"If you think there is no difference between Catholic school uniformity and corporate standards of fashion, drive by a Catholic school when all the kids are standing around in their uniforms waiting for the bus. It's the most soul-crushing sight you'll see."
Oh, I don't know. The sight of most schools is pretty soul-crushing to me; the uniforms are minor compared.
I liked school uniforms in Romania. There were derived from, I think, Czarist school uniforms, which purportedly Lenin liked. The girls wore black and white gingham dresses with frilly black aprons (on regular days) or frilly white aprons (on special days). The cool thing was to become a pioneer because then you got to wear a red scarf with this outfit. Very dramatic! Uniforms spared me the bother of figuring out what to wear and seemed to be a kind of protection. In Paris, where I went next to school, we wore smocks; but we could choose our own colors and patterns. That was o.k. too. In the US, until the late sixties, there were no uniforms, but there were dress codes, which I hated the most.
As a grown up I didn't mind uniforms: lab coat, state park ranger uniform, security guard uniform -- but I didn't like them either. Maybe because they were all male uniforms ...
Anecdotes, I know. Neither here nor there. Basically, I think the kids should get to decide whether they want to wear them or not.
Joanna