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  • Writer's pictureThea Hwang
    • Aug 20

Dress Coded


On August 16, 2024, the New York Times reported that a group of female NYC public school students spoke at a June city council hearing on the unfairness and indignities of getting dress coded, in other words “running afoul of apparatchiks who did not like what you were wearing, although rules about what counted as problematic were not always obvious, and enforcement of them could seem random and riddled with bias.” An educator with the students at the council meeting described the inequities in enforcement by schools as “marginalized students and teachers being policed by dress codes in ways that privileged communities are not judged,” with “Black, brown, queer and ‘fat’ students” being “punished for wearing tank tops or cropped tops, while their ‘skinny, white, cis peers’ were left alone.”


I discussed two recent school dress codes in my research paper, “The Evolution of the Skirt, its Alternatives and their Meaning in the Modern Era,” which was published in June by the Scholarly Review, a journal for high school students’ work. In the first case, in 2019, a high school senior in Pennsylvania learned that her high school did not allow female students to wear pants under their cap and gown at graduation. The student had to take multiple steps just to be able to wear pants – she spoke to the teacher who was her senior class advisor; she contacted the principal; she presented her argument in front of the school board; she then received permission to wear pants, but since it was only an individual dispensation, she felt it was insufficient and called her local television news station. It was only after the media interviewed the student and reached out to the school for comment that the district reversed the rule and allowed all students to wear professional business attire, including pants, to their commencement ceremony. (Remember – this is about attire UNDER a graduation gown!)


The second case started in 2016 and was litigated before resolving in June 2023. A North Carolina K-8 charter school had a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, and not pants or shorts, as part of its “traditional values.” The girls found skirts less comfortable day-to-day and less warm in winter than pants. Wearing skirts forced them to pay constant attention to the positioning of their legs during class and they avoided activities like climbing or playing sports during recess so as not to expose their undergarments and get reprimanded by teachers or teased by boys. Students and their parents argued that the school’s skirts rule signaled that girls’ comfort and freedom to engage in physical activity were less important than those of boys and challenged it as sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. In 2019, the trial judge agreed that the skirts rule caused the girls to suffer a burden that the boys did not, “simply because they are female.” In 2022, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit agreed that the school’s skirts rule violated the girls’ rights, saying it was “difficult to imagine a clearer example of a rationale based on impermissible gender stereotypes.” The Supreme Court declined to review the case in June 2023, which left the appellate decision as final. 


School dress code violations and enforcement, whether disparate or overly strict, are, of course, long standing issues. It’s a reminder that fashion is political. Self-expression through fashion can be nurtured or stifled, maybe depending on who is doing the expressing.


Sources & Further Reading


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