British Summer Time ends this weekend and, as the nights close in, so we become aware of the orange and yellow shades around us. This is because high-visibility clothing is even more noticeable in the gloom of autumn.

The postman who has just delivered my mail wears a high visibility vest. He is now exchanging a word with the driver of a breakdown truck who wears a highvisibility vest which, for good measure, features the word Recovery on a reflective strip.

Disappearing down an alleyway over the road, I see a man wearing a hard hat and a high-visibility vest. He carries a spare high-visibility vest tucked into his waistband, as if he were about to initiate another person into the secret society. I walk out of my house and head for the post office, where stacks of high-visibility vests are for sale, the packets illustrated with a picture of a perfect family, all highly visible in high-visibility vests.

Ought I to buy some of the vests for my children, so that they can wear them when cycling? Or walking down the road? Or standing still?

Most responsible cyclists already wear them, including bicycling policemen, whose high-visibility vests are also stab-proof, which seems paradoxical: a garment designed to attract and repel. Since October 1, all cyclists in France have had to wear them at night or when visibility is poor. In July, France also became one of the growing number of EU countries to require the carrying of high-visibility vests in car boots, in the event of a breakdown.

These developments are two posthumous victories for an American called Robert C.Switzer. As a young man in the 1930s he suffered a head injury while working in a Californian railyard, and he was required to convalesce in a darkened room. Switzer was trained in chemistry and he began experimenting with fluorescent materials in his gloomy confinement, which led to his creation of a fluorescent paint that he called Day-Glo. He covered his wife's wedding dress in the stuff, and so the first high-visibility clothing was made.

High visibility came to Britain with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, whose code concerning protective clothing was very boringly refined in the Personal Protective Equipment at Work regulations of 1992. Employees are required to remove hazards if possible or to guard against them if not, and there's no cheaper way of guarding against hazards than to dole out high-visibility vests that can be bought for about £1 wholesale.

Once you've adopted one of the vests you can't relinquish it, because that would smack of irresponsibility. If you speak to sellers of high-visibility clothing, they will tell you, in a weary tone, as though the point were hardly worth making, that sales go up every year.

There's no immediate prospect of British motorists or cyclists being required by law to carry high-visibility vests, but everything's pointing that way. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents will not be calling for such measures to become law, but this is not because it doesn't give a stuff about the safety of motorists and cyclists. Rather, it's because it wouldn't want one safety measure to be emphasised over others, such as the wearing of helmets by cyclists. The society recommends the use of high-visibility clothing for cycling and, it seems, most other activities.

Who could ever speak out against high-visibility clothing? Well, you won't catch me doing it, but I would mention that men used to dig holes in the road wearing dark three-piece suits, which gave them a dusty, cowboyish elegance. High-visibility vests are not flattering to the face or the figure, a point squarely addressed by the French Government, which has promoted their own high-visibility campaign using pictures of the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld wearing one of the vests, and giving his professional opinion on it: it's yellow, it's ugly, it doesn't match anything, but it might save your life.

I might also suggest that the wearing of high-visibility vests smacks a little of selfishness: “Look at me!” And is there not a danger in their sheer ubiquity? Just as patients become dependent on drugs, so we will all become attuned to noticing only high-visibility colours and our eyes will become lazy. And imagine the ineffectiveness of the following warning shouted out in the modern workplace: “You there ... in the high-visibility vest ... watch out!”

IRA members would often wear high-visibility clothing when on covert operations. The robbers who tried to steal that 203-carat De Beers diamond from the Millennium Dome in 2000 were all wearing it. High-visibility gear proclaims: here is an authorised, responsible workman; a person conforming to the modern pieties, which are very different, in their determined death-dodging, from religion. For the moment at least, vicars and priests dress largely in black and I for one take some comfort in that.

Andrew Martin's book, How To Get Things Really Flat: A Man's Guide to Ironing, Housework and Other Household Arts, is published by Short Books