Five people on their uniform fetish

Told by Five readers, 24 to 58 · As told to Val Okonkwo, Community writer · Published 4 September 2026

A uniform fetish is rarely about the fabric. Across five very different people, the pull came from what a uniform does: it confers authority, erases the individual, or carries a memory. Here are their own words.

We asked readers to tell us, in a few lines, what their uniform fetish is actually about for them. What came back was a reminder that one label can hide five completely different desires. Here are five of them, lightly edited, names changed.

Maya, 31

For me it is authority, pure and simple. A uniform says this person is competent, this person is in charge, this person knows exactly what they are doing. I find that genuinely magnetic. In the rest of my life I am the organised one, the capable one, the person everyone else looks to when something goes wrong, and there is something I cannot resist about the fantasy of being in the hands of someone even more in control than me. The specific uniform almost does not matter. It is the signal of steady, unbothered competence that gets me every time, and the sense that I could, for once, stop being the competent one myself.

Gerald, 58

Mine is honest to goodness nostalgia, and I have long since stopped being sheepish about it. It goes back to a particular time in my late teens, a particular person, a particular uniform, and the feeling attached to that memory simply fused with the look of it and never came apart. When I see it now I am not really seeing the present. I am eighteen again for a second. At my age I have made peace with the fact that a lot of desire is just old memory wearing new clothes.

Ash, 26

What does it for me is the erasure, which I know sounds strange. A uniform takes an individual and turns them into a type. The personal stuff drops away and what is left is the role. I find that transformation intoxicating, both to look at and to wear. When I put one on I get to stop being all my anxious specifics and just be a clean, anonymous version of a person. There is a real freedom in disappearing into a role that was designed for anybody.

Corinne, 44

I am the one wearing it, not watching it, and that is the key for me. Putting on a uniform changes my posture before it changes anything else. I stand differently. I feel borrowed authority settle onto my shoulders, and I become, for the evening, someone more assured than I usually let myself be. It is a costume in the truest sense, the kind that lets a different part of you come forward. My partner enjoys the result, but honestly I do it at least half for me.

Dev, 24

Everyone assumes uniform means something glamorous. Mine is the opposite. It is workwear. Overalls, hi-vis, the utility stuff. The plainer and more functional, the better. I think it is the ordinariness that gets me, the sense of someone dressed to actually do a job, unfussy and practical. Glamour does nothing for me. A person in well-worn work gear, completely unbothered about how they look, is the whole thing. I spent ages thinking this was too mundane to even count as a fetish, and part of why I am answering this at all is that I would have loved to read someone say it out loud when I was younger.

Five people, five almost unrelated reasons, one word connecting them. That is the thing about fetishes generally. The label is the smallest part, and underneath it everyone is running their own private film.

If one of these sounded like you, the useful thing to know is that whichever version you have, there are others who have exactly the same one. It is easier than it has ever been to find the people whose private film matches yours, and it beats assuming you are the only one by a mile.