Hooters Is Using Its Uniform to Rewrite the Brand
Hooters is trying to change what walking into a Hooters means.
After the Original Hooters founding group reacquired control of the brand in 2025, leadership began what it calls a “re-Hooterization” of the chain, returning restaurants closer to the beach-themed, neighborhood-bar concept the founders say originally defined Hooters. The overhaul includes restaurant upgrades, a simplified menu, renewed community programming and one particularly visible change:
the uniforms.
Under previous ownership, Hooters had introduced increasingly revealing uniform options. CEO Neil Kiefer argues that the evolution pushed the brand away from its original athletic, beach-inspired look and contributed to Hooters becoming perceived as more overtly sexualized.
The new direction brings servers back toward the familiar orange athletic shorts and Hooters tank styling associated with the chain's earlier years.
For marketers, the bigger story isn't whether one pair of shorts is more appropriate than another.
It's this:
When employees are one of the most visible expressions of your brand, changing the uniform can fundamentally change how customers interpret the entire business.
The Brand Hooters Is Trying to Reclaim
Hooters leadership isn't describing the strategy as abandoning its identity.
It's describing it as returning to it.
Kiefer defines the original concept as a beach-themed restaurant centered around the Hooters Girls, food and an easygoing atmosphere that could attract families, couples, singles and regular neighborhood customers.
That distinction matters.
Hooters isn't removing the Hooters Girls.
It isn't eliminating the orange shorts.
It isn't pretending the cheeky personality of the brand never existed.
Instead, leadership is trying to redraw the boundary between:
playful and overly sexualized.
The uniform becomes one of the fastest ways to communicate that difference.
Key takeaway: A rebrand doesn't always require replacing recognizable brand assets. Sometimes it means bringing those assets back into alignment with what the company wants them to represent.
Why the Uniform Matters So Much
For most restaurant chains, uniforms are functional.
At Hooters, the uniform is part of the brand iconography.
The white Hooters top.
The bright orange shorts.
White sneakers.
The logo.
Together, those pieces are recognizable enough that the public can identify the brand without seeing the restaurant itself.
Hooters' own FAQ describes the uniform as something it closely protects, while offering consumers versions of the iconic orange shorts and branded tank tops separately as merchandise.
That means a uniform change carries more weight than swapping polo colors at an ordinary restaurant.
You're changing one of the brand's most recognizable visual assets.
Key takeaway: The more recognizable a uniform becomes, the more carefully it has to be managed like any other piece of brand identity.
What Changed
The Earlier Look
Kiefer points back to the chain's original dolphin-style running shorts, a sporty silhouette common in the early 1980s and associated with the beach culture surrounding Hooters' Clearwater, Florida origins.
He describes the original uniform as having a “sporty athletic look.”
That context is important.
The uniform was always revealing.
But within the original concept, the clothing also connected to a specific brand world:
Florida + beach culture + athletics + casual food + playful hospitality.
The orange shorts weren't simply designed to show skin.
They helped create the restaurant's visual environment.
The More Revealing Uniforms
Under later ownership, new uniform options pushed the shorts toward a significantly more revealing silhouette.
Hooters itself previously acknowledged introducing new tops and shorts as part of a broader uniform update, while allowing employees to choose between traditional and newer options.
Kiefer now argues that the uniforms had moved too far.
He told PEOPLE that some versions appeared closer to a thong-style uniform, saying that the change wasn't consistent with the founders' original intention for the concept.
His concern wasn't only aesthetic.
It was audience.
According to Kiefer, the increasingly sexualized presentation “chased away a lot of customers.”
The Return
When the founding group announced its acquisition in November 2025, Hooters specifically listed “Original Uniforms” among the immediate changes being made to the restaurants.
The company said server uniforms would return to the original look and the brand's beach-inspired heritage.
That makes the uniform part of the turnaround strategy alongside:
Better ingredients
Original wing recipes and sauces
Restaurant upgrades
A simplified menu
Community partnerships
Family-focused programming
Improved hospitality
The clothing isn't being changed in isolation.
It's part of a larger attempt to change the experience customers associate with Hooters.
The Uniform Is Setting Customer Expectations
Uniforms communicate something before an employee says a word.
They tell customers:
Who works here.
What kind of environment this is.
How formal the experience will be.
Who the space appears designed for.
