There is really only one thing to wonder while waiting to meet Paul Fussell, the author of a wickedly funny new book called Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (Houghton Mifflin).

Sitting in the café of the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore before giving a reading from the book, Fussell is decked out in a uniform of sorts: khaki trousers, crisp white shirt and a black wool blazer. Coupled with his white hair and no-nonsense expression, the outfit signals "aging preppie." Add to the picture Fussell's solid build and impressive résumé -- University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus, 20 books written or edited, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award -- and it's impossible to imagine him wearing anything else.

Fussell freely admits that he's always had a thing for uniforms. In the book, he references photographs from his childhood in the late 1920s that show him decked out in a sailor suit, "complete, despite the short pants, with whistle and lanyard and red sleeve insignia featuring eagles and chevrons." He joined the Boy Scouts, briefly, not out of any urge to learn fire-building or help old ladies across the street, but in order to wear the distinctive blue and yellow uniform. Much of Uniforms focuses on military attire (with some digressions into the current trend of military chic in fashion) because of Fussell's experience serving in the army during WWII.

At Penn, Fussell says, "The professorial uniform consisted of gray flannel trousers -- sometimes khakis, depending on your age -- and a tweed jacket. When I retired, I had about six tweed jackets in my closet. I wore a different one every day, or I tried to, so I wouldn't bore the students with the same thing. When I retired, I took them all downtown and sold them. I don't have any tweed jackets anymore, at all." Now, absent the tweed jacket, Fussell habitually wears a blazer in order to avoid any worries about what to put on in the morning. "This is also the uniform of the retired long-service military officer," Fussell explains. "You can't wear your real uniform anymore, but you want a uniform."

Uniforms offers a delightful amount of detail on the myriad ways in which clothes make the man (and, occasionally, the woman), careening gracefully from sartorial trends among military personnel worldwide to Ku Klux Klan garb to clerical attire or the significance of chefs' hats. The book is guided by a quote from The Presentation of Self by Fussell's Penn colleague, Erving Goffman: "All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to identify." Uniforms is unquestionably a book written by an academic, incorporating a dizzying amount of research by scholars and critics of the 20th century. What makes it shine is Fussell's sly, witty, unashamedly iconoclastic personal style.

Fussell spent almost 45 years teaching 18th-century literature. Even though he has been retired for four years, it seems that his academic training, like his military training, is impossible to erase. When Fussell spent a short time in the hospital several years ago, he began wondering where the nurses had gone. The nurses were all there, it seemed, but they weren't identifiable because they weren't wearing nurses' uniforms anymore. "I asked them why not, and they said it tends to scare people," says Fussell. "Then you get a bloodstain on it, and you have to change the whole daily costume and so forth. I sent my research assistant to interview the head of the nursing school here at Penn, to find out what the truth was, and she corroborated it. She said that ŒWe don't really wear uniforms anymore -- the nurses don't like them.'" An ordinary person would stop with that explanation. Paul Fussell began looking for patterns, noting that nuns have dropped the practice of wearing habits for a similar reason. Then, he wrote an entire book examining the cultural significance of such phenomena -- tongue firmly lodged in cheek throughout the endeavor.

"I'll point out that you can read this book in the bathroom," says Fussell. "You can read a page or two, and it doesn't get anywhere. It's the first time I've written something that has no structure, and it was great fun. It was easier than figuring out what was the meaning of this whole thing. It has no meaning. I suppose that's a sort of postmodern impulse. But after a while, one gets tired of imposing meaning upon phenomena. Uniforms are interesting enough, regardless of what they mean."