The Uniform of the Different
Looking the Same Is Not the Same as Being Equal
The discussion began with the color of a sneaker, but it was never really about the sneaker. When a school determines what its students should wear, it is doing more than regulating appearance. It is organizing signals, defining an institutional space, producing belonging, and attempting to contain certain forms of visual competition. A school uniform carries discipline, identity, recognition, safety, and, in many cases, the promise of reducing discrimination based on clothing.
That promise is not unreasonable. In an environment without any shared dress code, brands, styles, frequency of replacement, condition of garments, and accessories can make economic differences immediately visible. Children and adolescents do not always know how to perceive those differences without turning them into comparison, embarrassment, exclusion, or hierarchy. A uniform reduces part of that exposure by establishing a common surface. But a common surface does not create equal conditions.
Two students may wear the same shirt while inhabiting entirely different realities. One may own several new sets, expensive shoes, a branded backpack, and arrive by private transport. Another may repeat the same few garments, depend on donations, wear visibly worn footwear, and lack the domestic conditions needed to wash and preserve the uniform easily. The clothing brings them visually closer, but it does not erase what preceded it, nor what continues beyond its reach.
This is why sameness is not equality. Sameness belongs to the realm of appearance, repetition, and standardized form. Equality belongs to the realm of condition, value, access, and opportunity. A uniform may make certain external features more similar without changing the deeper asymmetries beneath them. It may even create a reassuring image of equality, allowing the institution to manage what can be seen while remaining distant from what is structural.
Once clothing is standardized, difference does not disappear. It relocates.
The sneaker becomes significant. The backpack acquires symbolic weight. The phone, haircut, accessories, fabric quality, state of preservation, fit, and way of wearing the uniform become new markers of distinction. The narrower the permitted field, the more expressive each small deviation becomes. A folded sleeve, an unusual lace, a discreet pin, or a particular way of carrying the body may communicate more identity than an entire outfit would in a space without regulation.
This becomes especially visible in courses and professions where everyone is required to wear white. The color creates a coherent visual field, yet differences remain in cut, material, number of garments, combinations, and frequency of change. Those who own many sets can appear differently every day. Those who own only a few must repeat them. Chromatic standardization does not eliminate economic difference; it translates it into another visual language.
In many Japanese and South Korean schools, uniforms remain part of student life until the end of secondary education and operate as extensions of institutional identity. They indicate not only where a student studies, but also the conduct expected from someone representing that school. Hair, makeup, socks, coats, and accessories may also be regulated. The institution is not merely dressing the body; it is attempting to shape how that body appears in public.
Yet human beings rarely surrender completely to standardization. This is particularly true during adolescence, when the desire to belong and the need to become distinct intensify at the same time. The student wants to be recognized as part of the group without becoming interchangeable within it. Details are altered, limits are tested, meanings are displaced. The rule establishes the contour; identity searches for an opening.
Rebellion, however, can also become uniform.
In Japan during the 1990s, many young people dyed their hair in vivid colors as a way of breaking with more restrained visual codes. Blue, green, orange, and red could signal refusal, independence, or personal reinvention. But once the gesture spread, it became another collective vocabulary. Everyone wanted to look different and ended up drawing from the same repertoire of difference.
An old Brazilian advertisement built around the line “Nice shirt, Fernandinho” condensed this movement with unusual precision. First came contrast. Then recognition. After that came imitation. What had allowed one person to stand out became desirable to others and gradually turned into a new pattern. Successful singularity often carries within it the beginning of its own disappearance.
Denim performed the same operation on a global scale. No authority imposed it as a planetary dress code, yet people across countries, classes, ages, and cultures voluntarily adopted remarkably similar garments. Jeans became a kind of informal civil uniform. This reveals that uniformity does not depend only on coercion. Markets, imitation, practicality, aspiration, and shared references can produce convergence just as effectively.
Freedom of choice does not automatically generate diversity. It may simply offer multiple routes toward the same destination.
Formal uniforms are easy to identify because the rule is explicit. Invisible uniforms are more difficult to perceive. Executives converge around similar suits. Technology professionals adopt minimalist clothes. Artists, religious communities, urban groups, and digital subcultures develop recognizable codes. There may be no written regulation, yet there is a powerful expectation regarding how someone from that environment should look.
Clothing, in these cases, does more than communicate belonging to others. It also helps the wearer enter the role they are expected to perform. A military uniform, medical coat, judicial robe, team jersey, or work garment changes posture, expectation, and conduct. Clothing becomes a transitional device. It tells others which function is present and reminds the wearer which responsibilities have been assumed.
