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Girls’ school uniforms

If there is one particular item which causes the most pain to the parents of any schoolgirl, it must be her school uniform. This garment must be kept clean and creased despite the dirt and the dust and the child’s play activities.

Sri Lanka being a tropical country, it has a humid heat which makes people - especially children with their higher rate of activity - perspire profusely. The sweat, combined with the all-pervasive dust and grit, creates a fine mud which turns the pristine white of the girls’ poplin uniforms into a dirty, grubby brown.

During the wet season, the dust and grit and dirt are ready-made into mud, which lies in wait, in potholes on the road and in slick sheets on playing fields, for white school uniforms to muddy.

Womenfolk's clothes

It is desperately hard for the parents to provide a clean uniform for their child to wear to school every day. This is especially true for poorer families, most of which have only two uniforms per child (one being worn at any given time and the other being washed). Some children have only one uniform which can only be washed during the weekend or on holidays.

The girls’ school uniform was created under the rule of the British in the elite English Language high schools. Faded photographs from the late 19th century show girls covered all over in European costume.

There was nothing uniform about their clothing which, except for the ubiquitous sailor suits, abounded in ruffles, flounces, frills, ribbons and lace.

The American author and satirist Samuel L Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - noticed the girls’ attire during his brief sojourn in Colombo. Waxing lyrical (in his ‘Following the equator’) about the ‘radiant panorama’ presented by the indigenous population in their native garb, he says that into this ‘dream of fairyland and paradise’, ‘a grating dissonance was injected’:

Tropical country

‘Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, 16 prim and pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed - dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an English or American village. Those clothes - oh, they were unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud. I looked at my womenfolk's clothes - just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures - and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them.’

Gradually these overflowing garments settled themselves down into more reasonable one-piece uniforms, some with ties and some without.

Hemlines grew shorter, rising from the ankle up to the knee and giving girls greater maneouverability.

Most uniforms are of white poplin.

They range from the fairly simple (eg. the school uniform of both Ladies’ College and of Devi Balika is a white, square-neck sleeveless dress) to the fairly complex collar-tie item of clothing used by Musaeus College, Bishop’s College, Visakha Vidyalaya and hence most girls’ educational institutions; with lots of pleats in the skirt, they are almost dirndls.

Intermediate between the two extremes are the uniforms of St Paul’s, Milagiriya and St Bridgets Convent, Colombo. The former does away with a tie, but has the school’s initials embroidered on the left pocket and with a somewhat ornate neck.

The St Bridget’s uniform is a white dress described as follows:

‘Pocket with the SBC monogram; Length: up to the back bend of the knee; Pleats: 4 box pleats all of equal size; Darts: 2 side darts only; Waist: 3 inches lower than the usual waist; Belt: Loosely with 6 loops - must be sewn at the two sides; House Badge - to be worn daily.’

The children must be most thankful that St Bridget’s only requires its scholars to wear the school tie at functions.

Unfortunately, most schoolgirls must wear a tie at all times, causing severe discomfort in what is (as has been noted above) a tropical country.

During the 1970s, the Kantha Kavaya (Women’s Circle) affiliated with the governing United Front, brought forward a proposal for mass producing girls’ school uniforms.

Their proposal called for a common factory-made uniform. The requirements of economy and ease of manufacture called for the simplest possible pattern and a collarless, square necked dress with minimum pleats and darts was decided upon.

School identity

This design also meshed well with the need to keep ironing down to the least possible. Furthermore, the need to keep costs low caused the adoption of grey (un-dyed) cloth instead of white dyed textiles, which meshed well with the non-white dress necessitated by considerations of convenience of washing. School identity was to be established by a badge of some sort.

The Minister of Trade and Cooperatives at the time was the late TB Ilangaratne. He was quite enthused with the idea. However, he recognised that there were a huge number of seamstresses who relied on sewing school uniforms for their livelihood, and he tried to find a balance between mass-production and stitching by individuals.

Unfortunately, this idea was never carried out.

Today the government provides the cloth necessary for one uniform for each child, and every 500 or so uniforms keeps one seamstress going.

It would certainly behove the state to introduce a grey cloth uniform to reduce the cost, both to itself and to the parents who sew more than one uniform per girl.

There is no doubt that the design of school uniforms needs to be changed to suit our climate, particularly as global warming is visibly making living conditions more difficult.

Definitely, the colonial tie should be discarded. So should the complicated patterns which make ironing so difficult and which aid the process of wedging dirt in inaccessible corners.

And as the number of seamstresses declines, perhaps it is time to begin mass-producing these uniforms, (perhaps using excess capacity) at our garment factories.

 

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