What Not To Wear

So . . . today I'm thinking about choice.  Why?  Because not enough choice is seen as a problem, and so is too much choice.  For the former, think of debates about school uniforms.  For the latter, visit your grocery store's cheese aisle (or aisles - I find that most groceries have both a "fancy cheese" and a "commoner cheese" section), or just watch this.  But as difficult as managing food shopping can be with its plethora of choices, we would be very upset if our selection was limited.

Now, why did this topic come up today? Because of a comment made by flamboyantly diminuitive yet currently-mostly-irrelevant rock musician Prince (don't get me wrong - I like Prince, but haven't heard any of his music in the past decade or so; maybe that makes me irrelevant instead of him, but his influence has certainly diminished).  In a rare interview, rare perhaps because of comments like this, the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince said:

 "It's fun being in Islamic countries, to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that."

When the interviewer suggested that perhaps not everyone was happy with that, he basically said (in different words) that there will always be negative nellies, and you can't go by them.  Now, besides being a very ignorant comment (in that I doubt that Prince has had much contact with a representative sample of women who live in "Islamist" countries, and therefore is making his statement from a position of ignorance), it does provoke thought.

We in the west cling to our primary notion of free choice.  We define our nations as democracies, of which choice is a fundamental element.  The idea of forcing everyone (or all women, though that is a different issue) to dress uniformly is repellent to us.  Of course, we do have limits on our freedom, but they are intended to protect others from potentially harmful actions and effects (again, how we define "harmful actions and effects" is a different topic).  When the idea of uniforms for public school students is floated every few years, it is shot down because people have the right to express their individuality through their clothing.

But is that really an important right (well, it certainly seems important to Prince, which adds to the perplexing nature of his comment)?  Surely we can express our individuality in other ways, such as creative output, words, thoughts, deeds, opinions, and so on.  Seth Brundle in the The Fly wore the same thing every day so that he would not have to waste time deciding what to wear (I have a professional acquaintance that I always see wearing the same blue shirt; I only see him a couple of days a year, but I have to wonder if he subscribes to the same philosophy or just doesn't change his clothes).  Wouldn't wearing the same thing all the time force us to express ourselves in other ways?

This is not to say that I support burqas for all.  But consider this.  In most films and television shows set in the future (or alien species - the common element is that there is certain utopianism to it), everyone wears the same thing.  So our conception of an advanced society is that individual differences in dress are no longer an option.  Maybe we should re-think clinging to our right to wear acid-washed jeans, uggs and t-shirts with semi-clever slogans on them.