When the inbox is empty, Etiquetteer turns to the media for inspiration. And today’s New York Times includes an article on a Great Big Elephant in the Etiquette Room, high school dress codes. After getting “dress coded” for wearing “distressed” jeans that included a rip extending into her upper thigh, 13-year-old Sophia Trevino initiated a weekly dress code protest. Each Friday at her middle school in Cobb County, Georgia, she and other students wear T-shirts with the message “Dress Codes Are Sexist Racist Classist.” It seems to have provoked significant discussion throughout the school system.
Etiquetteer remains a believer in dress codes, but agrees with some of Miss Trevino’s arguments. “. . . her main issue with the dress code was that it singled out girls and made them responsible for boys’ actions. ‘In school, they think that the boys are just drooling over our shoulders and our thighs,’ Sophia said. ‘They aren’t. They don’t care. And even if they do, that’s not our fault. That’s theirs.’”
In this century, as more and more people are realizing, women will not be told what to wear by men. The 2021 Olympics this summer included the protest of women athletes fed up with having to wear “embarrassing” bikini bottoms to play volleyball and other sports. We also have to acknowledge that the teenage years are a period of fashion exploration as people start to figure out who they are and what they want to project about themselves. You can’t know the results of an experiment until you conduct it!
Miss Trevino advocates for a unisex dress code: “Shirts, bottoms, shoes.” “Such a policy would allow tops that show the abdomen, midriff, neck lines and cleavage and bottoms could expose legs, thighs and hips. Any outfit would need to cover the groin, buttocks and nipples.” Etiquetteer can imagine provocateurs wearing bathing suits to class to test this policy, and they’d win. If we’re really going to be gender neutral about this, Etiquetteer would specify minimum coverage from neck to knees and elbows. One solution that isn’t covered in the NYT article is a school uniform, but that, too, is fraught with disagreement. Self-expression and a dress code do not need to be mutually exclusive; the creative challenge is to find where they intersect.
What’s missing from all this? Elegance, which Etiquetteer would define here as “restrained beauty of style.” The late Marlene Dietrich once observed that elegance was “Rarely found today. Women are not brought up to know about it and therefore lack even the desire to acquire it.*” Men, too, benefit from elegance, but elegance is not about being fancy or snobbish. A plain white T-shirt and an unripped pair of jeans can be much more elegant than a fussy frock or a badly fitting suit.
Why does Etiquetteer still advocate for dress codes? Because they underline a Sense of Occasion, whether that’s in a workplace, a courtroom, a house of worship, a high-end restaurant, a beach . . . or a school. The Cobb County school spokeswoman said that their dress code “includes a minimum standard of dress and exists, per the policy, so students dress in a way which is ‘consistent with the formality of school.’” Because a school is designed to be an arena of education, not a catwalk for fashion statements.
Etiquetteer applauds Miss Trevino for initiating a valuable discussion, and hopes that the school system can tweak its dress code to be more equitable . . . and that the fashion for “distressed” clothing with rips and tears will disappear permanently.
*Etiquetteer has quoted this before, when telling the story about the night he saw all the way to Crawford’s Notch.