IS THERE anybody who doesn’t remember their first school uniform? I remember it to this day. For sartorial excitement only the fairy dress that my mother made for my sixth birthday, and which I wore while riding furiously around the neighbourhood on a boy’s bicycle, beat it.

Of course, I grew up in South Africa, and the colonies always took these things seriously. When I first wore the deep-blue cotton dress of Rustenburg Girls’ School, had my very own soft Panama hat with a band in the school colours and a blazer with the school badge on the pocket, I felt as if I’d joined psychological hands with an exciting sisterhood — the world of Mallory Towers and the Famous Five, of funny nicknames and wild scrapes — and that midnight feasts were surely just around the corner.

Uniforms were a vital part of the thrill, but they also tied one in to the ethos of the school. They gave one a sense of belonging to the school community, of it being a special place. It was a symbol that one was joining a world of shared values, loyalties, hopes and dreams.

But there are other, more important, issues here. Although I went to a private school, fees were low, so there were the children of rag-trade tycoons and eminent brain surgeons sitting beside the daughters of low-ranking clerks and bank officials. The shared uniform helped to do away with material rank and status. When my daughter went to an infinitely more renowned school (St Paul’s Girls) and there was no uniform, I still remember the difficulty of kitting her out. She had just turned 13 — grown out of the sweet little-girl clothes that pleased her mother, yet not yet old enough to dress like a grown-up.

We trawled Kensington High Street for something in between. I can’t remember what we came up with, but I do remember the angst.

Clothes became an issue. They mattered in ways that weren’t always attractive. Clothes spoke of income, social status, fashion know-how, interests. There were the tarty girls. The swots. The swanky girls. The scruffs. They drew them into cliques. But each day a decision had to be made about what to wear. My daughter was fairly immune to the pressures of funky trainers, designer jackets and which sort of trouser was this year’s “in” shape, but what a relief it would have been to have had a formalised kit to don each day. “You could,” as a young friend who went to a fashionable girls’ school which had a uniform, put it, “just relax into it. It took all the anxiety away.”

Those who claim that school uniforms deaden the creative sartorial impulse have clearly never visited some of our modern classrooms. Teenagers today seem to love the challenge. They take the kit — the skirt, the tie, the socks — and they tweak them all. There is the special way they knot the tie, the way they sport the socks (if they are knee-high they roll them down, if ankle-length are on the menu they buy them knee-high), if black lace-up shoes are decreed they buy Doc Martens, and so on.

On another more serious note, research in the US showed that when mandatory uniforms were introduced into the Long Beach, California, school district, vandalism and violence fell by a significant degree. Uniforms seem to work. They bind together into a sense of community, of belonging and of responsibility — all particularly important in the more loosely bonded communities of urban day schools.

One parent whose children transferred from a non-uniform-wearing school to one where uniforms were obligatory was surprised to discover that “it changed my relationship as a parent with the school, something I never expected. When children have to wear uniform, we parents have to buy it, name it and make sure that they are wearing it correctly. If we don’t, our children will get into trouble for our failure — something that most parents are keen to avoid. For the first time the school was requiring something of me, beyond the duty to get them to the building on time. It meant that I, as well as my children, had to abide by their rules. Before that I had been agnostic about uniforms, observing that in French schools they seemed to have no need for them. But our schools are ill-disciplined and a uniform definitely helps.”

But perhaps the real antagonism to uniforms (which undoubtedly exists) has deeper roots. My husband put his finger on it, I think: “There’s something very, very sexy about school uniforms,” he said. “And I don’t mean the boys’ ones.” This perhaps accounts for the near-hysteria that the subject often arouses. Too dangerous. Too subversive. Can’t let such sexy gear into mixed schools, let alone have them tempting the teachers.

It is tapping into that sexuality that has seen most of the great designers (Karl Lagerfeld, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana) playing with the components that make up the uniform. They take the tie, the blazer, the pleated skirts and trousers, and play with sexual ambiguity. Every porn site on the web, I am reliably informed, is awash with chat of school uniforms, and certainly a brief check on the internet brought up dozens of sites offering adult-sized school uniforms for sale. The “Mallory Towers Look” for adults is all the rage, says the shopping website OffTheRails. “Let the naughty girl from behind the bike sheds come back for a while.”

So perhaps we should revisit the design of the uniforms themselves. Get the kids wearing something hip, cool but entirely unisex. Something much more like the gear that Swat teams don — brilliant black jumpsuits that look really cool but don’t raise the blood pressure.

Get Karl (on second thoughts, perhaps not — he’d be unable to resist having a lot of subversive fun), get Ralph, get Giorgio, get somebody to do something. Most parents, I feel sure, will do nothing but breathe one huge sigh of relief.

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