Dress Code

The following is a letter written by an irate mother, namely me, to the principal of my daughter’s high school:

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am writing to inform you that her father and I have been extremely worried for some time about conditions that exist in our daughter’s school.

I can remember, way back in September, when she first told me about her and her friends’ dissatisfaction with conditions at school. She said that for years you’ve made all the boys wear grey slacks and white shirts and ties and the red school sweater with the pink and purple stripes on the sleeve. The girls have to wear tunics, white blouses and sensible black shoes and they all look alike.

She complained about how stifling these dress restrictions were to their psyches, and how repressing they were to their individuality and creativity. I pointed out that I thought proper dress showed a certain amount of respect for the school, and that a neat and tidy appearance helped promote an orderly mind.

But she explained to me how, throughout history, whenever a repressive regime wanted to stifle individual liberty, they put everybody into identical uniforms. She told me all about the Cossacks, the Roman Legions, the Storm Troopers and even the Coldstream Guards, and I was impressed with her logic.

She insisted that in order to ensure complete freedom of individuality, so that the creative talents of each and every student can blossom and flower without hindrance, the kids must be allowed to dress as they please at school. In this way, individual liberty will be preserved, and we will have taken another step forward in our painful progress toward freedom for all.

A group of us parents, who agreed with the kids, got together at a Home and School meeting and proposed a resolution to drop the dress code, which passed unanimously. The children were each allowed to dress invidually, exactly as they pleased.

So I ask you, what went wrong? I looked out my kitchen window yesterday at the children going to school, and they were all wearing identical blue jeans frayed at the bottom and torn at the knees, polo shirts ripped under the arms, dirty sneakers and long stringy hair. Not only do all the girls still look exactly alike, but now they even look like all the boys!

Tell me, Mr. Smith, this is progress?

Designer Dilemmas

Unless you’re fifteen years old, weigh 84 pounds and have the profile of a poultry skewer, shopping for clothing nowadays can be a traumatic experience. This is expecially true for someone like me, because I bitterly resent patronizing any store where the salesgirls are better dressed than I am.

I don’t think designers have taken a good look at the female figure since the Boxer Rebellion. Last year they designed clothing for midgets and ten-year-old boys, but not for women—at least not any women I know—the ones with two arms and legs and a reasonable amount of avoirdupois in between. I know someone who didn’t buy a thing all year because she refused to appear in public looking like a pregnant eight-year-old.

Now, fashion’s fickle pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction. This year they’ve buried legs behind hobbling swathes of skirt which add ten years per ugly inch to your age, and topped it all off with shoes just like the oxfords Grandma wore back in 1902.

Women even have trouble buying maternity clothes. Fifteen years ago, everything was size twenty, black, and designed for forty-year-old women, which the manufacturers obviously felt was the proper age for anyone contemplating such a serious undertaking as having a baby.

Today, they’ve undergone a change of heart. They now apparently feel that no one over fourteen could possibly attract a man long enough to become pregnant in the first place. Therefore all maternity clothes are size five and ten inches above the knee, which is ridiculous, because none of the pregnant women I know could squeeze into anything smaller than an army tent, and then only if it slept six.

Things don’t improve a bit when you give birth. After starving myself into a size ten (well, maybe a twelve, but a small twelve), I still can’t find anything to wear that doesn’t make me look under ten or over sixty years old. The colours are unflattering, the materials are sleazy, the trimmings are grotesque and everything is beaded or fringed.

There’s only one solution. I’m going to drag out all the clothes I bought sixteen years ago on my honeymoon that I’ve been saving for the kids for Hallowe’en. After I lose twenty pounds so I can get into them, I’m going to be the best-dressed woman in town.