By bbr

by Sarah Warlick, content director

Love Orange Is the New Black? So does everyone else. What makes it so powerful? 

Photo credit: Netflix.com

Netflix hasn’t traditionally been the go-to source for the hottest original content of the season, but it’s had a couple of powerful successes now. With an additional season of the cult classic Arrested Development and then with the incredibly popular original series, Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s original content has been riding the crest of popular culture. Now the latter show’s popularity has extended beyond inspiration for conversation at water coolers and cocktail hours to create a new fashion trend: people are adopting the bright-orange jumpsuits worn by prisoners on the show as a fashionable outfit to wear when out and about in the big city. It may not have hit your corner of the world yet but this unusual clothing choice has become popular enough to create waves in the incarceration industry. The Saginaw County Jail in Michigan has ordered brand new jumpsuits that are unlikely to be mistaken for the old orange ones that are now showing up on fashionistas around the country. Apparently the coolest threads of the year are creating confusion as to who’s in the roadside work crew and who’s just super-hip, or thinks they are, when it comes to clothing. William Federspiel, the Sherriff of Saginaw County, felt that since the orange prisoner jumpsuits had become “cool,” his duty was to swap them out for something more distinctive as prisoner garb that would at the same time keep prisoners from taking illicit pleasure from their county-issued clothing as they dressed each morning. “We decided that the black-and-white stripes would be the best way to go because it signifies ‘jail inmate,’ and I don’t see people out there wanting to wear black-and-white stripes,” Federspiel told the Saginaw News. “When the lines get blurred between the culture outside the jail and the culture within the jail I have to do something to redefine those boundaries, because they’ve been blurred far too often in public culture.”

That’s a powerful statement. The lines between prison culture and public culture in the United States have for centuries been well enough defined to prevent most people from adopting distinctive prison garb as their outfits of choice. What’s different now? The difference is storytelling. Orange Is the New Black tells such a compelling story that normal citizens with no strong ties to the prison system are willing to change their behavior to visibly identify with the characters in the show. Only through a great story did public perception shift to thinking it was cool to wear such a jumpsuit. Every fashion-conscious citizen was well aware of prison uniforms long before the series came along but the garment held no appeal until Piper Kerman and her inmate crew brought it to dramatic, fully relatable life. Tell a compelling story and you change everything about perception and behavior. Now that’s a powerful tool!