The Power of a Uniform: Clothes Used For Uniformity

Clothing can be a powerful unspoken statement depending on the outfit. Some people are fortunate to have large wardrobes with many outfits to choose from. Others change their outfits several times a day depending on their activities and employment. In some cases, however, someone else gets to choose what you wear.

Clothes For Identification

Uniforms are worn by a number of professions such as nurses, doctors, maids, doorman, waitresses, police officers, and fire fighters to name a few. Uniforms help identify a person’s employment. Undercover police work is so successful because most people can’t identify the police without their typical uniform.

Retail employees wear uniforms so that customers can locate them easily when they need help finding a particular item for pricing, gift wrapping, delivery, and so forth. Waitresses wear uniforms for similar reasons. They wear uniforms so that customers can identify their availability for ordering food, making adjustments in seating, substitutes in the menu, or delivering the check to the table. Some uniforms, however, do not inspire a pleasant experience.

Uniformity

Prison uniforms in the United States mostly consist of a bright orange jumpsuit or a black and white horizontal striped uniform which makes it most visible and harder for inmates to escape since the uniforms are easy to identify. The striped black and white uniform was abolished in the 20th century. In some facilities inmates are allowed to wear sweat pants and shirts in the colors of blue, orange, and gray. In recent years a trend to use uniforms as a measure of punishment has become increasingly popular.

Tennessee police in Lincoln County came up with a plan to change uniforms when an inmate escaped in his bright orange uniform and no one called the police. Why? Because Lincoln County is right in the middle of the University of Tennessee and their fans wear colors that are similar to inmates uniforms. So in order to deter prisoners from escaping, the sheriff’s department changed the color of inmates’ uniforms to pink.

Polygamist style of dress was inspired by the garments worn by the original Mormon pioneers who settled in Utah. The puffy, pastel-colored dresses also incorporate elements of original 19th century and 1950s style. The dresses are meant to show modesty and conformity: They go down to the ankles and wrists and are often worn over garments or pants, making sure every inch of skin is covered.

John Llewellyn, a polygamy expert and retired Salt Lake County sheriff’s lieutenant, says the women cover themselves “so that they’re unattractive to the outside world or other men.” Enforcing a uniformity of dress was one means by which members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints had their behavior controlled. Girls who thought of fleeing one of the FLDS compounds were discouraged by threats that outsiders would force them to cut their hair and wear makeup.

In 2001, the ruling Taliban movement in Afghanistan planned to require all non-Muslims in that country to wear distinctive symbols or clothes. Maulawai Abdul Wali — the Taliban minister for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice — told the Pakistani-based Afghan Islamic Press that “non-Muslims should have a distinctive mark in their dress so that they can be identified. We have asked for a fatwa [a religious decree] from the ulema [a group of Islamic scholars] for the full implementation of this. When a fatwa comes, a complete law will be made.”

In Nazi occupied Europe Jews were forced to wear an identifying mark of the Star of David on their clothing. This process of discrimination was the beginning of them being viewed as outsiders, different, less human and unequal, which ultimately led to the extermination of six million Jews in concentration camps.