Perhaps expandable clothes are the answer to materialism

Aeronautical engineering graduate Ryan Yasin has just won the prestigious UK Dyson prize with his designs, which are expandable and waterproof, and fold down to practically nothing

Freedom of choice (and excess consumption) is bred into us from the moment we choose a male or female version of school uniform, and from then on, the clothes mountain starts to pile up (Getty)

Parents complain that children outgrow their clothes so fast it costs a fortune (£2,000 on average per year), going through seven different sizes in the space of their first two years. There could now be a solution: a new high-tech fabric that expands as the wearer grows.

Aeronautical engineering graduate Ryan Yasin has just won the prestigious UK Dyson prize with his designs, which are expandable and waterproof, and fold down to practically nothing. Could Ryan have developed a solution to another parental nightmare: the cost of school uniforms?

The current row about “genderless” school uniforms seems bizarre – if I’d been allowed to wear trousers at my girls’ school, life would have been much easier. Instead, pupils customised their skirts, rolling them up and down, to expose as much flesh as possible – and if you didn’t, you were tagged a prude. The tradition still lives on.

Why not issue all school students with one range of clothes, regardless of sex? I’ve never understood the demand for “choice” or the mantras about “allowing individual freedom of expression” when it’s applied to attending an establishment not that far removed from a prison, with set rules and regulations and a strict timetable.

To succeed you need to focus – not on skirt length, but facts and figures. As things stand, freedom of choice (and excess consumption) is bred into us from the moment we choose a male or female version of school uniform, and from then on, the clothes mountain starts to pile up.

Goaded by bullying from our peers, we end up dressing to please others and fit in, or we attempt to live our celebrity fantasies, blindly following so-called trends. The result is an environmental disaster, a mountain of waste. No fashion is eco-friendly, other than a basic uniform.

I bought a plain white T-shirt recently and was told it was “environmentally friendly” – but if I want to help the planet, then I should be wearing one of the 10 T-shirts I already own.