UNIFORMA
Uniformity of clothing in various work environments, such as business, retail, and hospitality, signifies a deeper interest in aestheticizing corporate culture. This project delves into the significance of modern uniforms in work cultures and explores their potential to instill occupational identity and pride, or alternatively, to exert coercive control over workers.
Fashioning Corporate Identity: Exploring the Significance of Work Uniforms
An aesthetic of standardization in work clothing has been widely interpreted as a technique to increase surveillance over workers' bodies. This section focuses on the use of uniforms to embody a technical rationality that works to create images of unity and authority. A discourse of uniformity in the workplace might emphasize the comfort and convenience of regulation clothing, but uniform wearing is primarily about creating personal and professional interpretations through clothing.
We sought to explore what occupational clothing means in corporate environments, particularly mechanical establishments, commercial enterprises, law offices, and educational institutions. The discussion considers the uniformity of business clothing and the standards of conformity it demands of wearers.
The business suit, for example, may not look like a uniform in the strict sense of the word, but it is more ambiguous than, for example, a military uniform. However, the standardization of clothing and the visual uniformity that business clothing represents, as well as the control and restriction it exerts on the wearer and the body, adhere to the characteristics of a uniform.
This collection specifically addresses how uniform visualizes and embodies what it means to be modern. We make a distinction between uniform and fashion, but we also take into account how uniformity of clothing has been incorporated into the grammar of fashion. The uniforms are also “designed to suit the variety of purposes for which they are intended.”
Cultural and sartorial historians have defined fashion as a provisional means of stabilizing identity, a practice primarily concerned with pleasure and self-expression. In contrast, the modern uniform was designed not for pleasure, but for utility. No matter how different the dress, fashion and uniform systems are, they both promote body discipline and transformation.
We sought to explore what occupational clothing means in corporate environments, particularly mechanical establishments, commercial enterprises, law offices, and educational institutions. The discussion considers the uniformity of business clothing and the standards of conformity it demands of wearers.
The business suit, for example, may not look like a uniform in the strict sense of the word, but it is more ambiguous than, for example, a military uniform. However, the standardization of clothing and the visual uniformity that business clothing represents, as well as the control and restriction it exerts on the wearer and the body, adhere to the characteristics of a uniform.
This collection specifically addresses how uniform visualizes and embodies what it means to be modern. We make a distinction between uniform and fashion, but we also take into account how uniformity of clothing has been incorporated into the grammar of fashion. The uniforms are also “designed to suit the variety of purposes for which they are intended.”
Cultural and sartorial historians have defined fashion as a provisional means of stabilizing identity, a practice primarily concerned with pleasure and self-expression. In contrast, the modern uniform was designed not for pleasure, but for utility. No matter how different the dress, fashion and uniform systems are, they both promote body discipline and transformation.
Exploring the Significance of Uniformity: A Study of History, Bodies, and Costume
Studying the uniform presents unique challenges and joys, not only because its meanings are elusive and multivalent, but also because the uniform always addresses the body and its alterations. In fact, the various transformations that uniforms undergo illustrate how the material and the discursive converge when the body is placed at the center of historical research. At first glance, this collection might be about uniforms, but it is primarily concerned with examining the significance of costume uniformity in history and body modifications.