The idea that other people could tell you when it is appropriate to wear certain articles of clothing has always confused me. Maybe it’s the constant desire for self-expression I’ve had since I was a child, or maybe it's the more progressive upbringing my parents provided me with, but either way this social construct put in place so many years ago has never made any sense in my head. I don’t deny that there is a time and place for certain dress codes, for example, weddings, job interviews, etc but in other instances, I am responsible for making sure other people feel comfortable around what adorns my body? No thank you.
In elementary school, I was confined to wearing three colors: Red, White, and Blue. While I could wear any article of clothing as long as it fell within that simple color scheme, I felt so trapped. Why did my favorite yellow dress with strawberries embroidered on the bottom hem have to sit in the back of my closet collecting dust? Wearing it wouldn’t hurt anybody. Why did an eight-year-old have to suppress her personality when it came to what she wore? The battles my mother and I would get in every morning before school as I got dressed probably still haunt her to this day.
Luckily once high school rolled around I felt slightly more free to dress as pleased, but the snide comments from teachers didn’t go unnoticed. I grew up in California so the weather got fairly warm towards the end of the year when we were let out in June. I remember one day, specifically, it was over ninety degrees outside and I had a tank top on. My 11th-grade chemistry teacher thought this was some kind of hate crime apparently because before the fifty-minute period was over I had heard multiple jabs at how my clothes must have gotten “shrunk in the washing machine”, or asking if someone would lend me their jacket so I could “cover-up”. Of course, no one had one because it was ninety degrees outside. I do not view myself as some saint who never caused problems a day in my life, but what I will say is that a tank top was not something worthy of the scrutiny it received.
Coming into college I was excited to not have anyone telling me when I could or could not wear things. During freshman year I thoroughly enjoyed picking out my outfits every day depending on my mood, and what I felt like portraying to the world that day. It was so fun. Now as I sit in Tate writing this post, I can’t help but analyze what I chose to wear today - a tank top and tennis skirt. While it may not be the most groundbreaking outfit anyone has ever seen, it’s what I wanted to put on when I woke up this morning, and for that, I am grateful I never lost the desire to dress as I wanted. Thank you to all of the dress codes that confined me in the past, you only made my drive for self-expression stronger.
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ReplyDeleteI love how within your commentary you're able to use dress codes to frame a narrative of who you are. I feel like so many people, especially girls, can relate to the experiences you capture here. When I was in elementary school I never questioned dress codes the way you did, but as I got older I became more and more confused by how they seem to defeat their own purposes.
ReplyDeleteI think girls and women have always been judged if someone feels they're dressed "provocatively" or "inappropriately." It's interesting that the same judgment rarely happens to men, isn't it? If this is a topic you're genuinely interested in, there's a lot of work out there by scholars who study clothes and how we dress from a feminist perspective.
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