A close friend of mine is serving in the 1st Infantry Division. He’s currently deployed to Afghanistan.

Naturally, before he left, his brother, myself, and another friend wanted to drop in and visit him. So, we spent most of the weekend in Austin, Texas (he was stationed at Ft. Hood), making sure that we squeezed every last bit of enjoyment out of this weekend.

Now, it’s important to note that while my friend is serving his nation, he isn’t Mr. Adherence to Social Norms. He has big tattoos. He likes bar fights. When we worked at a restaurant together, he maintained that working in the service industry will inevitably turn you into a phony.

Imagine my surprise, then, when, sitting in his barracks room at Ft. Hood after a weekend of partying, he began to deliver to us a lesson in the proper placement of the patch that represents his unit. Each soldier, he explained, wears on his left sleeve the patch of the unit in which he is currently serving. After deploying to a combat area, the soldier may then wear his unit patch on his right arm.

As he had not yet been deployed, my friend had only his Big Red 1 patch on his left sleeve. His brother suggested putting the patch on his right arm to see how it looked. (The patches are all Velcro on his uniform, so it’s about a two second procedure.) My friend refused with a zeal I didn’t expect. He said, “Good men have died who didn’t get to do that. There’s no chance I’ll do that.”

The lesson here for employers is that aspects of uniforms that represent more than an arbitrary decision from on high that employees must dress a certain way will lead to employees who are more willing to wear their uniforms correctly. I don’t doubt that the nature of service in the Army contributed to my friend’s passion for proper wear of the uniform. But don’t think that civilian employers need to create a paramilitary environment to create uniforms with meaning. In fact, they don’t even need to create the meaning themselves.

To bring it back to my previous post, meaning is one of the parts of Tokyo Joe’s uniform code that is so appealing to me. In this case, employees who are wearing piercings or tattoos that often have a significant meaning to them are allowed to show them instead of being forced to hide them. In Joe’s uniform, they’re being allowed to share with others a meaning they have created .

The Army creates the meaning of the uniform and expects soldiers to understand this and take pride in the message transmitted as a result of this meaning. Tokyo Joe’s allows employees to create their own meaning and share that with people. In both cases, you can find young people who normally resist fashion requirements wearing their uniforms correctly.