Starting with a personal crisis in culinary school, this essay explores how uniforms in India evolved from colonial tools of control into modern security theatre. It examines why we equate compliance with competence and how dressing ourselves becomes an act of resistance.
I spent three years wearing a chef coat before I realised I had very little interest in becoming a chef. For most of that time, there was no evidence that I didn't belong there. I was doing the same course as everyone else, learning the same things, turning up to the same practicals, and wearing the same uniform. A chef coat is supposed to make you look badass. It is the visual shorthand for "I handle hot pans, I take zero shit, and I have achieved inner peace through repetitive chopping."
Except, halfway through my degree, I arrived at an inconvenient realisation:
I did not, in fact, want to spend the rest of my youth sweating over a prep station for sixteen hours a day.
It was strange to discover this while wearing an outfit designed to make your professional identity unmistakable. The more certain I became that I didn't want to be a chef, the more conspicuous the coat felt. What had once looked like a badge of honour and belonging began to feel like a costume I had been handed for a part I decided I didn't want to play. Everyone around me seemed to be moving towards the same horizon, dreaming of the Michelin circuit while I was sitting at the back of the class drafting essays on my laptop about why I like weddings.
And nobody was excluding me, everyone around me seemed to fit effortlessly into the world we had been trained for, while I had somehow become an anomaly. In a batch of fewer than eighty people, looking exactly like everyone else while imagining a completely different life made the difference embarrassingly visible.
The entire point of a uniform is to create uniformity — to make eighty individuals look like one cohort; one profession; one collective future. Instead, I became conscious of the distance between the person I was dressed as and the person I wanted to become.
The only thing that gave me any respite were our ‘formal days’. Twice a week, we were supposed to dress like “business professionals”. I treated this allowance like a constitutional right. I'd stay up the night before planning outfits for a 9.00am lecture on Customer Relationship Management, and I was doing better at those outfits than I was at culinary school.
At the time, I dismissed it as me being a dramatic ‘fashion girlie’, as they say. Obviously, it was less frivolous than that — those outfits were my sanity tax. Three days a week, I was required to put on an identity that was borrowed; twice a week, I got to decide what I looked like before anyone else did.
The clothes themselves hadn't changed anything about where I was, but for those two days, I no longer felt like I was inhabiting an institution's idea of who I was supposed to be.
It's funny how uniforms are used to signal our belonging — to a school, a profession, an institution, a system. We surrender a little bit of our individuality in exchange for the reassurance of being part of something larger. Sometimes, the thing designed to make you feel like you belong can become the very thing that makes you feel out of place.
We’re talking about uniforms as if they’re purely functional garments — a practical necessity that keeps a kitchen hygienic, identifies a police officer on a crowded street, or helps you spot a nurse in an ER — which makes sense until you start looking at what they actually communicate. The moment you place a person inside a particular garment, you are also placing them within a particular institution, hierarchy, and set of expectations.
In Britain, where the modern school uniform took shape, the blazer, crest and house tie became markers of institutional identity and, particularly within private schools: prestige. Wearing one meant carrying a little piece of the institution with you, signalling that you belonged to a particular community.
India inherited this institutional language under British rule, but within a very different relationship to power. Here, uniforms became tied to systems of categorisation, regulation and control.
When the British left in 1947, that instinct for institutional discipline did not disappear. Much of that machinery remained embedded in the institutions we built afterwards, shaping a relationship with uniforms that feels more concerned with discipline than identity.
From our earliest school years, the uniform comes with a weirdly forensic attention to the body. Is your shirt tucked in? Are your socks pulled up? Is your hair the right length? Are those earrings allowed? Did someone forget to polish their shoes?
Long before most of us are introduced to critical thinking, creative writing or even the basic joys of figuring out what we're good at, we learn that there is an appropriate way to stand, to look and, apparently, an appropriate length of skirt.
