- Dress codes reveal our social aspirations
and even political ideals.
If we care enough about clothing to pass a rule
or a regulation around it,
we're trying to accomplish something particular.
And the dress code can actually get us to understand
what it is the clothing signifies.
What it is that the person writing the dress code
is trying to control, promote or repress.
Sometimes, dress codes make sense
because the dress code in one sense
is just a way that a group
or an institution uses the power of attire and fashion,
that expressive power for collect events.
If you think about, for instance,
the racial justice movement,
the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
When civil rights activists went to protest
at lunch counters or to conduct public marshes
in that early period of the civil rights movement
there was a dress code.
People were expected to wear their Sunday best.
And that dress code allowed that movement
to make a public statement
that was very powerful.
On the other hand, there were lots
of reasons to be worried about dress codes.
Dress codes have been used to entrench status
hierarchies of various kinds.
By imposing a narrow and prescriptive view
of what particular types of people ought to be like
through requiring them to wear certain types of clothing.
The easiest case to see this involves gender.
Gender dress codes very often
are based on antiquated and inappropriate ideas
about women's appropriate role,
High-heeled shoes are a consistent source of conflict.
What's fascinating and surprised me in my research
was that the high-heeled shoe didn't start off
as a feminine style at all.
It actually started off as a masculine in military style.
It was brought to Europe by Persian horse riders
and the heel of the shoe was designed to fit
in a stirrup.
The style caught on
and over time it became a high status.
And so the heels got higher and higher kind
to exaggerate that.
Louis XIV had shoes with red high heels
and he actually passed the law,
forbidding anyone outside of his Royal Court
from wearing shoes with red soles.
For a long time in history and even today,
women would finish parts of masculine style
and they were expressing
or asserting their right to enjoy
masculine prerogatives.
Whether it was masculine freedoms,
masculine assertion
getting kind of adopted by women on the album avant-garde.
So, some women started to wear high heel shoes
and over time but slowly they became more associated
with women.
One key moment in that evolution involved
that period in history in which men began to
get rid of opulent attire in favor of streamlined
and practical attire.
So ,as that happened
what was once a status symbol
started to become questionable suspect
and eventually associated with femininity.
And then in a distinctive kind of misogynistic mindset
becoming veer for associated with frivolousness
and treated with contempt.
One big area where I'm fairly confident
we're going to see changes in dress codes
is around norms of gender.
And we're already seeing such dramatic changes
in terms of the recognition of the transgender community
and people who are gender non-binary.
And that's a remarkable challenge to a centuries old set
of conventions in which men's and women's clothing diverged
and were considered to be symbolic opposites.
You know, another interesting area,
post pandemic is what happens to
the norms of workplace attire.
In the era of the zoom call
where first you had the idea of like the zoom shirt
that people would just kind of leave hanging out
in the back of their chair,
and then they could stick it on right before the meeting
and presumably for the rest of the day,
they're wearing sweatpants or pajamas.
Interestingly, another thing that developed was a kind of
subtle new dress code,
but then involve not the clothing itself,
but what was behind you in the room.
So then you got norms about
how one should style the background of the zoom call
in order to communicate messages.
And that the very much like a different kind of a
dress code.
So now you've got a whole other category
of things that before strangers never saw the inside
of your house that have now become the subject
of the same kind of scrutiny that we use to apply to dress.