Living Information

JEANNE MOOS, CNN Correspondent: They wear it to open our doors. To guard our shores. To clean our floors. Let's hear it for the uniform. Maybe you've had to wear one.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was a campfire girl.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was a car hop, my very first job as a teenager.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The only kind of uniform I ever wore was a habit.

MOOS: The uniform rules from nuns to inmates, from those who fight fires to those who cook over them, and now it's being celebrated at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology.

VALERIE STEELE, Curator, Fashion Institute of Technology: Well, it interests me that some uniforms are uniforms of power, and others are uniforms of service.

MOOS: The diner waitress uniform has an authentic food stain to prove its service. These McDonald's uniforms were designed by Stan Herman in the ’70s. Uniforms in general are not as distinctive as they used to be?

STAN HERMAN, Uniform Designer: No, they're more like clothes.

MOOS: Herman's designs range from the current FedEx uniform to these 1974 TWA outfits. Back then, big names like Valentino and Halston designed for airlines.

HERMAN: It was like a badge of honor.

MOOS: In the days when flight attendants were called stewardesses, they even wore hats.

HERMAN: A hat gives you a chance to really give a uniform a look, but this is again not a hat country because we have too many hairdressers out there.

MOOS: Herman did get to do a hat for the new uniform worn by Amtrak conductors on the high-speed Acela. Herman's latest uniform is for the country's newest, hippest airline, JetBlue. Dots on some ties coordinate nicely with dots on some tails.
In hospitals, hemlines count. Residents wear short jackets till they graduate to the long ones worn by doctors. Hat maker Gretchen Fenston reminisced about her school uniform.

GRETCHEN FENSTON, Hat Maker: I remember the last day of school, we all ripped our skirts up.

MOOS: Even at the opening of the uniform exhibit, folks in uniform were working. Do you like your uniform?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.

MOOS: You don't?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, I don't like. I'd like something like that in a darker color, without the belt.

MOOS: You don't like the belt?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. Because I look like a sausage tied down the middle.

MOOS: Some uniforms hide the form. Sister Dorothy Ann is still a nun, but she got out of the habit almost 20 years ago.

SISTER DOROTHY ANN: You were supposed to pray as you put it on.

MOOS: Now that's a uniform that's habitforming. Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.

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