Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear

Paul Fussell narrates the legacy of society's garments through to their modern inheritance. He analyzes not only the uniforms we commonly associate with blue-collar workers, but also the nature behind dress outside of the workplace. Fussell shows the ways in which human nature leads us to want to fit in - to assume our uniformity - while claiming to maintain individuality. His writing is crisp, refreshing, and cutting - his words convey comical anecdotes, historical accounts, and incisive analysis in a palatable fashion. While tracing uniforms throughout history, Fussell's work primarily focuses on the uniforms in our contemporary society today. Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear transcends mere history, making probing social commentary and examining deeper meaning of cloth - showing how society might just be made out of cloth. Fussell's work is a treasure and remarkably astonishing - Uniforms tells the reader just how important our clothing is in conveying our place in society, how uniforms speak volumes beyond their superficial appearances, and how uniforms persist even in the absence of official doctrine. This book brings to light many things that we take for granted and demonstrates the significance of our society made of cloth.

Everyone wears a uniform. Of course, the military, the church, sports teams, and letter carriers all have their uniforms, but then so do lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. In these less regimented occupations, there is a universal dilemma: "Everyone must wear a uniform, but everyone must deny wearing one, lest one's invaluable personality and unique identity be compromised." So writes Paul Fussell in _Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear_ (Houghton Mifflin), a funny look at all sorts of intentional and unintentional uniforms. Fussell is a historian with plenty of hefty, well-regarded books to his credit, but here he has adopted a perfect light tone for what he admits is "unabashedly a book about appearances." In over thirty chapters, some only a couple of pages, some full of research, some personal essays, Fussell has called attention to the way we dress, something he shows we are already paying a great deal of attention to anyway.Of course, uniforms are most closely associated with the military. It shows up in surprising ways. Despite any Bolshevist tendencies, Russian uniforms had style and elegance, perhaps as a compensation for the poverty of the officers. The tendency for lesser states to compensate by overdress in uniform is cited here repeatedly. The pictures of the Japanese surrender on the _USS Missouri_, for instance, show "the triumphant Allied officers in their informal, unpretentious khakis, pressing forward for a sight of the humiliated, overdressed Japanese officers and diplomats wearing standard hot uniforms and striped trousers, black tailcoats, and silk top hats." The crisis in current military uniforms is that they are looking the same, in different services and in different nations. Camouflage patterns have become the style. "The hope was that the infantrymen would look like leaves or some natural flora and thus deceive the enemy." American commanders can choose between the most popular "Woodland" version, also favored by hunters, and the alternates "Desert," "Arctic," and "Urban," the last one "imitating building surfaces like stucco, concrete, and brick." But this is decidedly not a book about military uniforms only. The Catholic religion, baseball and basketball teams, the Salvation Army, police, brides, firemen, doctors and nurses, academics in dress robes, chefs, the Mounties, the National Park Service, war reenactors, the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and many more uniformed services are treated here. There is only a bit of organization to Fussell's book, though there is plenty of insight and humor. The subject is a perfect one for some joshing, but it is serious all the same. He reminds us, "Dressing approximately like others is to don armor against contempt. Better to be not noticed at all than noticed and targeted as odd."

Having grown up in an army family, I've always been aware of the subtle distinctions among military uniforms, while at the same time being semi-unaware of them because they were so fundamental to my world. In his urbanely witty but sharply observant way, Fussell identifies much deeper distinctions: The Russian love of large shoulderboards, the 20th century German fascination with black, the Italian thing for plumes, and the different perception and philosophy between British class-conscious khaki and American egalitarian olive drab. And the essential reason army and navy uniforms are so very different: until the Cold War, the army and its uniforms were made up anew for each new major conflict, while the navy continued to exist much the same in peacetime as in wartime. But "uniform" means more than the military -- witness the ubiquity of blue jeans in the United States and, eventually, all over the world. Fussell also asks the questions most of us wouldn't have thought of, like why do British and American cops tend to dark blue uniforms, quite unlike the tradition in Continental countries? Why do commercial airline pilots wear uniforms at all? (The early ones didn't.) Why are UPS men considered sexy while FedEx guys aren't? And what was it with Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Nixon when it came to bizarre uniforms? This isn't a very long book, nor is it scholarly in style, but it's a lot of fun. And you'll find yourself looking at all the uniformed people around you with a new eye.