Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (Hardcover)

Excerpt

A Thing About Uniforms

Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded
upon cloth." Thus Thomas Carlyle in 1836. Little less astonishing today are
some of the cloth objects chosen by their wearers. But when such objects
become, like uniforms, obligatory and regulated, with implications of mass
value, they are irresistibly fascinating.

All my life I have had a thing about uniforms. Although it would be pleasant to
assert that as a newborn I noted that all the boys were lapped in little blue
blankets, with the girls uniformly in pink, I wouldn"t go back that far. But it is
undeniable that as I aged I began to appear in a sailor suit (this was in the
late 1920s), complete, despite the short pants, with whistle and lanyard and
red sleeve insignia featuring eagles and chevrons.
Next, my loving mother went into action to accouter me as an
ideal Boy Scout, with t

Excerpt

A Thing About Uniforms

Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded
upon cloth." Thus Thomas Carlyle in 1836. Little less astonishing today are
some of the cloth objects chosen by their wearers. But when such objects
become, like uniforms, obligatory and regulated, with implications of mass
value, they are irresistibly fascinating.

All my life I have had a thing about uniforms. Although it would be pleasant to
assert that as a newborn I noted that all the boys were lapped in little blue
blankets, with the girls uniformly in pink, I wouldn"t go back that far. But it is
undeniable that as I aged I began to appear in a sailor suit (this was in the
late 1920s), complete, despite the short pants, with whistle and lanyard and
red sleeve insignia featuring eagles and chevrons.
Next, my loving mother went into action to accouter me as an
ideal Boy Scout, with the result that at troop gatherings I was conspicuously
overdressed among boys who as a sophisticated gesture wore only a part of
the uniform, if that, at a time. I had the whole thing, and brand-new,
comprising breeches, long socks, Smoky Bear hat, official shirt, neckerchief,
even official shoes. The rest of the troop appeared in blue jeans or corduroys,
with perhaps a neckerchief fastened by a rubber band. (Mine was secured by
a costly official slide.) The whole thing was a terrible mistake, resulting in my
deep humiliation and rapid resignation from the Boy Scouts. This was all
highly ironic, for, entirely uninterested in Scouting "activities," my reason for
joining was actually the uniform alone. And also not to be forgotten was the
invariable Sunday uniform for churchgoing, consisting of dark suit, white shirt,
black shoes, and understated dark tie.
This was at the time I was in high school, and attracted to the
Junior ROTC, but only because those enrolled in it performed their evolutions
in full dress uniform and, sweating profusely, were excused from showering
afterward. (I had a horror of exposing my babyish body.)
The ROTC uniform consisted of olive-drab trousers and wool shirt
with black tie, the whole gloriously completed by a real U.S. Army jacket, but
with bright blue lapels to distinguish it from the jacket worn by real grown-up
soldiers. There was plenty of brass to convey a military look, lots of buttons
and lapel ornaments in the form of discs exhibiting lighted torches
(of "learning"). Keeping these, as well as the brass belt buckle, shiny was our
prime military duty. There was never any other homework.
Later, at college, I proceeded to join the Senior ROTC (Infantry),
which meant furnishing myself at government expense with a real officer"s
uniform of the 1940s, including pink trousers and greenish-brown jacket. But
still distinguished from actuality and seriousness by the shaming letters
ROTC on the cap badge and the lapel brass US"s.
General Colin L. Powell (U.S.A., Ret.) has testified about the way
uniforms first attracted him. When he was a student at New York"s City
College, "during the first semester at CCNY, something had caught my eye —
young guys on campus in uniform." As soon as he could, Powell joined up,
and he was not alone. "CCNY was not West Point, but during the fifties it had
the largest voluntary ROTC contingent in America, fifteen hundred cadets at
the height of the Korean War.
"There came a day when I stood in line in the drill hall to be issued
olive-drab pants and jacket, brown shirt, brown tie, brown shoes, a belt with a
brass buckle, and an overseas cap. As soon as I got home, I put the uniform
on and looked in the mirror. I liked what I saw."
So did I on similar occasions. But fantasy suffered a cruel
deflation in the terrible hot summer of 1943, when I had to trade my pseudo-
officer"s gauds for a real private"s baggy fatigues for basic training at Camp
Roberts, California. If one ever achieved a pass there, one sweated in enlisted
men"s khakis while drinking beer and eating steak off the post. When I moved
on to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, the daily uniform changed
to light green cotton overalls and helmet liners. These remained the fatigue
uniforms when, commissioned, I joined an actual infantry division.
Shipped to France, we wore uniforms still, but in combat we
removed all shiny insignia, secretly pleased to imagine that, as identifiable
officers, we were the special targets of German snipers.
The point of all this is that, until mustered out of the Army in 1947,
I lived in a constant environment of uniforms and in the atmosphere of the
human uniformity they were designed to produce. The tradition continued
during my many years as a college professor, where practically compulsory
was the daily get-up of gray flannel trousers and tweed jacket, often, of
course, with leather elbow patches, suggestive at once of two honorable
conditions: poverty and learning. In The Professor of Desire Philip Roth saw
to it that his alter ego, David Kepesh, says to his students, "However you
may choose to attire yourselves — in the get-up of garage mechanic,
panhandler, tearoom gypsy, or cattle rustler — I still prefer to appear before
you to teach wearing a jacket and a tie." The distinction Roth makes is really
between uniforms and costumes.
It is a distinction not always easy to make, but still some
principles hold. Uniforms ask to be taken seriously, with suggestions of
probity and virtue (clergy and nuns, judges when robed), expertise (naval
officers, senior chefs, airline pilots), trustworthiness (Boy and Girl Scouts,
letter carriers, delivery men and women), courage (U.S. Marines, police
officers, firefighters), obedience (high school and university marching bands,
