Apparently, this was enough to force senators to unanimously pass a solution on Sept. 28, 2023, that forced men to wear coats, ties, and pants in the Senate.
As a fashion historian, I’ve heard this song before. It’s the same song school principals sang in the late 1950s, when women preferred to wear pants in the campus cafeteria. And I can hear the refrain of bewildered managers who sought to ban polo shirts in the early 1990s, just as Casual Fridays were revolutionizing the way other people wear to work.
People who revel in those adjustments see them as decentralization rather than evolution. An old guard steps forward to protect the dress criteria of an earlier era by employing terms like “respect” and “tradition. “But time and again, his efforts to regulate how to dress ultimately failed.
Short films, in particular, have aroused anger.
The shorts protest of 1930 brought together more than six hundred academics on the hallowed steps of Robinson Hall at Dartmouth College, then exclusively male, to challenge the much-hated dress codes that banned sportswear in campus buildings.
The student paper’s editors had challenged readers to “offer their most prized possessions, whether compatible with cut or old and loose flannels,” so that men can simply “enjoy the ideal thrill of total freedom of legs. “Old basketball uniforms, tweed shorts and new cuts.
It’s bigger than campus regulations. It’s about freedom and self-expression. The Associated Press picked up the story and published it nationally. Princeton and Harvard student newspapers also reported on it, and Fox Movietone News appeared to record the day’s events. .
The reaction of the old guard was instantaneous and scathing. A “prominent Boston draper” sat down and wrote a letter to the university noting that “the average American student” was “the dumbest of all the academics in the world” and that “there was no brain to make them famous, they’ll have to use their legs. “
Women should also get into the shorts game. Beginning in the late 1920s, shorts worn by women in public spaces were the subject of intense debate for more than 30 years.
Social critics, grooms and fashion writers tried to set parameters on “when” and “where” the garment can be worn. Shorts were prohibited at religious services, but at informal social activities. We may just not use them for lunch in the cafeteria, but they were fine for lunch. And some country clubs in the 1930s required women to wear trench coats on the tennis court to cover their shorts.
Time has passed and men and women have simply followed. . . Wear shorts. In 1955, Esquire showed readers, “Now you can wear shorts for sports and casual business anywhere it’s hot, and no one will blink. “
For decades, written or unwritten regulations on how to dress also prohibited women from wearing pants in formal places.
University deans, school principals and human resource managers have drafted dress codes that ban dress altogether or relegate it to certain areas. The authors of the label explained that the pants “insulted the aesthetic sense of men” and were appropriate in a context: when “you” are rough.
However, he continued to wear pants of many varieties.
In November 1970, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle searched for an article about butlers in fancy restaurants refusing to sit in pantsuits. At one establishment, the host explained, “If you admit a woman in pants, you have to admit her. “all. Others cited “decoration” and “decorum” as reasons for refusing entry.
The complaint surrounding Schumer’s resolution closely resembles court cases against pant-clad female politicians. In 1993, Senators Carol Moseley-Braun and Barbara Mikulski wore pantsuits in the Senate.
Instead of firing women, Martha Pope, the first female sergeant-at-arms, replaced written regulations on dress to specify pantsuits as proper business attire.
As dress codes evolve, what other people wear in public becomes the starting point for new concepts of race, class, and gender.
For more than a century, fashion has moved significantly away from the prestige of a top-down regulatory procedure to become a means of individual expression. At a fashion show for the country’s bicentennial in 1976, former Miss America Bess Myerson told the audience, “Our garments and way of life reflect each other, reinforcing our independence and individuality. “
He proclaimed that in twentieth-century America fashion was not “uniforms of rank or class, as was the case in many ancient countries from which our others fled. “
Whether written or simply implied, dress codes make sense when enforced. To me, the concept of controlling the dress of adult professionals is simply obsolete.
When John Fetterman wears sports shorts in public, I see him leveraging his personal identity and political brand. Despite Susan Collins’ outrage and jokes about wearing a bikini in the Senate, fashion is born of culture, and culture is vibrant.
And cultural forces are almost on the verge of repelling.
Deirdre Clemente, Associate Professor of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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