What behavior feels normal inside it.
That last point is particularly important for Hooters.
If leadership wants customers to see the restaurant as a neighborhood destination where families, couples, groups and longtime regulars can all comfortably eat, every customer-facing signal has to support that claim.
You can't position the restaurant one way in advertising while employees visually communicate something completely different.
That's where uniforms become strategic.
The uniform has to make the brand promise believable.
Uniforms as Audience Strategy
One of the more interesting lessons from Hooters is that uniform design isn't only about employees.
It's also about who the company wants walking through the door.
Consider the two positions:
Version One
More revealing uniforms→ stronger emphasis on sexuality→ narrower perception of the experience→ potentially stronger appeal to one audience→ potentially greater discomfort for another
Version Two
Sportier heritage uniforms→ still unmistakably Hooters→ stronger connection to beach and athletic styling→ broader interpretation of the restaurant→ potentially more approachable to families and mixed groups
Neither uniform exists in a vacuum.
Each one subtly changes the customer's answer to:
“Is this place for me?”
That makes uniforms an audience-acquisition tool.
Brand Recognition vs. Brand Perception
This is where Hooters' challenge becomes especially interesting.
The company has enormous recognition.
Changing the recognizable parts too aggressively could destroy what makes Hooters Hooters.
But recognition and perception aren't the same thing.
Leadership doesn't need customers to forget:
orange shorts + Hooters Girls + wings + irreverent humor.
It wants customers to interpret those things differently.
Less:
destination built primarily around sexualized servers
More:
irreverent neighborhood wing restaurant with an iconic service culture.
That is a much harder branding task than simply changing a logo.
It requires keeping recognizable assets while changing the associations attached to them.
And employee apparel sits directly in the middle of that effort.
Key takeaway: Sometimes the goal isn't increasing brand recognition. It's changing what people think when they recognize you.
Heritage Can Be a Rebranding Tool
There's another interesting move happening here.
Hooters isn't using a completely new uniform to signal modernization.
It's using heritage.
The original orange athletic shorts become evidence of what leadership says Hooters was supposed to represent all along.
That's a strategy other established brands can borrow.
When a company has drifted over decades, its archives can contain useful answers:
Previous uniforms
Original packaging
Historic logos
Early color palettes
Old signage
Product silhouettes
Store designs
Advertising language
Sometimes moving a brand forward doesn't mean designing something entirely new.
Sometimes it means identifying which earlier version of the brand is still culturally useful.
The Employee Side Matters Too
There is another audience affected by every uniform decision:
the people wearing it.
Hooters' earlier uniform policy emphasized giving employees some choice between traditional and newer uniform options and said employee feedback helped shape those changes.
That's an important consideration for any company redesigning employee apparel.
A uniform has to work simultaneously as:
Branding + dress code + functional workwear + employee experience.
A beautiful brand concept that employees dislike wearing isn't a successful uniform program.
Neither is an employee-friendly uniform that completely loses the visual identity customers recognize.
The strongest programs find the overlap.
The Bigger Branding Play
Hooters shows why companies should stop treating uniforms as an operational purchase made after the branding work is finished.
For customer-facing businesses, the uniform is part of the branding work.
Think about everything a restaurant guest sees:
Signage → exterior → interior → menu → packaging → employees → food.
The employee may actually be the most frequently viewed branded touchpoint in the entire experience.
Hooters understands that intuitively because its uniform has always been unusually central to the concept.
But the principle applies far beyond Hooters.
Hotels.
Airlines.
Retail stores.
Coffee shops.
Gyms.
Auto dealers.
Healthcare groups.
Entertainment venues.
Any company with customer-facing employees is effectively operating a wearable media network inside its own business.
Lessons from Hooters
The Hooters reset offers a useful framework for any company reconsidering its uniforms.
Don't start with:
“What should our employees wear?”
Start with:
“What should customers understand about our brand when they see our employees?”
Then work backward.
The formula worth borrowing:
Define the audience you want → clarify the experience you're promising → identify the brand codes worth keeping → remove elements sending the wrong message → translate the new positioning into what employees actually wear.
Hooters is attempting to change its menu, restaurants, community strategy and customer perception at the same time.
But few changes communicate that reset as immediately as the uniform.
Because sometimes changing what the team wears is the fastest way to show customers what the brand wants to become.