McDonald's Fashion Statement

New designer uniforms are being unveiled at fast-food outlets in the U.K.

Once the logo signified a take-away. Soon it might be a fashion statement. If it looks like brown, but color of the new McDonald's uniform is officially mocker as in coffee and the managers' shirts are said to be biscuit.

Eating in or take order? Eating in.

Soon all of McDonald's 67,000 staff will adopt the uniform and as is obligatory in the company they are loving it. But according to Bruce Oldfield, there were some initial design problems discovered during wearer trials.

" We found that there was one particular design of shirts and it chafed . So just by dint of it being really uncomfortable rather than being a color that somebody didn't like to wear, we had to get rid of it because we didn't want our girls' or our boys' indeed nipples chafed ."

Designer uniforms are nothing new of course. These BOAC designs were unveiled in 1969 with the help of Clive of Mayfair. Queen's dress designer Hardy Amies designed uniforms for the metropolitan police in the same year. And in 1971, Christian Dior showed off these nursing designs. They appeared hopelessly impractical although with plenty to cheer up bed-ridden males. So where can designer uniforms go wrong?

" You don't want people to be dressed up like billboards. You want people to feel comfortable and on side with the messages of the brand that they are portraying. So, yeah, colors like red can be difficult with different skin types and those sort of things. So you have to design against that, which is usually why most brands will have a pallet or a range of colors.

Now McDonald's says the new uniform should help close the gap between the perception and the reality of working here. In other words, wearing an outfit like this should help staff feel more Julian McDonald than Ronald McDonald. Thank you.

Ron Milligan, ABC news.