Edel Coffey: There's a lot to be said for the uniform
28/01/2022
As a young journalist, I was lucky enough to meet and interview the writer Josephine Hart, best known for her classic novel, Damage. When I met her, she was wearing a navy cardigan and skirt, and a white shirt with a small black ribbon tied in a bow at her neck. It was an understated, respectable and perfectly functional outfit and when I mentioned how much I liked it, she explained to me that she always wore the same thing. It was her ‘uniform’. She was a naturally glamorous woman and didn’t have to do much to look phenomenal. Still, the Mullingar native could have bought and worn as many couture outfits as she liked – she was after all Lady Saatchi, married to the advertising magnate Maurice Saatchi – but she often opted for her uniform, something simple and usually in black or white.
I’ve always been a fan of fashion but over the years I have come to appreciate the idea of having a uniform to rely on for everyday life. I always thought I loved fashion and clothes too much to be the kind of person who wears a uniform but I accidentally discovered the joys of wearing a variation of the same thing every day during the pandemic. But even though life has now returned to a sort of normal, I have kept my uniform and I don’t think I’m ever going back to the days where I spent mornings wondering what to wear, wasting valuable time and mental energy deciding on an outfit. I used to use up a lot of time wondering what to wear on any ordinary day. As a woman, not having to worry about what you’re going to wear every day saves a lot of time and mental energy. If you’re prevaricating in front of a wardrobe, you’re using up a lot of your decision-making power before you’ve even left the house. And some scientists believe the more decisions you have to make, the less brain power you have to make those decisions. (Have you ever come home from work and not been able to decide what to have for dinner? That’s decision fatigue. The struggle is real.) My uniform is not as chic as Lady Saatchi’s were, consisting as they do of a t-shirt, jeans and blazer, but it’s as quick and easy to get dressed in the morning now as it is to throw on a tracksuit, and the outfit is functional, with the added bonus of being able to take me everywhere I want to go from the school gates in the morning to a restaurant lunch to a wine bar in the evening (if I’m lucky).