It’s called cosmetic discipline: the idea that if the outside looks sufficiently organised, the institution must be doing its job. A polished shoe tells us very little about whether a child is learning, and a perfect haircut tells us nothing about whether they're being encouraged to think independently, yet schools can spend an extraordinary amount of energy policing both. The uniform therefore becomes one of our earliest lessons in institutional life, teaching us that looking compliant is part of learning how to belong.
That conformity comes with a familiar, supposedly noble justification: "Uniforms are the great equaliser." The logic is straightforward enough:
If every child is dressed the same, socio-economic differences become less visible and everyone apparently starts from the same place. It’s a comforting idea, but anyone from an Indian school knows how quickly that illusion falls apart.
Funnily enough, kids make sharp sociologists; they don't need a giant logo on a t-shirt to recognise wealth or privilege. The uniform doesn't level the playing field so much as disguise a very visible part of inequality. It limits individual expression while doing little to bridge the economic differences that exist outside the school gates. The result is a superficial performance of equality that holds together neatly till you look closer.
The contradiction becomes particularly stark when this obsession with physical compliance follows students into some of the most consequential moments of their lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way national entrance examinations are conducted in India today. Before sitting for competitive tests that can determine the trajectory of their adult lives, students are subjected to an extraordinary level of scrutiny. Candidates are forced into slippers, banned from closed shoes, forbidden from wearing full sleeves, and stripped of nose rings, earrings, or religious threads before entering the examination hall.
They are subjected to invasive physical checks at every threshold in the name of “maintaining integrity”. And then the actual question paper gets leaked on Telegram behind closed doors.
You cannot make this shit up. An institution will pull out a pair of scissors at the gate to cut the sleeves off an eighteen-year-old girl’s kurti to prove she isn't hiding a cheat sheet up her sleeve, while the entire system leaks digitally from the top down through officials, compromised centres, and private messaging channels.
This is where uniforms become political, raising a larger question about who gets to regulate students’ bodies in the name of order, security, and fairness.
The system demands physical compliance and submission from young candidates, but when it is time for the institution to keep its side of the bargain — to provide basic operational competence, security and a fair playing field — it gives up and asks millions of exhausted students to pack up and prepare for a re-test.
For years, young Indians are taught that discipline and conformity are the price of a secure future. The uniform is where that lesson begins, long before we are old enough to question it.
This fixation on visual compliance does not disappear after school. It follows people into adulthood, shaping the way society decides what looks credible, respectable and professional.
A doctor's coat, a military uniform, an airline pilot's epaulettes, a lawyer's black suit or even a corporate ID card instantly communicate that an established institution has recognised your role. Congratulations, you have a “real job”.
When you step away from those predetermined pathways — writing, independent art, research, or building a career on your own terms — that recognition becomes harder to access. Without a visible marker of where you belong, people often struggle to understand your work.
Leaving culinary school meant giving up the automatic credibility of the chef coat. I was moving away from a path where my future could be explained with a single look at what I was wearing into one where I need to constantly explain what I’m building and why it matters.
This feeling extends beyond the classroom. It reflects a larger uncertainty about the institutions we are expected to belong to.
For many young people today, the promise that following a prescribed path will guarantee stability feels uncertain. Choosing a different career, rejecting traditional markers of success, or building something independently is not always a rejection of structure itself; sometimes, it is an attempt to create one’s own.
In retrospect, the chef coat represented an identity that had been assigned to me by an institution while my own outfits allowed me to construct one for myself. They were a small act of agency — a reminder that even within a system built around making everyone look the same, I still had ownership over how I presented myself.
Uniforms themselves aren't inherently evil. Surgeons need scrubs, firefighters need protective gear, and chefs need double-breasted coats designed for the realities of their work. The issue isn’t the fabric but the belief that a uniform can define a person's worth. Without them, we’re pushed to define ourselves beyond the roles assigned to us.
And perhaps that's exactly how it should be; after all, credibility is earned, not tailor-made.
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