What do vests scream if anything? During the course of a given day, I maybe pass through 2-5 different social situations where what I wear is not appropriate to the surrounding dress code, either over or under dressed. If I worried that I did not blend in all the time, I would be in the psyche ward (more often, anyway). If you stand out, you get noticed, but that does not mean your dress screams gun or anything else like that. For the general public to recognize you as wearing supposed gun garments, they have to recognize them as gun garments. They don't know a gun garment from a Zuni Fetish.
I have a blue vest. In Walmart, I keep getting asked directions to produce or clothing areas. My vest looks nothing like a Walmart blue vest, not patches, pins, or ribbons. Mine is stained and discolored. Plus, I am usually pushing a shopping cart. I guess I could whip out my 1911 and give them some direction, but that isn't legal.
I like to wear my black 5.11 vest with the Carlsbad Caverns $3 patch on the right chest. I keep getting asked when I worked there. Mind you, I now live in north central Texas, nowhere near there. The last football game I attended while wearing a vest, I got asked for my press pass.
Like I said above, whatever you wear, you have to make it work for you and make it a part of your person. It can't look like it is there to serve the purpose of hiding guns.
On the flip side, I enjoy the naivete of you guard dog and wolf gun carriers who know that a vest means the person has a gun. I can go to a gun show, gun range where you check your guns (Bass Pro) or even be amongst friends when they ask if I am carrying. I can open my vest and show that I have on no holster and no gun tucked Mexican...and that is all that is needed to 'prove' I am unarmed...as if the only place you could carry a gun is in a holster on your belt when wearing a vest. I will have the gun in the pocket of my pants or elsewhere, just not on my belt...and the gun folks who are in-the-know on such matters are totally clueless because they know that the only place you carry a gun when wearing a vest is on the belt and if you show them there is nothing on the belt, then you must not have a gun. D'uh!