A guest forms an opinion of a hotel in the first ten seconds, and almost none of it is conscious. It's the light, the scent, and though they'd never say so the person who greets them and what they're wearing. We've spent over 25 years thinking about that handshake.
A great hotel uniform does three things at once. It has to look unmistakably of the building a seafront grand hotel and a minimalist city property should never wear the same thing. It has to survive a fourteen-hour shift without wilting. And it has to make the person inside it stand a little taller. Get one of those right and you have workwear. Get all three and you have a uniform that does quiet, daily brand work.
The mistakes are usually fit. A jacket cut for a showroom mannequin looks wrong the moment someone reaches for a luggage trolley. We cut for movement first — concierge teams, housekeeping, bar staff all move differently, and the pattern should know that before the fabric is touched.
Then there's fabric. Front-of-house tailoring lives or dies on how it washes. The romance of a beautiful cloth fades fast if it can't take an industrial laundry. The trick is suiting that reads luxurious and behaves like workwear, a balance our hospitality team at Gresham Blake Studios has spent years refining for hotels at every level.
We learned all this the long way round, dressing real buildings rather than catalogues. If you want to see how the thinking translates into finished programmes, the hotel uniform work is here.
Maybe the best compliment a hotel uniform can get is none at all the guest simply feels they're in good hands. That's the whole job.