Q.If choosing what to wear is an expression of one's freedom then how should we look at the following situations where there are restrictions on dress? (Mao suits in China; Sania Mirza fatwa; cricket white-dress rule; school uniforms.) Debate: Is the restriction on what to wear justified in all cases or only in some? Who has the authority to impose these constraints? Is the imposition excessive? What are the consequences of accepting the impositions?

Applying the harm principle to dress-code restrictions means asking, in each case, whether the restriction genuinely prevents harm to others, who has legitimate authority to impose it, and whether it is proportionate. …

Choosing what to wear is, in the language of the harm principle, mostly a self-regarding choice — it mainly affects the person making it — which is exactly why restrictions on it need a real justification rather than being accepted automatically.

Mao suits in Communist China were a state-imposed, uniform dress code justified in the name of equality. Judged by the harm principle, no genuine harm to others comes from people dressing differently, so a state compelling identical dress for everyone looks like an excessive constraint that goes well beyond what preventing harm requires — it enforces uniformity for its own sake rather than protecting anyone from harm, and it removes a real way individuals have of expressing themselves, without making society more meaningfully equal.

The fatwa against Sania Mirza is a different, and arguably clearer, case: a religious authority attempted to impose a dress code on an individual who had not accepted that authority's jurisdiction over her in the first place. Since she caused no demonstrable harm to anyone by her choice of clothing, this looks like an unjustified, excessive constraint — the cleric had no legitimate authority over her at all, only over those who had themselves chosen to be bound by that authority.

The cricket whites rule is a genuinely different kind of case, because it comes from within the sport's own governing body (the ICC), a rule that players and boards have themselves accepted as part of choosing to play the game at that level — much closer to a voluntary, self-regulating convention than an external constraint imposed on unwilling individuals, and its consequences are confined to the game itself.

School uniforms sit somewhere between these — imposed by a school on students who are minors, generally justified on grounds of reducing visible economic differences between students and maintaining order within the institution, a low-cost, non-harmful and widely accepted constraint most societies treat as reasonable, though it can still be debated at the margins (for example, whether it goes too far in restricting a student's individual expression). …