The Queen Mum of England celebrated her 100th birthday this month. In all the televised scenes of the various parties in her honor, she wears pretty much the same style dress, different color, with a matching wide brimmed hat and shoes. Although she is not a fashion trendsetter as was the late Princess Diana, this matriarch of the royal family certainly is appropriately, even elegantly, gowned for the occasion.
Having grown up in an era of strict school dress codes, I’ve certainly appreciated the more relaxed attitude about teen dress in the past years. Probably nothing irritated me more as a teenager than having to wear a dress, with 15 starched petticoats underneath, every day to school, especially when the temperature dropped 10 or more degrees below freezing. Exposing even a part of the leg when ice is on the ground, in the name of propriety, is truly inappropriate dress.
However in recent years, too many teenagers, in the name of fashion, seem to forget what is appropriate dress for their workplace - school. While none of them would dream of wearing formals and tuxedos designed for the prom in the classroom, they choose to don beach wear for class and then complain about the air-conditioned rooms being too cold.
Administrators at the high school have spent far too much time in past years in an attempt to determine how short is too short. Thus the revised dress code quires shorts and skirts to be at least knee length. At least, students are not required to wear a raincoat over their P.E. shorts if they are called out of the gym as I was as a teenager. And with the new code, they will certainly should feel more comfortable in the classroom.
The second change in dress code is a return to an existing rule about both boys and girls tucking in shirttails. While the original rule may have been designed to promote a neat appearance, safety experts today encourage administrators to adopt this procedure as precaution.
The rationale assumes that the neater people are dressed, the less opportunity they have concealing contraband. In our small town, we wish we didn’t need to concern ourselves about what we see as a large-city problem. However, in all matters, we prefer prevention over treatment.
As a high school teacher, I feel very safe on campus. The vast majority of our teenagers are considerate, good people. We have done a fine job in raising our children.
Yet, I feel as if there is one more rule of dress that we really need to address with our youth. Ads come and go. Over the years we’ve seen clothes go out of style, only to return a few years later. Fortunately, no one has thought the multi-petticoat that makes a girl look like a blown-up balloon worth repeating.
But as we teach our young people about appropriate wearing apparel, we need to instill in them an understand that what people wear does not determine their value as a person. Displaying brand names on garments might indicate how much money someone spent on an outfit or a pair of shoes, but youngsters seem to ignore then fact that this very trend allows companies to use them as free walking advertisement.
When I entered SMU, which drew students from all over the world, the campus fashion police considered any girl who wore any color sock but white to be totally ignorant of fashion. Although I wore white socks because it was all I could buy, I thought even then, such criticism crazy. By the time I graduated four years later, colored sock fashion from other parts of the country had become the trend in the Southwest. Now truly who were the ignorant ones?
Certainly, by age 100, the Queen Mum should have learned her lesson about dressing appropriately for all occasions. In fact, it is a lesson that all of us should have learned at a very early age. However, even more important is the lesson about accepting people because of who they are rather than for the labels they display.
2000
Comments