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This operation has practical value. Military and police uniforms make authority, hierarchy, and responsibility visible. Medical clothing supports hygiene, mobility, and rapid identification. Industrial garments protect against heat, chemicals, impact, contamination, or poor visibility. Sports uniforms distinguish teams and support performance. In hotels, restaurants, airlines, and stores, uniforms help customers identify workers and transform appearance into part of the service itself.
The problem begins when the function disappears but the demand remains. A rule may organize, protect, and facilitate collective life, yet it may also survive by inertia, turning visual conformity into a supposed measure of character. When an institution can no longer explain what a rule protects, communicates, or improves, discipline tends to harden into formalism.
Jacqueline Susann’s novel Yargo pushes this logic toward its limit. On the imagined planet, visual standardization is used to reduce feelings of inferiority, envy, and competition. By removing visible markers of difference, society attempts to prevent comparison from becoming conflict. The solution appears efficient, but it introduces a more disturbing question: how much difference can be suppressed in the name of preventing discrimination before diversity itself begins to disappear?
There is a decisive distinction between preventing human characteristics from being converted into hierarchy and preventing those characteristics from appearing at all. The first possibility requires social maturity. The second replaces coexistence with homogenization. Instead of learning how to live with difference without turning it into inferiority, the system eliminates the field in which difference could become visible.
Even then, the need for singularity would probably return somewhere else. It does not arise only from vanity or competition. It also comes from affection, authorship, memory, and presence. Families with limited resources often decorate cradles, strollers, and children’s clothes using whatever materials are available. They are not necessarily competing for status. They are transforming an ordinary object into something that carries care, attachment, and recognition.
The charms placed in the holes of Crocs reveal the same movement in a commercial form. A standardized, mass-produced shoe becomes a platform for personalization. The common object receives small marks of taste, humor, memory, identity, or belonging. Those who cannot replace the object can still transform it. Creativity does not remove material limitation, but it introduces authorship within it.
Industry has learned to monetize this impulse. It first produces millions of identical objects to reduce costs. It then sells accessories, custom finishes, special colors, limited editions, numbered series, and bespoke services to restore the sense of singularity that mass production removed.
Modern economies manufacture sameness and then sell difference back to us.
At one end, the difference may cost very little and take the form of a small decorative object. At the other, it may cost millions and appear as an exclusive car, rare watch, limited handbag, artwork, or item associated with a famous person. Value no longer resides only in what the object does. It also resides in what possession allows someone to communicate: this is mine, this says something about me, few people can occupy this exact symbolic position.
NFTs attempted to transport this logic into the digital environment. Since digital files can be copied endlessly, uniqueness was transferred to a record of ownership. The image remained reproducible, but the token promised authenticity, scarcity, and public recognition. Exclusivity no longer depended only on matter; it could be produced by a shared system of certification.
Banksy’s partially shredded artwork reveals another route to singularity. The act of destruction did not reduce the work’s value. It transformed the object into an unrepeatable event. The piece came to include not only image and authorship, but also a documented moment in art history. The market absorbed a gesture directed against it and converted the critique itself into rarity.
In such cases, value is only partly functional. It may also be emotional, social, cultural, historical, and speculative. An object may be valued for what it does, what it represents, what it communicates, and what someone expects another person might pay for it later. The more standardized material life becomes, the more symbolic value may be transferred to whatever appears to resist interchangeability.
Perhaps this is the deeper movement connecting all these situations. People need a certain degree of similarity in order to live collectively. Without common codes, institutions, roles, and shared signs, coordination becomes difficult. But people also need some degree of difference in order not to experience themselves as replaceable units within the collective.
We do not merely want to belong. We want to belong without disappearing.
This is why a uniform never uniformizes as completely as it appears to. It organizes the surface, reduces certain visible distinctions, communicates belonging, and defines roles. At the same time, it creates the background against which small singularities become more legible. It may reduce ostentation, but it does not eliminate inequality. It may support discipline, but it does not produce character. It may bring appearances closer, but it does not make trajectories equivalent.
The relevant question, therefore, is not whether uniforms should exist or whether every visual rule is authoritarian. The question is which differences need to be temporarily reduced so that a collective can function, and which spaces must remain open so that individuality can continue to breathe.
The color of a sneaker is not everything. But it is not nothing either. It is one of the places where a permanent human tension reappears: the need to share a common form without losing the possibility of saying, even through a small detail, that no one is merely one more identical unit.
A uniform does not erase difference. It decides which differences will be temporarily muted, which will remain visible, and where singularity will return.
If this essay shifted the way you see uniforms, equality, and difference, follow the next publications.
Portuguese version available on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/nexhowledumampo/p/o-uniforme-dos-diferentes-the-uniform?r=5tj4nj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
