Understanding the Dress Code

Adaora Ede

With the school year coming off to a start at Bel Air High School, students struggle to find it hard to get back into the school year grind. Gone are the days of sleeping until 11 in the morning every day, gone are the days of lazing off and not doing any work, gone are the days of hot weather, gone are the days of living your life without a care. Arriving back in August, students find themselves facing the 6:45 bus, seemingly never ending loads of homework, and the signs of fall. Oh and of course, knowing that you can’t wear some of those clothes that gave you so much ease and freedom during the summer month. Yes. The dress code.

A dress code is meant to be a written set of rules expressing the required manner of dress needed for a certain organization, club or institution. Essentially, a dress code is a list of what you can or cannot wear in a specific place. Dress codes have been a part of human society since the rise of planned social structures in feudal Europe and Asia and indigenous civilization in the Americas. Basically, a pretty dang long time. Although we take cues from these cultures, these dress codes weren’t created for the same reason that modern day groups are- they were used to distinguish social status. Still, we have rules and expectations for people in the contemporary world, especially in schools like Bel Air High School.

Lately at Bel Air High School, there has been a recent increase in the stress about rules. Students are used to going through the first week of school handbook, but a couple of things of changed. For instance, students received calls reminding them about the dress code. Principal Komondor laid out the rules that are found under the “Dress” section of the Personal Responsibilities page in the handbook (page 21 in the planner if you’re really interested). And more recently, students have seen the appearance of an ever mysterious PowerPoint chockfull of stock photos of dress code infractions, eerily playing on the flat screen televisions in every classroom. But why?

We, as students, know what we are and are not allowed to wear in school. We walk into wonder if our fancy crop tops and skater skirts will get us dress coded, although we know that the dress code specifically says not to wear them. We hope that none of our teachers will care enough about us wearing those string Nike bookbags during the day, even though it plainly states in the handbook that we “may not carry book bags during the school day.” But we just don’t understand WHY.

Modern feminist theory finds the student dress code problematic. It argues against the targeting of girls with dress regulations mostly dealing with traditionally feminine clothing. Majority of the rules found in our dress code deal with skirts, tank tops, dresses and clothes that are socially normal for females. Feminists say that aiming these guidelines at girls lead the overt sexualization and the relevance of the male gaze. In the simplest of words, they believe that the dress code favors dudes, but people have spotted some male infractions. (No thank you, mesh tank tops and ironically worn short shorts!) For practicality’s sake, others see it as an ease thing. Why we are not allowed to just waltz into our schools in our most comfortable short shorts and spaghetti strap tank tops? Wouldn’t it be easier to focus if we didn’t have to squeeze ourselves into jeans and nice sleeved shirts? The thing about this is that we can’t change the dress code. Created years ago, it is ‘intended to create and preserve a positive climate for teaching and learning’. There really hasn’t even been much change for it to apply to present day.

Whether we like it or not, dress codes are an integral part of modern Western society. It’s not just in school that you’ll see them; they are found in organizations, office buildings, clubs and more, even past the years of high school. At Bel Air High, we have a dress code in place that tells us not to show too much skin but in other schools, they have limits on what colors and styles of clothing they can wear and even set uniforms. In the future, we’ll have to worry about what outfits we want to wear to make a good impression at a job interview or an exclusive event. Our school only asks that we wear enough clothes to cover ourselves. And it gets more severe: in some countries, such as Qatar, there are posters and guidelines as to what people can wear in public (And it includes tourists.) We are told that dress codes are there to discipline and keep us in check, but justly, dress codes exist to prepare us for the consequences not following society’s rules.