So you’re about to have surgery. You’re probably nervous. But the medical staff seems calm and competent, and that’s reassuring, because you’re counting on them to make pretty serious decisions. You glance over at a nurse, and you notice the tag on her scrubs. “Grey’s Anatomy,” it says.
Whether you’re a fan of ABC’s hit hospital drama or not, you might find this . . . notable. A reader who had precisely this experience dropped me a line about it not long ago. “I asked her about it, and she said they were the most comfortable scrubs and very popular,” he wrote. “How odd is it that a profession that asks people to trust its members to take life-or-death actions would advertise a brand based on a TV show on the job?”
I would say: pretty odd. Even if you enjoy following the private tribulations and messy love lives of an imaginary hospital staff during prime time, you would probably prefer to see the people delivering your care as laser-focused pros leading a personal-distraction-free existence. But it turns out that “Grey’s Anatomy” scrubs have been popular with medical professionals pretty much from the moment they were first produced, in 2006. The collection won its maker, Barco Uniforms, the “best new line of the year” award from the Uniform Retailers Association, which I hadn’t heard of but which sounds impressive enough. The branded line has been a top seller for Barco, according to Kyle Weiner, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the company, who not surprisingly didn’t see anything odd about the situation the reader encountered. Barco, he informed me, has long been a leader and innovator in “the medical--scrub world.” The company says it is pushing “advanced research clothing technology” — arcTechnology — “applying various properties to fabrics at the fiber level, for outstanding, extended performance.”
And maybe more to the point, Weiner added, the company has a long relationship with the entertainment world, supplying scrubs used in a variety of movies and television shows at least since the 1960s. Barco, founded in 1929, also makes uniforms for Taco Bell and McDonald’s and claims to have created “the world’s first fashion scrubs” in 1965. Weiner says the idea of reversing that flow — from a uniform maker providing realistic scrubs to fictional worlds, to connoting a fictional world on real medical wear — came from Barco’s chief executive, Michael Donner, when “Grey’s Anatomy” was still in the concept stage. It’s a matter of luck that the show, now in its seventh season, turned out to be a hit.
Scrubs are a far less standard category of garment than might be assumed. Aside from the color you might think of as “scrubs green,” a huge variety of hues and patterns are offered by competing scrubs makers like Cherokee, Koi, Urbane and Peaches. You can also buy scrubs emblazoned with your college logo or a variety of Disney characters. Barco itself has multiple lines, including Crayola Threads, which, like the “Grey’s Anatomy” products, is a result of a licensing arrangement. You can also find medical garb that’s part of the Katherine Heigl Collection — she’s a former “Grey’s Anatomy” actress — but this line, now discontinued, was not manufactured by Barco. O, The Oprah Magazine recently gave a shout-out to the “sleek, chic duds” of Blue Sky Scrubs, a Texas company that offers earrings in addition to uniforms and boldly patterned scrub hats.
While scrubs with bright patterns, or even Mickey Mouse, make imminent sense in the context of a pediatrics ward, a TV-show-branded medical uniform seems different to me. When I asked a doctor friend of mine what she thought, she clearly considered the question itself odd: quality of medical care has nothing to do with the little tags on the professionals’ uniforms; the more insidious form of branding in hospitals are the freebies from drug-company sales reps. Fair enough. On the other hand, comments on the Consumed Facebook page, when I floated that reader’s story, represented a different view. “I’d prefer my fantasy/reality to not collide when in the hospital,” one said.
The disconnect here is that the consumer isn’t the patient; it’s the person wearing the scrubs. Like anybody else who wears a de facto uniform, that person wants to be comfortable, look good and perhaps, within the confines of dress-code strictures, express some personality. That’s why at least some medical professionals apparently seek out “Grey’s Anatomy” garb in specialty-uniform stores: a garment referencing a medical--focused hit from pop culture might be clever or amusing enough to catch the attention of colleagues, and that’s the idea — not to distract or disconcert the occasional sharp-eyed patient. For most patients, the branding is probably too small and subtle to notice, and I suppose if it made my caregivers happy, I would be fine with anything that put them in a good mood. But if this catches on and medical uniforms routinely reference medical-themed entertainments, let’s just agree on this: no “Nurse Jackie” scrubs, O.K.?
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