It is surprising that in this age of information herve leger clothing technology the writer is so outdated. The dress of women officers in the armed forces depends on the nature of their work. Women doctors wear sari and nurses shalwar-qameez as they have to work inside the hospital and are not required to be dressed in trousers and boots. But when they are sent on field duty, they are dressed in ‘fatigues’. Women doctors also wear peaked cap or beret even when they are wearing sari but only when outside their office/clinic.
Dress for women officers of other branches is trousers, bush shirt and oxford shoes. They either wear beret, peaked cap or side cap like male officers. While in the field, women officers are dressed like soldiers with ankle-high boots (DMS) and wear steel helmet.
They also attend morning PT, evening games and do foot drill herve leger white as per routine programme of their units. They are also trained and carry out live firing practice of small arms.
Similarly, in Pakistan Air Force we have now women fighter pilots and they wear the same flying suit as worn by their male colleagues. To keep them physically fit, women officers undergo rough and tough training both in their respective academies and in their units. Many of them are also trained in martial arts and sharp shooting: this again depends on the nature of their duties.
In other words, somewhere between the Thriller video and Kitty Brucknell humping that dartboard on X Factor at the weekend, Halloween became the get-out-of-slutty-free card - a chance for nice, normal girls with a tasteful line in Uniqlo cardigans to crank their assets up to their chin and blue herve leger embrace their slaggy alter egos for a night.
And what's wrong with that, really? Fancy dress has always been a chance for escapism - be it as a teary five-year-old inkeeper, or a hobbit in live action roleplay in a wood somewhere in Norfolk. If your heart's desire is to spend the night as a lascivious incarnation of Little Bo Peep, then by all means go for it. But watch where you put that crook, you'll have someone's eye out.
The problem, you see, isn't so much that Halloween offers the chance to dress slutty, but that recently it seems to have become the only option. It started small enough, with sexy she-devils, minxy vampires and the 'underwear with arbitrary animal ears' get-up so well illustrated in Mean Girls. But then (probably as all the fancy dress shops started selling out of red PVC), it spread. And lo, we were forced to sluttify every costume we could, just to keep up. Nuns, literary characters, historical figures - all now have to come with a side of knee-socks and pouting.
