Clergymen have been called “men of the cloth” since 1600. The term was originally coined because their ceremonial robes were made of distinctive and very expensive wool and silk cloth.
It wasn’t until 1865 that the church decided their clergy needed a more specific sartorial statement. In that year, Presbyterian Reverend Donald McLeod in Glasgow, Scotland, invented the clerical collar — a stiff, white collar with no opening in the front. It was quickly adopted by all Protestant and Catholic clergy. By 1900, even some rabbis in England were wearing collars.
Not all clergy were enthralled with it. Many called it their “dog collar,” since its tight fit reminded them of their pet Fido’s neck attire. And by the mid-1960’s, when the most radical of American clergy were leaving the profession (Catholic priests were marrying; a few ministers were dropping out to join the Free Love movement) they shed their clerical collars and renamed them “flea collars” (which had just been invented in the early 1960’s). This was their punny way of declaring that they were “flee-ing” organized religion.
It was the great American novelist Upton Sinclair, during the Depression, who coined the term “white collar” to describe the higher salaried occupations of administrative and managerial jobs. Sinclair was reacting to the term “blue collar,” which originated a decade earlier, and had been applied to those unskilled laborers of lesser social class who wore blue denim or chambray shirts. The darker color of their work shirts helped hide the grease and dirt stains that were associated with these workers’ occupational environment.
During the 1960’s, the term “pink collar” was coined by sociologists for jobs traditionally held by women. Nurses, teachers, and secretaries were especially singled out for this designation, but to the public, the term somehow seemed most applicable to sassy waitresses, best personified on television by “kiss-my-grits” Flo on “Alice”. A pink collar was certainly not a women’s liberation neckband.
Even worse for the equal rights movement was the Whisk clothes detergent commercial of the 1970’s, where housewives were supposed to feel humiliated if their white-collar worker husbands’ shirts were befouled with “ring around the collar” due to the wives’ inadequate laundering. As my annoyed sister wisely pointed out, “Why in the world doesn’t the dumb husband just learn how to wash his neck?”
With the current rise of young tech billionaires in the last thirty years, we now have a new category: the “gold collar,” applied to the incredibly wealthy Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and many other super-rich entrepreneurs. Which brings me to an unsurprising work-collar twist, exemplified by Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-two year old crypto exchange FTX wizard. Sentenced to twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary last year for massive fraud and conspiracy, he has been forced to trade in his gold collar for the less fashionable prison orange one.
Actually, the original collars of the Middle Ages were in some sense always “golden”. While the first shirt collar appeared in Europe in the late 1400’s as a symbol of its wearer’s purity, by Shakespeare’s sixteenth century there was the sudden emergence of The Ruff, a highly starched frill worn around the neck of royals and nobles only, a major status symbol of the Renaissance. Its name derived from the word “rough,” since its starch made it quite quill-like and heavy, a literal pain in the neck for all who donned it.
In our more modern times, we have decided to make “collar” a verb as well as a noun. This verb has left behind any aristocratic connotation of those fancy ruffs; instead, we think of “to collar” in reference to a policeman chasing after a criminal and finally grabbing him by the neck and hauling him off to jail.
During my years as a professor, I used the verb once when describing a dreadful cocktail party with my fellow academics. I had tried my best to avoid being collared by the Biggest Bore in the room. Trust me, with nobody but professors attending these functions, there were numerous contenders for this title.
But a few of us ended up collared in the kitchen listening to… well, let us call him Professor Blather. His field was ethnobotany, the use of plants in primitive religious practices. After twenty minutes of his deadly dull disquisition on ceremonial fennel, and with no polite way to escape, it took all my willpower not to suggest to my fellow listeners that we engage in a reverse seance by all holding hands to try to contact The Living. When we finally left the party, a fellow English professor, prim and proper in public but profane with good friends, told us what Blather could do with his ceremonial fennel.
I’d love to end this essay with her witty remark, but her comment was way too “off-collar" for mixed company.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here