own work uniforms?
T-shirt with clean lines and functional details
That’s exactly what branch manager Markus Bock from a McDonald’s franchise in Austria did. He organized a design competition in collaboration with the Ferrari Fashion School in Innsbruck. Students were invited to submit a design for the restaurant’s new uniforms. Out of 70 students, six made it to the final round.
These finalists got the chance to present their ideas to a jury made up of franchise and project managers, including franchisee Markus Bock and Marko Krapec, Head of Employee Experience at McDonald’s Austria. The winning design came from 17-year-old Ida Lechner. The jury was especially impressed by the clean lines and functional elements of her T-shirt design.
Over the next six months, the shirt will be tested by the staff, after which feedback will be collected. Any necessary improvements will then be implemented.
MacDonald’s is a unique project
Fashion students are increasingly involved in designing professional uniforms. It already happened in 1986 when students from the School of Fashion Design at the Institute of Technology MARA contributed to the uniforms of Malaysia Airlines. More recently, Ryanair (2015) and Brussels Airlines (2025) also held competitions where the winning student got to design the final uniform.
The big difference with the airlines mentioned above is that, in McDonald’s case, students are being asked to design clothing they could actually end up wearing themselves. After all, the fast-food chain is a popular workplace for young people looking to earn money alongside their studies. That means they’re quite literally close to the clothing. They know what it’s like to wear it, or they hear it from their peers.
Another advantage is that, aside from the recognizability of the logo, students enjoy a relatively high level of creative freedom. That’s because McDonald’s has a policy that allows not just countries, but in some cases even individual branches, as in this Austrian example, to decide on their own uniforms.
Students are the (workwear) future
By asking students to design only a top, the project remains manageable and leaves plenty of room to learn. The more you ask a student to design, the more guidance they’ll need. But with a T-shirt and a print, there’s less risk of things going wrong.
Still, the most valuable part may not even be the design process itself, but the fact that a testing phase will follow. And that’s exactly what sets workwear apart from fashion: a large group of people has to wear it and be able to work in it. The test period teaches the student what it means to keep improving a garment, rather than just delivering a final product. That’s what makes workwear so fascinating. Hopefully, more projects like this will follow, because it’s a great way to get young people excited about our incredible industry.
Photo : Bernhard Schösser
