If you’ll be visiting London this summer to watch the Olympics, and it happens you stop by at McDonald’s in the Olympic Park, or the Athletes Village in Stratford, you might just find yourself in a strange situation where all the workers are dressed up in 60s style clothes.

Photo: McDonald’s / Flickr

No reason to panic though, time machine hasn’t been invented, and you haven’t been teleported back in time. The “new” outfits are a part of the brand’s initiative to change the workers’ uniforms in McDonald’s outlets across the United Kingdom.

Wayne Hemmingway, the founder of Red or Dead fashion label, was the designer in charge of the new uniforms, and according to his words were inspired by the Emmy and Golden Globe winning TV series Mad Men, and the mod (modernist) movement – subculture that originated in London in the early 1950s.

“We wanted to put some color into it. We wanted colors that reflected where McDonald’s and the restaurants were going. We haven’t gone for bright reds and yellows. We’ve gone for more muted colors,” says Mr Hemmingway.

Photos: McDonald’s / Flickr

The “mocha brown” uniforms, introduced four years ago were ditched, and replaced with a more heterogeneous colorway that includes colors such as dark green, mustard yellow and “gherkin green” for the staff, and black and white for the managers, all combined in different patterns and applied to different textiles to create interesting outfits.

Photo: McDonald’s / Flickr

This is a great new initiative by McDonald’s if you have in mind that the mod movement, that had it’s influence on fashion back in the 50s and 60s, is coming back in a symbolic way though the brands restaurants to the city where it was first started. The Mad Men inspiration, mentioned by the designer, is in my opinion irrelevant here. After all, Mad Men is all USA in its essence, and that is something the designer wanted to evade through the substitution of classic McDonald’s baseball caps with baker style caps, as the prior were “too American”.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Nevertheless, Newsweek had an interesting take on precisely that “American style” that Mad Men is all about for the celebration of the start of the series’ fifth season. Take a look at what they’ve come up with.