This entry is both about a specific dress code in a Houston public school and about my lifelong (usually) mild opposition to dress codes in general.

Mild Conflicts In The War On Personal Appearance

First, a bit of personal history relevant to the topic. Like some of you, I was born nude — in violation of all known western dress codes. Whether it was God or evolution that determined the clothesless state of my beginning, I enjoyed it briefly until trained medical personnel put a stop to it. My next brush with a dress code came in high school, when my hair length began to violate the “personal grooming standards” printed alongside the school’s dress code. Nothing serious happened except that a certain assistant principal began frequently referring to it until I decided the easiest course was to get a haircut.

Then came my second job, for a major American chain of supermarkets, where men and women were supposed to look, by God, like men and women, two totally different species, of course. While friends of mine were informed they couldn’t return to work until they removed their godless male earrings or shaved their heathen facial hair (a problem I hadn’t yet been able to participate in), I again fell afoul of nature — which had decreed my hair was to keep growing. Supervisors made it publicly and loudly clear that this wasn’t allowed.

In my questionable wisdom, I chose a college that had an even stricter personal appearance code than any I’d experienced so far. Women must wear dresses or long skirts; men had to wear slacks and button-up shirts (bonus points for complete suits). Alas, I had begun wearing combat boots as daily footwear before they became popular, and had continued wearing them as they became popular elsewhere in the country. (It is estimated by experts that Missouri was about five years behind national fashion trends.) Combat boots, somehow, did not qualify as “dress shoes” despite obvious similarities. I was actually called into the Dean Of Men’s office to discuss my recurring infraction. It was suggested that I could quit the school, or get kicked out, or — they said kindly — I could simply acquiesce, conform, and go buy a $40 pair of dress shoes. (I chose the latter, due to being a coward.)

That’s actually all of it, I think. As long as you don’t count my boss at a newspaper asking me “are you in a gang?” because I had again grown long hair and was wearing a bandana to hold in the tangly mass. (I was not, technically, in a gang* at that time, though I admit I never formally abdicated my generalship of the Tree House Club, circa 1983, which did not have a dress code, but did, unfortunately, practice both ageism and ableism.)

(* In fact, “gangs”, sometimes called “militaries”, are about the only organizations for which I can see a legitimate, practical reason for dress codes. I’ll get to that later.)

We Have To Have Standards!

Some of you were ready to complain, as soon as you saw my headline, that dress codes serve a valuable service, as Principal Carlotta Outley Brown said (.pdf): “please know we have to have standards... what is right and what is correct or not correct”. Or, as she told Vox, “It is about elevating standards... My mother told me to never go outside the home looking like you’re in the home, like you’ve gotten out of bed.” (She is among the very rare 0.3% of people who have never, ever questioned what their parents told them.)

Note that in defending the dress code she implemented at James Madison High School in Houston, Outley Brown never once actually provided a reason. She kept using words like “standards”, “acceptable”, “presentable”, and “appropriate”, which are all fun words but all they do is restate the fact that there is in fact a dress code. A dress code is, after all, a standard, which describes what is considered acceptable, presentable, and appropriate by the person who wrote the dress code. (For further hilarity, note that she wrote the dress code for parents who show up at the school, not for children, who are required to wear uniforms at Madison High.)

When someone I know very well said recently, “People shouldn’t be allowed to wear pajamas to the supermarket”, and I asked “But why?”, that person responded: “Because it’s just not right.” But that person, like Outley Brown, could never articulate an actual reason. Do the pajamas cause some kind of harm at the supermarket that they don’t cause in your bed? Do the “hair rollers” (banned for parents at Madison) truly disrupt or harm the school building in some way? What about “men wearing undershirts”, also banned at Madison? (Note, the ban doesn’t say only wearing undershirts, but undershirts, period.) If I wear an undershirt, is it going to start a fire? Make a loud noise to interrupt the learning process? Cause structural damage? Somehow cost the school money? And watch out for a “satin cap or bonnet”, man, because those things will turn you into a communist so fast.

What Is The Point Of A Dress Code?

Note that dress codes didn’t begin because “we have to have, like, standards, man”, but so you could tell rich people from poor people, and men from women (seriously, because there’s no other good way to know).

Back in the days when they hadn’t yet invented posh 5th Avenue stores, most people wore basically the same things: robes and/or tunics. But the wealthier and more powerful people wanted it to be more obvious that they were inherently more important. So, for example, in Ancient Rome, only Senators were allowed to wear clothing dyed purple. It got more complex after that. Eventually, rich and powerful people figured out how to simply make their clothes cost so much that poor people couldn’t afford them. So today it’s easy to tell when someone has more money than you.

