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champion.
    This exchange sounds so much like a quiz show on NPR or BBC Radio 4 that you’d almost expect Peter Sagal or Sandi Toksvig to interrupt them with a scripted joke and points to the winner.
    One who is in mufti is assumed to be at ease, but I have observed that English people often seem more at ease in their uniforms. This could be because absolutely no one does uniforms quite like the English, and it starts from early childhood. More than 90 percent of English children wear uniforms to school from age four, and there is broad agreement, crossing political party lines as well as class lines, that uniforms are a good idea. Reasons the English cite for their approval of uniforms include improving discipline and focus, and leveling class distinctions.
    Fewer than a quarter of American schools have uniform policies. Those that do are mostly private, or concentrated in largercities. But uniform policies have been on the rise, subject to heated debate in the United States since the late ’90s, when President Clinton suggested that American schools adopt uniforms to improve students’ concentration and cut down on conflict and competition over dress. Not everyone agrees that the problems in American schools can be solved so easily. An American social scientist, David Brunsma, who has studied the subject extensively, concluded that instituting uniform policies did not have any significant impact on student attendance or achievement, but was more “analogous to cleaning and brightly painting a deteriorating building.”
    Americans are less comfortable with the idea of uniforms than the English, and when objecting to them, they often invoke the ideal of defending individual rights to expression. If Americans are so into their individuality, the English might wonder, then why are they so often seen wearing similar jeans and T-shirts? Why does individuality so often translate to informality, even slovenliness? Why do American tourists, who must have heard how much it rains in England, never seem to carry proper raincoats but instead wear disposable plastic ponchos with flimsy hoods, resembling packs of used Kleenex wafting around London in their “fanny packs”? (The English find this locution hilarious because
fanny
is slang for
vagina
, which they astonishingly will also call a woman’s
front bottom
—though this at least sounds less confrontational than America’s
vajayjay
. Reference will also be made, even in medical settings, to the
back passage
, which makes the anus sound like the hallway of a gracious country house—at any rate, somewhere you would be welcome to enter only if you were quite friendly with the family. Incidentally, the English call fanny packs “bum bags,” but theyhardly ever wear them.) It would seem that Americans, having spent their childhoods in mufti, grow up to adopt a kind of uniform, at least when traveling. But growing up in uniform is certainly no guarantee of one’s future sartorial sense.
    Too much uniform-wearing can have consequences. Those who are indifferent to clothes end up confused about how to dress themselves in mufti. I have a friend whose husband borrows her socks without compunction—they’re the right color, so what’s the difference? Some English women, perhaps in reaction to being made to wear pinafores—or worse, plus fours—well into their adolescence, throw modesty to the wind when they at last gain control of their closets. At the first sign of spring, acres of sunburned cleavage and fake-baked legs are revealed, prompting fashion police to decree: “Legs
or
tits out—not both!” Even covering up can be fraught with peril. Although the weather often warrants wearing black opaque tights year-round, they do look out of place in July. And one fashion blogger quipped, while watching the royal wedding, that England ought to have a Ministry of Silly Hats. The peach potty seat Princess Beatrice perched on her head was surely an attention-grabber, but even a