Rosemary McLeod: Cut from the same old cloth

I hated my school uniforms for the way they encouraged both uniformity of appearance and uniformity of outlook.

It is the purpose of uniforms to make the wearer look mildly, or hopefully horrendously, unattractive, and to negate individuality. Uniforms want clones.

Their cut is unflattering, their fabric nasty to the touch. They make the wearer look as though they live somewhere outside the ordinary, and so police and army people wear them.

It seems only right when they have to maybe shoot somebody that they not wear T-shirts plastered with branding, or shorts and jandals, the preferred clothing of males locked into eternal childhood. There should be decorum about the killing business. It isn't a joke.

Of course they render the wearer sexless. Even if skirts are involved they make women in uniform look fatter than they need to, and with key rings hanging off them they look positively menacing, which is why some hysterically imaginative people fetishise them. Oh to be handcuffed and locked in a cell by a woman wearing stiff serge and flat, manly lace-ups. What a world of magic to uncover. Or something like that.

Air hostesses are supposed to look lovely in their uniforms, but more often look silly. Nobody in the real world, apart from royalty, wears hats. No sane person would wear high heels on a long flight.

I hated my school uniforms for the way they encouraged both uniformity of appearance and uniformity of outlook. Do not imagine that the pleated gymslips of soft-porn fantasies really were sexy. They made us look like a boiled pudding, even pretty girls, as was the intention, and gave whippet-thin schoolgirls' breasts the look of matronly middle-age.

Nothing could be nastier than heavy denier so-called "flesh coloured" hosiery that replaced the scintillating black legs of the past. We might as well have been nuns, though we were spotty and randy and thought of nothing but boys, condemned in their turn to wear little boys' outfits to school no matter how tall they were, and how deep their voices. How strange that grown men today have reverted to that look. What can it mean?

They tried infantilising us, but nature had other ideas. Nothing could stop us wearing coloured underpants and bright red toenail polish, though girls with pierced ears were persecuted for wearing sleepers in them. Old women teachers who policed such policies, were plainly - and I use the word advisedly - crazy.

Today schoolgirls wear uniform kilts down to their ankles in sly sabotage; they embrace the hideousness in order to emerge like the swan that was an ugly duckling in a children's story that explains the crucial importance of an elegant neck. And so to burqas, the ultimate school uniform.

What delightful images emerged this week from the capture of Manbij, the Syrian market town that had been under the thumb of Isis for two years. Like naughty teenage schoolgirls the women rushed to abandon their burqas, those stifling but modest black tents, and set fire to them. Only a month ago they would have been publicly executed for their daring. Any day now they could be dancing, a serious sin in the Isis rule book, but for the time being they're puffing on cigarettes defiantly. A month ago that would have meant having their hands chopped off. Laughter, I imagine, was a capital offence.

I'd ululate with joy too if I shed the dark uniform of Isis. The least extremist men should do is wear the burqa themselves, and see how they like it.

The town's men, too, couldn't wait to shave the manly whiskers that were a compulsory uniform during the occupation. I can imagine how uncomfortable a face full of hair would be in the heat, and what a relief to shave. It's one thing to choose face fungus, the vogue among boutique brewers and rugby players, but quite another to have it forced upon you.

We are individuals, all of us, no matter what language we speak, not battery hens with a shared mindset. We mark that with our choices of everything in life, what to wear, what to eat, who to befriend, the books we read, the shoes we wear, and whether or not to observe a religion.

I lived through compulsory religion as a young person, with church twice on Sundays. I know, as do the people of Manbji, that if you want to put people off religion nothing works better than soaking them in it.

- Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author