Wartime recruiting drives encouraged a certain "glamour": "you'd look good in a uniform!" The well-creased pant, starched shirt, insignia-bedecked jacket, a cap at a jaunty angle…

In time, there followed generations where, for some, the idea of a uniform was rejected, whether a school uniform or military one - although, in truth, trends in clothing fashions have brought their own sense of the "uniform", blue jeans, t-shirt and ball cap among them. (In 1975, a decision of an English Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, considered whether an accused could be found guilty of wearing a "uniform" in a public place, contrary to a public order statute, and said that "the simple fact that a number of men deliberately adopted an identical article of attire justifies in my judgment the view that that article is uniform if it is adopted in such a way as to show that its adoption is for the purposes of showing association between the men in question".) I suppose by this view that the "Jets" and the "Sharks" of "West Side Story" each had their own "uniform", or that the same may be said of Bay Street blue-suited lawyers!

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