“Yellow vests” “EN ISO 20471” are the name of the safety vest worldwide. In France, she now inherits the revolutionary symbolism.
It was supposed to unite France’s revolutionaries. The Cap of Jacob was once a great idea, it was the hallmark of the Robespierre followers, the sans-culottes, the fighting workers and the petty bourgeoisie. The Jacobean cap stood for freedom, brotherhood, but above all for the equality of the revolutionaries. At the same time, the so-called Phrygian cap was a great symbolic misunderstanding: the barricade fighters put the headgear on their angry head in the historical mistaken belief that it was already carried by freed slaves in antiquity. This is not true, because they had the felt cut on the vertex. The “Phrygian cap” was actually a tanned bull scrotum that was supposed to give the antique bear the power of a bull.
Revolutionary mood reigns in France these days. The fashion, however, has changed. At present, the “yellow vests” are fighting on the Champs-Élysées and throughout the Republic against the increase in petrol taxes and the state, as Emmanuel Macron imagines. Cheap vests as a symbol of rebellion against the tightened suit policy of Macron’s “En Marche” movement. Not a blue-white-red democracy movement, but a neon-glowing exclamation point that should unite communists and nationalists with the French rogue.
After all, the brief history of the warning vest tells pretty much the opposite of disobedience, revolution, and insurrection. It was invented to protect, not to cause chaos. It was intended to secure airport staff, truck drivers, hunters, and construction workers with increased visibility. In addition, folders of all kinds are equipped with the “yellow vest” to organize the public mess with a hard hand. At some point, the safety vest was then the accessory of dutiful helicopter parents: no kindergarten trip without apple slices and big yellow jackets. The strange species of radical cyclists wear safety vests so naturally over the Jack jacket as the plastic-helmet-protected bicycle helmet on their head and the neon yellow trouser-straps around the shins. There’s nothing more spiteful than safety vests – at most garden gnomes (who – why actually? – get along largely without yellow vests).
It was the English who eventually developed safety vests for chickens (in models neon yellow, pink and blue) and successfully exported them. The EU understood less fun. It has bureaucratically buttoned and unified the “yellow vest”: as part of the harmonization of Member States’ legislation on personal protective equipment, a standard for safety vests has been introduced, which is entitled EN ISO 20471. Since then, it has been necessary to carry “warning reflective clothing” in cars, which comply with implementation instructions of DGUV regulation 70, which refers to DIN EN 471 and certain requirements of the latter. ” Ironically, this globally standardized garment should now stand for a new French Revolution? Burning cars instead of protection for drivers? Disarray and uprising instead of clothes for folders? Coup d’état in mantle an EU standard? The state-obligatory clothes for the fight for freedom? Is this the second time in the history of France that this is a fashionable error of the revolutionaries? Are the “yellow vest” the Phrygian scrotums of our time? And is it in France really a neon revolution according to DIN standard?
It’s not that easy. Probably no other garment is present in as many households as the safety vest. It belongs in every car like the toilet paper on a toilet. The safety vest is the accessory that unites a people in truth. An affront to Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gautier and Karl Lagerfeld, the latter would probably claim that anyone wearing a warning vest, has long lost control of his life. The safety vest with reflective tape is as practical-rational as the guillotine and the cheapest and most socially acceptable uniform (the four-pack is available from 10.99 Euros). It symbolizes the history of the working class and at the same time embodies the people subjugated in the name of security. And most importantly: The common safety vest screams continuously, day and night, in neon-shrill clarity: “Look at me! Do not forget me!”
Incidentally, in her old paintings, the revolutionary icon of France, the Marianne, proudly wears a Jacobean cap as she storms over burning barricades. The German Michel, on the other hand, was quickly given a similar, but completely differently connoted head covering by the French: with a sleepyhead. As a symbol of having lost the revolution. While the Jacobean cap has brought it into the democratic fashion of the United States, the sleepyhead still adorns mainly the garden gnomes in German front gardens.
Ultimately, little has changed in Europe since the first French Revolution. While the Parisians with the warning vest storm the streets, the Germans drive model EN ISO 20471 dutifully in the trunk around. And if they bring it out, then to be visible in the winter darkness.