May 12, 2023 |
I feel like I should be writing a defence of uniforms, but we already think they’re the best, don’t we? Whenever I read a Q&A with someone very stylish, it gets to the bit about their personal look and the answer is, invariably: “I decided years ago to wear the same thing every day. Black. No frills. I never own more than two pairs of trousers at a time. I’ll allow myself a colourful bracelet twice a year.” It sounds punitive, dry and monotonous… and dear God I really want to do it.
This, to me, is the main appeal of uniforms: the savage whiff of discipline. The convenient suggestion that you are so busy with other things in your life, you don’t have time to wonder which striped knit goes best with which chino with which directional running shoe. No! You’re a machine! You have Marie Kondo’d every element of your life, never mind your wardrobe, and you have seven T-shirts in your drawers, which you wash every Sunday! You are too busy pondering some earth-shattering concept, or turning over an eye-boggling profit, or just shagging someone senseless in a very direct and non-talkative way. You have just one perfectly chosen object on any table at home, you never eat seconds at dinner and you leave worryingly hot people “on read”.
Dear God! I really want to do it. Some of the above, obviously, isn’t quite in my natural range.
For most people, meanwhile, the charm of uniforms depends on two things. First, whether you’ve got over your schooldays or not. And second, whether you’re still forced to wear a uniform now. If you’ve developed a more philosophical, ironic or just plain nostalgic attitude towards the former, chucking the same clothes on every day can become a pleasure. School, somehow, has become cool. However, if you’re still in a job where you still have to don one, and it’s not just an aesthetic kink, perhaps not.
Needless to say, having slowly become a fully paid-up member of the self-indulgent media classes, I’ve not been forced into a uniform in years. I have, however, worked several jobs where there was an unspoken dress code: a kind of smart-casual miasma of Oxford shirts, smart jeans, light knits and winter boots/desert boots. There was no official directive as to colour (though bright red was reserved for posh men… and clowns) and nothing, apparently, needed to be ironed. Looking back, I realise I found this both dispiriting and confusing, and frankly not sexy at all. (And yes, I do think you need to be sexy – just a little – at work.)
I was tired of trying to coordinate different things every day, of trying to communicate entirely different moods to colleagues who didn’t give a damn, to be clear. They just wanted me to stop crashing InDesign.
All of this means that when I started a new job 18 months ago, I resolved on something that had been in my mind for a while. I decided to wear all blue.
Obviously, this is not very radical. Blue is the colour of countless men’s shirts and trousers and jackets: I wasn’t going out on a limb on, say, yellow. (And I wasn’t including shoes in my rule.)
The only way in which I’d say it’s wild is that it’s not black, which is of course the ultimate shade for uniforms the world over. But although I love black on other people, and appreciate touches of it myself, I have never been someone to wear it all over and I don’t think I ever could. I can’t face dressing to mourn. (I also can’t afford vintage Japanese 1980s pieces, which makes the decision a bit easier.) Blue, to me, is natural, quite literally so; it’s the hue of sea and sky. It’s sober without being sombre. And, yes, it is available in an extraordinary number of shades and styles, which for menswear is no small feat.
But therein lay the problem. I found myself, yet again, bewildered by the amount of choice. I tried very hard in the first few weeks of work to align the same few shirts and sweaters on the clothes rail, to stick to the same five sensible things. I bought stuff which evoked workwear, but in a bourgeois-chic kind of way, you understand, and I stuffed all my coloured jumpers under the bed. But then the demons started to creep out. Acid-washed denim: that’s still blue, right? An electric cyan rugby shirt: that’s discreet? About a month in I decided I was allowed “accents”, which turned out to be tangerine sweaters, burgundy T-shirts and white-on-white- on-white everywhere.
The fantasy of self-control was fading. My uniform had veered into mufti.
To return to the school thing: whenever I think of my own uniform, I think of the deep green blazers I wore from 11 to 16 at secondary, while for sixth form we turned to black. I actually don’t remember hating the green – the shade of ivy, old wine bottles and faded pub carpets – though I’ve essentially never worn it since, so clearly I didn’t love it. I mostly remember its stuffy feel. But I always had a nice nostalgic thing about school uniform, because for ages afterwards I wore a grey V-neck out and about that was positively Grange Hill. It’s only writing this, though, that has let me remember my primary school uniform, which I wore every day aged five to 11… it was blue.
I don’t think much about my primary school days, as I’ve decided I didn’t like those much. It was a drearily tough place to be for a deceptively fragile child. But a range of school photos on my mum’s dresser suggests a more nuanced view. The pictures, especially the earlier ones, show me positively beaming as I pose in my cosy deep blue sweater with the logo woven in gold: Compton C of E. And now, to this day, the clothing I’m most comfortable in is some variation of the same top. Oh, God – is it as simple as that?
Is it just that I’m happily institutionalised again and am seeking, in my new employment, to get back into class, where teacher can mark me accordingly? Am I trying to rekindle some early naivety and joy? Or is it just that blue, specifically navy, is the only shade worth wearing? Is it the perfect option to be either smart or casual, serious but not too dramatic, where it’s possible to be revved up or down with only a few stylistic tweaks… and that I twigged all this at six years old? For my dignity, let’s say the latter and keep the other stuff under review.
Photography by Anna Stokland. Louis Wise is assistant editor at the Financial Times’ HTSI magazine. Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Men – NEW, DAILY, UNIFORM – out now. Order your copy here.
