Leggings, dress codes, etc.

In the back-to-school news:

“Students question dress codes in District U46: ‘It’s basically telling us to hide ourselves’” in which students are upset that a new principal at Elgin High School is enforcing a school dress code which bans leggings and tank tops.

“Telling us we’re too revealing, a distraction, it lowers your self esteem, and we already have a lot of that at Elgin,” [junior Maris] Lipsey, 16, said. “I can see it in the girls, and it’s been concerning for the guys, too.”

and “Evanston Township High School adopts a kinder, gentler dress code where leggings are OK” by a Tribune columnist, Heidi Stevens, who praises the schools new dress code that specifically green-lights those items, and sets the minimum requirements that a shirt (with an unspecified amount of fabric on front, back, and sides), pants (with no further definition), and shoes be worn.  Underwear waistbands are permitted to be exposed, as are bra straps, but pants may not have rips that expose the non-waistband part of the underwear, and, if I’m interpreting this correctly, boys’ pants must not sag so much as to expose more of the underwear than can reasonably be called the “waistband,” but students should not be “shamed” on dress code violations in front of other students.   Effectively the only way to violate the dress code is by wearing t-shirts with unacceptable images, which are defined as violent images, “hate speech,” pornography, profanity, or images which “create a hostile or intimidating environment based on any protected class or consistently marginalized groups.”  (Is a MAGA hat allowed?)

Here’s what strikes me:

First of all, the claims that dress codes need to restrict girls’ manner of dress because they are “distracting” to boys — well, I’m not sure what to make of it.  On the one hand, that’s a suspect claim to make when you know that it’s been applied in all sorts of ways:  at its most extreme, requiring women to wear burqas or niqabs, in the Islamic world.  Among some conservative Christians, of the Duggar type, it’s denim skirts all the way because pants are too form-fitting.  And the notion that boys can’t control their actions and need to be protected from temptresses?  Ugh.  No.

But how far do you take this “freedom to dress”?  A librarian-friend reported an encounter with a teen at the high school library, who was wearing a tube top, and had rolled it down to her waist, so that she was basically only wearing a bra.

The Daily Herald reports that Bartlett High School tries to solve this with its dress code, which specifies that

The new dress code clarifies what students must have covered — upper thighs, chest, buttocks and midriff area — regardless of gender.

Does that work?  Is there boundary-pushing around what it means to cover the “chest” or the “buttocks” sufficiently?

One suggestion that I’ve read, though, is that maybe administrators themselves don’t necessarily even worry about boys being distracted; it’s just a matter of instinctively feeling that it’s wrong for girls to wear clothing that exposes every bulge, but not being able to articulate it other than “it’s distracting.”  Certainly at a public school one can’t say, “it’s morally wrong to expose yourself with skin-tight clothing” or “it’s inappropriate to do so in a classroom environment” so the “distraction” claim is an out.

But here’s what’s odd:  for all the complaints that the dress code enforcement is unfair to girls, it seems to me that boys have generally become much more modest than girls, anyway.  It’s not that boys are getting away with immodest clothing but girls aren’t; boys aren’t being penalized because there’s nothing that they’re wearing that would raise these issues.  (Unless there’s something about the teen fashion world that I’m unaware of?)

After all, there exist leggings for boys, too.  Athletes wear them, when biking or running, for example.  But how often have you seen a boy wear these as “regular” clothing?  And it seems to me that, almost always, they wear a loose-fitting short on top of their athletic shorts.

And consider swimwear:  teen girls’ swimsuits contain less and less fabric even as boys’ trunks grow in length.  A teen boy or a man wearing a speedo is “icky” and the notion of men being required to wear these (e.g., in France) is horrifying.  There’s even a parody of Despacito, “I Wear Speedos,” that’s based on the notion that men wearing something that shows a bulge is, well, creepy.

Regular shorts, too, for teen boys have gotten longer, even as, for teen girls, they cover butts, at best.

Yes, teen boys and men go shirtless (remember the volleyball scene in Top Gun?), though even then, only those with the right bodies are “supposed” to take their shirts off, and definitely not if you’ve got chest (or back!) hair.  (Remember, Goose the family man wore a t-shirt.)

Second thought:  yes, there are circumstances in which girls are intentionally “showing off their bodies” and trying to impress the boys.  But leggings seem to have evolved somewhat differently.  Near as I can tell, this started first as a style of clothing worn under a loose-fitting shirt, or even under a too-short dress or miniskirt.  Then women and girls abandoned the butt-and camel-toe-hiding tops.  But the current generation of teen girls grew up wearing leggings as young girls, when their moms didn’t care about preserving “modesty” since they were just girls, after all, and found that it was easier to dress toddlers in leggings, and easier to give preschoolers dressing themselves leggings to put on, rather than pants that needed a button or snap and zipper. Which means that the girls themselves don’t perceive of them as “clothes I started wearing to get attention from boys” so much as just “normal clothes.”

And, look, much as I’m weirded out by all the leggings-wearing, the genie’s not going to go back into the bottle.  Some battles you can fight.  Some you can’t — short of a uniform with strict requirements such as khakis and polos for everyone.

Third — it seems to me that something has changed in fashion more generally.  Maybe I just don’t know enough about teen girls, but for all that the teens of my 80s generation were colorful and had their own, er, unique styles, it seems to me that the clothes were, well, more tailored.  I’m not going to use my own style of dress, back in the day, as an example, because I had no fashion sense (I wore blazers, and skirts, and cords), but something’s changed.

If I pull up an old blog post of mine, from my early days of blogging, I can read that teen and young adults’ clothing is what’s called “fast fashion,” clothing that changes constantly, but is always cheaply made and essentially considered as disposable.  Now, leggings don’t seem to change much with the new fashion-season, but they are certainly constructed very simply and cheaply:  at Kohls, for instance, girls’ leggings are currently priced at $8, and women’s likewise start at $8 for juniors.  As for the construction, the Lularoe brand sells its leggings in One Size, Tall & Curvy, and Tall & Curvy 2, and markets them based on the softness of the fabric and the variety of the prints.

Do I have any firm grounds for getting all high & mighty?  As I said, I have no fashion sense.  But it does seem as if we’ve lost something.

At the same time, well, The Economist had an article on the prospect of inventors having finally figured out how to, to a limited degree at least, automate clothing manufacture.  Their ambitions are small at the moment — just the simple processes needed for t-shirts; and their method involves a stiffening of the fabric that is then washed out afterwards.  But maybe, once they’ve got this figured out, leggings could be next.