The Japanese are some of the most fashion-conscious dressers in the world. They spend large amounts of their discretionary income on clothes, have a strong preference for designer-made outfits, and take great care in coordinating their dress and accessories. Beneath all this stylishness, however, some social scientists see another, more disturbing, pattern in their dress: uniformity.
On any given day in a Japanese city, for example, one can see hordes of salarymen in subdued blue or gray suits jammed into the subway and pairs of identically dressed young women balancing precariously on towering platform shoes, while on warm, summer-festival nights, young couples in matching yukata strolling along riverbanks are a common sight.
On his very first day in Japan, Brian McVeigh, the author of "Wearing Ideology," felt as if "everybody, it seemed, was uniformed." Armed with the hypersensitized antennae of the outsider, he was particularly impressed by the number of uniformed junior and senior high school students.