Ku Klux Klan), extraordinary cleanliness and sanitation (vendors of ice cream
on the streets, operating-room personnel, beauty salon employees, food
workers visible to the public, and, in hospitals, all wearers of white lab coats,
where a single blood stain might cause shame and even dismissal). Uniforms
also differ from costumes by their explicit assumptions about the way every
element must look. Hence the ridicule visited upon Supreme Court Chief
Justice William Renquist when, sitting in judgment on President Clinton,
adulterer, he chose to appear in a special robe augmented by unprecedented
(i.e., "unauthorized") stripes on the sleeves.
On the other hand, ideas of frivolity, temporariness, inauthenticity,
and theatricality attend costumes, one reason that Hemingway"s Colonel
Cantwell, in Across the River and Into the Trees, is angered by an Italian
upper-class couple who appear to sniff at his uniform. "The pair stared at him
with the bad manners of their kind and he saluted, lightly, and said to them in
Italian, "I am sorry that I am in uniform, but it is a uniform, not a costume."
The colonel is implying also that for an outfit to qualify as a uniform, many
others must be wearing the same thing, all more or less conscious of a
mysterious bonding by means of — cloth.
But the difference between uniform and costume grows
complicated when we consider, say, "cowboys," most of whom turn out to be
Marlboro Man impersonators.
Their appearance is "uniform," all right — the unique boots, the obligatory
jeans, the neckerchief. But as Leslie Fiedler observed in his useful
essay, "Montana, or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau," what occasioned
their uniformity was less their common working experience than the bad
cowboy movies they swarmed to on Saturday afternoons. We can infer even
from this that when enough people wear the same thing over time, like the
dark suits and white shirts of U.S. senators, their costume is likely to
ennoble itself into a uniform and convey news of valuable personal qualities in
its wearers. And uniforms, even the most modest and apparently demeaning,
do tend to ennoble their wearers.
When I first began pursuing this subject, I assumed that many
people wearing uniforms in low-paying work resented being the compulsory
bearers of such visible evidence of their subordinate condition. But what did I
find? All but universal pride in a uniform of any kind, comparable with that felt
by an enlisted marine on graduation day. The uniform, no matter how lowly,
assures its audience that the wearer has a job, one likely not to be merely
temporary and one extorting a degree of respect for being associated with a
successful enterprise. The uniform attaches one to success.
But what about the outfits far removed from the military or the
servants" livery models? What about uniforms more subtly disguised, like the
business suit, the dark blue blazer with gray flannel or khaki trousers, not to
mention such uniforms as tennis- and beachwear? And what about the recent
fad for "casual" dress in business offices, with its delusive suggestion of
escaping regulation and unleashing hitherto stifled individualities? It took
about a month of the casual fad to reveal that an equally rigid uniform code
was now in action, and the obligatory polo shirt came into its own.
Here we encounter a paradox and an embarrassment, which
some pages of this book will ventilate. The universal dilemma can be
specified succinctly: everyone must wear a uniform, but everyone must deny
wearing one, lest one"s invaluable personality and unique identity be
compromised. If you refuse to dress like others, you will be ridiculed, and no
one wants to appear in public dressed like a fool or an oddball. It is not likely
that executives will ever skip down Park Avenue at noon wearing tights in
fetching colors, and it is equally unlikely that people in general will abandon
their secret pride in being identifiably themselves and imagining themselves
honored for their originality of appearance.
Unless one chooses to conceal one"s physical uniqueness under
military or religious garb, there"s always going to be an internal conflict
between one"s aggressive urge to register a singular identity and the opposite
impulse, the need to join the crowd and thus risk ridicule, if not contumely.
It"s hard to avoid seeing this as a form of madness. Conflicts like
this are known in psychiatry to lie at the root of many mental disorders. This
conflict we repeat daily as we put on or take off various cloth things with the
intention of expressing an identity that will ideally honor our presumed
uniqueness. It is a trap impossible to avoid, unless one goes all the way and
goes naked. That might be recognized as the ultimate uniform, although it
would clearly pose other problems. From the daily sartorial conflict there
seems to be no escape — except perhaps to tone down self-consciousness,
which is as unlikely as ridding ourselves of the liability to social anxiety.

This is unashamedly a book about appearances. I have long despaired of
discovering what"s really going on in people"s insides (like their brains), since
the only news available about that is their self-interested testimony.
Despairing, I deepened my curiosity about what"s happening on their
outsides — what can be inferred from their looks, figures, clothing, speech,
gestures, and the like. I should also warn you that I have had to restrict
myself largely to the twentieth century. My implicit guide has been Erving
Goffman"s invaluable perception, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life: "All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it
isn"t are not easy to
specify."
This is also a book about the comfort and vanity of belonging,
which everyone has experienced. Every soldier knows its pleasures, as does
every person who has put on any kind of uniform or black and white formal
clothes.
And here I must note and apologize for the unrelenting masculinity
of this book. Only recently have women (nuns, nurses, and flight attendants
aside) required uniforms (and attempts at their theory), and I have sought to
do them justice where appropriate. My experience, on which my labors have
largely been based, has installed me inescapably in a man"s world, and
writing about what I know and have an instinct for has doubtless limited my
vision.
I have worn many a trousered uniform and buckled many a
cartridge belt, but I have never worn a dress or fastened a garter belt.

Copyright © 2002 by Paul Fussell.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Uniforms by Fussell, Paul Excerpted by permission.
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