I hate dressing up, but I love uniforms. As a kid I had this set of encyclopedias and they had full color charts in them and I would alternately spend weekends drawing either, all the flags it showed, or the military uniforms that it showed. I especially enjoyed the completely impractical uniforms that predated camouflage and and long distance battle. I love the idea of wearing red into battle with a giant purple plume extending from your already ridiculously tall hat. I guess in the days where you had to be within 15 feet of someone to end their life there was no reason to hide. If you are going to fight hand to hand, or at least saber to saber then you ought to look like a high class drum major to do it.
So when I saw Uniforms: Why We are What We Wear I had to give it a read. I will get my only complaint out of the way first. The author never addressed sports uniforms. I love sports uniforms, if you do to check this out. Any way, I never really thought to look at uniforms from a psychological viewpoint but that is where this book is coming from. Some of the highlights are as follows:
Q: Why do the Marines look so much badder than the rest of the military?
A: Because they are and you aren't going to tell them otherwise. If they want to kill people in full dress uniform while carrying a saber who is going to stop them.
Q: Why did nurses used to wear white when they deal with so much bodily fluid?
A: It looks sterile and sanitary if you are able to keep it clean.
Q: Why do nurses now wear Betty Boop scrubs?
A: They got tired of keeping their whites, white.
Q: Why do the Navy Seaman uniforms look like Schoolboy costumes?
A: Apparently they like them, Admiral Zumwalt tried to change them in the 1970's and people went bananas.
Q: Why do commercial airline pilots where quasi-military looking uniforms?
A: We trust them more that way.
Q: Whats with Hotel Bellboys?
A: Who knows?
So basically uniforms say a lot about who we are, from class, to income level, to our ideas about sex and ultimately about our culture. Some of what they say isn't good, and some show that we are a society of order, and that we respect our superiors, and that shiny buttons will never go out of style for the people in charge.
I remember back in high school I was going to tell the Marine recruiters that they always had the cooler commercial and dressed better than any of the other military. They never called...
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