Brand Names Hinder School Uniform Policies, Says UF Researcher

October 2, 1996

GAINESVILLE — Prestigious labels on brand-name clothes are so important to children that they jeopardize the success of much-touted school uniform policies, says a University of Florida researcher.

“Uniform policies face significant competition from brand-name clothes,” said David Jamison, a UF marketing researcher. “Students place so much emphasis on brand-name clothing, they are likely to resist the policy.”

School uniform policies have captured national attention lately, most visibly with support from the Clinton administration as an antidote to discipline problems and other learning distractions.

In a study at Niblack, a Lake City public school for sixth graders that implemented a voluntary uniform policy last year, Jamison found that brand names were very important to students. An average of 3.5 brand names were mentioned in 114 student essays about the new policy, with 91 percent of the youths saying brand names were a major reason why they wore what they wore, he said.

“A lot of the student essays were very much concerned with fitting in,” Jamison said. “There were statements like All boys wear Nikes’ or The only jeans I like to wear are Guess.’ There were other brand names I hadn’t heard of before I started reading these essays, but apparently they’re very popular with 12-year-olds.”

Not everyone, however, reported having a happy experience with these much sought-after products. “One young lady talked about not watching commercials for Arizona jeans because they made her sad that she couldn’t afford them,” he said.

Jamison was surprised to find greater support for the policy among females than males. “That seems to be counterintuitive because the image is that females are more concerned about clothing,” he said.

The policy enjoys more support among females, as well as minorities and the poor, as Jamison found, perhaps because it removes the pressure to conform. These groups liked not having to buy the right piece of clothing to fit in, he said.

But students in Jamison’s study who said they thought clothes were good indicators of coolness’ and status markers were likely to reject the idea of uniforms, he said.

Jamison does not believe voluntary policies have much chance of success with students as young as 11 and 12 years old. They seem to attach certain in crowd’ qualities to brand-name clothes, he said, and getting them to accept generic uniforms can be difficult.

“As teens become older, they begin to recognize more divisions in society and start choosing who it is they want to be associated with based on some personal characteristic or interest,” he said. “At age 12, there are very few distinctions to be made. Students are very concerned with being in’ or out.’ And in American culture, in’ is largely associated with material possessions.”

Even when uniforms are mandatory, students tend to use articles of clothing to distinguish themselves, Jamison said. One Los Angeles school required shoes instead of expensive brand-name sneakers, but found students continued to create social divisions by wearing pins on their shirts or stickers on their backpacks, he said.

Jamison believes some attempt needs to be made to understand why clothes have assumed such a central role. “If clothing has become such a problem in schools to the point where students can’t concentrate on learning because they are looking at one anothers’ clothes or because violence is erupting over whether or not some people are wearing brand names, it’s important to ask why clothes are so important,” he said. “What function do they serve that students become so preoccupied with them that they disrupt the classroom and jeopardize education?”