When I was a kid, I watched Star Trek and listened to Dr. McCoy complain about how much the dress uniform hurt (though the Vulcan greeting hurt worse!).  There’s truth in that though.  I never liked wearing the Class A/Class B uniform.  The Class A uniform is the suit type uniform, with jacket, pants/skirt, and blouse.  The Class B is minus the jacket, and depending on what you’re doing in, minus the medals, or not.

For the women, we had a very form fitting light green shirt that could be worn either tucked in or not (I had a question on the last post about this).  But I’m not really sure about the reason, and the regulation covering it doesn’t give any guidance.  The shirt of the time I was in was clearly made to be worn untucked, so it may have been a change to help women with fit problems.  The shirt was made to fit a woman with an hourglass figure.  I could buy it off the rack and wear it without making alterations, but other women had to make a lot of alterations to get a proper fit.

But I also always wore it untucked.  One of the problems with being an hourglass is that it’s really hard to get waistbands that fit, and the sizing of the uniform pants was cut too small.  I always felt like it was cutting off circulation, and yet, it I went one size up, everything else was way too big — and the waist was still too tight.  So I endured the hour or so of inspection and overlayed the shirt to cover up the fact I couldn’t get the fit of the pants right.  I sometimes looked at the maternity pants and wished I could wear them because it had a panel of a stretchy material that was hidden by a much longer shirt.  The fit of that waistband was really frustrating.

Sometimes it made me wonder if everything was designed by men who didn’t really understand women’s bodies and tried to fit them like men!