Going Back to School.(nostalgia for school days, desire to hook up with old friends fuel discos and Web sites)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

On a balmy Saturday evening in London revelers pour out of the tube station, peals of laughter flooding the summer air. This would seem exceedingly unremarkable in a city renowned for its nightlife, except for the way one crowd of thirtysomething women is dressed. They're wearing adult-size versions of British school uniforms--complete with fishnet stockings, stiletto heels and clingy button-down shirts. And they're not headed for the nearest leather bar.

Instead these wanna-be Lolitas are on their way to something called "School Disco," a club night where patrons dress up in their button- downs and dance to the '80s music of their youth. "It's escapism without doing anything illegal," says DJ and School Disco founder Bobby Sanchez. That nostalgia for school days has taken London by storm. Every weekend upwards of 7,000 partygoers pay $18 apiece to get into clubs that require them to dress in uniform. Next month School Disco is sponsoring an outdoor party in Clapham Common that is expected to draw 40,000 participants who are eager to run relay and three-legged races, eat lunches of boiled cabbage and unrecognizable meat, and listen to bands like ABC and the Human League. The group's Web site, schooldisco.com, which helps people track down friends from high school, averages more than 1 million hits a day. Friends Reunited.com, which charges nearly $8 for the same service, has gone from around 5,000 registered members in early 2001 to more than 6 million today. Similar reunion Web sites have been springing up in Germany and France, with one French Web site receiving more than a million hits in the past six months.

High-school reunions have always been a popular concept in the United States (the American Web site Classmates.com claims to have 29 million users). But aside from those with an allegiance to their old boarding schools, the idea is relatively new in Britain. Nobody needed reunions in the past, when English graduates typically stayed within a few miles of home; the hunt for an old friend was often as easy as strolling down to the local pub. Now, says Dr. Marie-Claude Gervais, a lecturer in social psychology at the London School of Economics, "we are more dispersed than years ago, and we live more isolated, anonymous lives. Any means to ...