What Will Your Staff Wear to Work in 2030? A Decade of Student Research Just Gave Us the Answer

For almost ten years, Murray Uniforms has run live design briefs with fashion students at Coventry University, asking them to imagine the future of workwear. Their findings were presented at the Murray Lab Live, and lined up strikingly well with Murray’s own research: uniform only works when it’s customisable, comfortable and authentic to a brand, not just smart. The next decade adds sustainability regulation, sensory-friendly design and climate-responsive fabric into the brief. If your uniform programme hasn’t been reviewed against any of that, it’s worth an audit before your Gen Z workforce reviews it for you.

At a recent Murray Lab Live event, an expert from The Arts at Coventry University’s School of Arts and Creative Industries, took the stage to share something most workwear suppliers never get access to: nearly ten years of unfiltered feedback from the people who will actually be wearing tomorrow’s uniforms.

Since around 2016, Murray has run a series of live student competition briefs with Coventry University, asking fashion students to respond to themes ranging from trend forecasting and colour psychology to, in 2020, “work from home uniform,” and most recently, the future of NHS paramedic uniform and workplace dress. As it was put to the room: “The majority of the students who I work with are Gen Z. They are, as we’ve heard, the people who are most likely to wear your uniforms.”

That’s not a small claim. It’s a direct pipeline into the values and expectations of the workforce every uniformed employer is currently trying to recruit, retain and keep engaged.

The line between “smart” and “well presented” and why brands keep blurring it

One of the sharpest points in the talk was a distinction she drills into students before they design a single garment: smart and well-presented are not the same thing, and confusing them leads brands astray.

Illustrated with two garments, a lab coat signals trained, expert, sanitary, credible. Which is exactly why brands with no clinical connection at all, from Victoria Beckham’s beauty line to fashion houses like Margiela and Comme des Garçons, have borrowed the silhouette to manufacture scientific credibility. An apron, by contrast, signals craftsperson, artisan, process over results. Equally well-presented, equally intentional, but not “smart” in the traditional sense, and entirely appropriate for the brands that use it.

“I think it’s really important that we keep those distinctions. Wherever you sit on that fence and wherever your company sits. A uniform doesn’t need to look corporate to be doing its job. It needs to look like your brand.”

What a decade of Gen Z design briefs says actually matters

Asked to summarise the recurring themes across nearly ten years of student responses, the expert was candid that the results are anecdotal rather than statistically rigorous, ”I play fast and loose with data, so apologies”. But the pattern across hundreds of student projects was consistent. The factors that came up again and again were:

• The ability to customise and adapt the uniform
• Comfort and a sense of empowerment, not just compliance
• Opportunities to express individual identity within the workforce
• “Head to toe and beyond” thinking; accessories, layering and small extras, not just the core garment
• Authenticity to brand personality and culture, rather than generic formality
• Ethical and sustainable production, including cradle-to-cradle routes for worn-out uniform
• Transparency in the supply chain

None of that is abstract design-school idealism. It maps almost exactly onto what Murray’s own commercial research already shows. In Murray’s study with Coventry University of more than 2,500 employees,

97% say it matters that their uniform represents the company brand, 91% say what they wear affects their own confidence at work, and 70.5% say their uniform actively influenced their decision to join their employer in the first place. 

Ten years of Gen Z design briefs and a 2,500-person research study are independently, telling employers the same thing.

The detail that costs almost nothing and changes everything

Some of the most memorable moments in the Q&A weren’t about materials or sustainability, they were about the small, human details that make a uniform feel considerate rather than issued.

Asked about designing for neurodivergent and anxious wearers, one of Murray’s own designers described a recent project for a retail client: “We designed a certain zip pull for these people who are walking around in the retail and shop experience. They wanted just to hold onto something if they’re a bit nervous, a bit anxious… it’s a very small detail, but we just gave them that.” The result, she said, gave wearers “that bit more security” and reduced anxiousness on the shop floor. A near-zero-cost addition with a disproportionate effect on wellbeing.

It’s the same logic behind the “head to toe and beyond” theme in the student research: branded slippers for a work-from-home uniform, taggy labels wearers can fidget with on a call, a hidden personalised detail inside a standard shirt. None of these show up on a spec sheet. All of them show up in whether someone actually wants to put the uniform on.

Where Murray is taking the brief next

Sustainability regulation is no longer optional. The EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) which tracks a garment’s materials, origin and end-of-life route becomes a requirement from 2030, and Murray is already building it into product development now rather than waiting for the deadline.

Fabric performance is becoming the new battleground. Phase-changing and thermal-regulated materials, designed to let wearers move comfortably between a shift and a workout, are moving from niche sportswear into everyday uniform specification alongside early exploration of bio-engineered, lab-grown and regenerated textiles.

Longevity is being redefined. Rather than uniform as a disposable catalogue product, Murray’s stated aim is a garment engineered to last two to five years, treated as a sustainability outcome in its own right, alongside circularity and reclaimed-material routes for garments at end of life. As noted in the Q&A, that longevity works both ways: technical durability matters, but so does making a garment someone still wants to put on years after it was issued.

An audit for your own uniform programme

Whether or not your workforce skews Gen Z yet, it will. A few questions worth asking of your current programme:

1. Does your uniform allow any personalisation or “head to toe and beyond” thinking, or does it stop at the core garment?
2. Is your uniform authentically “your brand,” or is it defaulting to generic smart-formal because that feels safer?
3. Do you know what happens to a uniform once an employee leaves or a garment wears out. Is there a cradle-to-cradle route, or does it go to landfill?
4. Have you looked at your Digital Product Passport readiness ahead of the 2030 requirement, or is that still someone else’s problem?
5. Has anyone who actually wears the uniform been asked what would make them proud to put it on, or has that decision only ever been made in a boardroom?

Want your uniform programme designed around the workforce you’ll actually have in five years, not the one you had five years ago?

Book a consultation with our design team