FROM THE ARCHIVES:Kevin Myers regretted a missed opportunity in the school uniforms business in this Irishman's Diary from 20 years ago today. – JOE JOYCE
ONE CAN always look back on failures in one’s life; my greatest touches upon the matter of my failing to become a supplier of uniforms to girls attending Loreto convents.
Now this was a serious oversight because the rules of the market place, as understood by Adam Smith and other sayers and seers of the free enterprise system, do not apply when it comes to the Loreto Order. Those simple matters of supply and demand, of the relationship between price and turnover, are irrelevant abstractions in the world according to Loreto.
Girls attending Loreto – they have not yet opened their doors to boys – are obliged to wear the school uniform. Some might say that school uniforms are an anachronism, a mere flaunting of class. But there is nothing mere about it. It is the essence of the matter.
Now there are the obvious items of apparel for the young ladies; tunics and blouses and things. Possibly there are rules about knickers and other invisible articles but these are not matters a gentlemen, especially an unmarried gentlemen, need inquire into. But the one thing about these various bits of clothing is that they are worn at school.
But the Loreto nuns do not stop there. There is one further item which they insist that their pupils possess, though it is not clothing which is likely to be worn at school for more than a few seconds. It is a gabardine raincoat.
Now I should have thought that it was unnecessary for the Loreto Order to specify a particular kind of raincoat: that if they wanted the girls to appear to have some kind of uniformity in the rain they should simply tell them to wear something waterproof and bottlegreen coloured.
But no, they insist that a Loreto girl must possess a bottlegreen gabardine raincoat of a specific type and manufacture; it is a prerequisite to attending a Loreto school. The cost of this gabardine raincoat is £80.
Now it could well be that this Indian summer will last into the spring, and that the young ladies of Loreto will never need to wear their gabardine raincoats; which is just as well, because unlike the bottlegreen anoraks the girls could get for far less than £80, their gabardines are not waterproof. They are not intended to be. They are intended to be something else entirely; they are intended to be a declaration that the wearer is a Loreto girl whose parents can afford to pay £80 on a coat which the girl might grow out of in a year.
Or can they? Merely because a girl goes to Loreto does not mean her parents are rich. It could well mean that they are anxious to give their daughter – or heaven help them, daughters – a good education. That undoubtedly is what the Loreto nuns provide. So why on earth should the possession of a ludicrously expensive and largely useless piece of clothing be a stipulation for acquiring this education?
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