Even earlier, some men apparently had had trouble distinguishing men from women (possibly after a night of heavy drinking and an embarrassing episode in a nearby alley), so they made actual laws that banned men and women wearing the wrong gender’s clothes. (This is actually in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 22:5.) Worried that someone would argue against the law, they added “for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.” Notably, the rule doesn’t clarify what, exactly, constitutes men’s clothing or women’s clothing. I assume they meant three-piece suits and mom jeans.

As religions arose and became very proud of themselves, they invented their own particular clothing, like tall pointy hats, or short round caps, or — okay, it’s mostly hats and caps. But also necklaces with crucifixes on them. At first, I assume, it was simply a practical way to say: “this is what religion I am!” but eventually certain hats became enshrined in doctrine.

And sometimes it’s not so much a rule as a heavily-encouraged cultural practice, like wearing a wedding ring if you’re married and not wearing one if you’re single.

But almost all those, you’ll have noticed, have no real practical purpose. For example, the Roman Senator could just tell people he’s a Senator. “I’m a Senator, you nitwits! Out of the way!” Or you could, as some religious people have discovered recently, just tell people what your religion is.

There are, I acknowledge, a handful of practical reasons for dress codes. Your job, for example, might involve a lot of grinding machinery in which case you’ll want to avoid loose, flowing clothing that could get caught and result in injury. Or you might be out in the sun a lot, where it’s a good idea to wear a hat of some sort and light-colored clothing. Or, as with many jobs today, you might find it necessary to wind a thin strip of cloth around your neck and tie it in a knot, allowing the ends to dangle uselessly near your belly button. Oh wait; that last one is just stupid.

But truly, the only organization or type of employment for which a dress code makes abundant sense to me is the military (or their smaller cousins, “gangs”). And, possibly, related: sports teams. Because nobody wants to be in the middle of a war and suddenly realize that everyone on the battlefield is dressed identically. Imagine:

“You there, mister! Are you my enemy or not?”

“Why, I rightly don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether you are my enemy.”

“Let’s shoot each other, just in case.”

“Sounds good to me! Oh, boy, the generals sure will be pleased with us!”

The same (except with less shooting) would hold true on the basketball court or soccer field. So it makes sense that one side or the other would want to wear a patch or ornament of some kind, while the other side wears (hopefully) a different type of identifying material. Maybe a different color jersey, perhaps.

We Forgot All That, Though

At some point, society became blissfully unaware of the (few) practical reasons for dress codes and even more unaware that almost none of the other rules have any practical basis whatsoever. Instead, we grew up being told “it’s just indecent” to break a particular rule or “you kinda have to” wear a certain something.

Almost none of today’s dress codes have anything to do with identifying an enemy soldier by the color of his jersey or determining which player on the field is your teammate by the flag patch on his shoulder. Almost all of today’s dress codes are in schools and workplaces. And almost all of them are inherently puritanical, classist, sexist, and/or racist.

The rules that prohibit showing certain patches of skin are needlessly puritanical. Your knee is no more or less attractive than your shin, ma’am. (Or your ankle, or jaw, or pinky finger, for that matter.) The rules that allow boys to display patches of skin that girls can’t (or, rarely, vice versa) are pointlessly sexist, as are rules requiring different hairstyles for different genders, skirts versus pants, and so on. The rules that require the purchase of more expensive clothing or shoes than one would ordinarily wear are by their very nature classist, an attempt to separate one from the lowly masses who can’t afford separate “dress shoes”. And plenty of the rules (including several put in place by Outley Brown) are designed specifically to target racial/ethnic minorities, often with the goal of forced assimilation.

Conclusion

Did this blog entry go on too long? Yes. Yes it did. But I had a little fun with it, and it flowed easily from my fingers into this computing machine.

Does it seem silly that “dress codes” is something about which a grown person has a firm political position? Yes, it does. However, I claim (and/or assert) that it’s far sillier for other grown people to spend time and effort policing the way other people wear clothes or style their hair, with the aim of actually punishing people who don’t fit their “standards” of appropriateness. Without them, I wouldn’t need to take a position on it.

Addendum

Here, for your reading pleasure, I will add links to news stories about stupid dress code kerfluffles, to further emphasize the absurdity:

2019.10.08	NBC News	8-Year-Old Girl In Michigan Denied School Picture Because Of Red In Her Hair
2019.09.13	CNN	A Texas School District Said A 4-Year-Old Boy Had To Braid His Hair Or Cut It Off. Parents Say That Discriminates Against Black Hairstyles
2019.05.07	Vox	A High School’s Dress Code For Parents Sparked Backlash. The Principal Is Standing By It.
2018.09.21	Yahoo! Lifestyle	‘Code For No Black People’: New York Bar’s ‘Racist’ Dress Code Sparks Online Debate