Conform to uniform?

Abstract

This dissertation investigates school uniforms as a system of signs whose function is to relay images about educational institutions and their members to the world at large. In semiotic terms, each of the four Maltese school uniforms reviewed constitutes the referent and its characteristic materials, colour and styling the signifiers that signal the thoughts or concepts to be discovered and defined by the study. Fashion design as applied to school uniforms is understood as a kind of visual language that operates according to its own rules or grammar to communicate meaning, including unintended meaning. The laws of colour harmony, as explicated by leading authorities in the field, are invoked as primary syntactic constituents of the sign system, whose semantic potential, or meaning, thus emerges from the way colours are selected and combined in the referent under review. The styling of uniforms also plays a part, in some instances an essential part. The actual meanings that emerge can be multifarious and open to different interpretations. The study explores how these different interpretations, in their tum, provoke diverging attitudes to school uniforms in general and specific uniforms in particular. It reviews how, once school uniforms are perceived to be a badge of class privilege, they can become an instrument for neutralising it and how they can alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously, project conservative and progressive values and aspirations. It also attempts to relate the debate about the political correctness of school uniform policies to opposing visions of an ideal community life.