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A Buzzfeed writer tries to follow the dress codes of 7 different high schools across the US and runs into trouble.

You know what makes me laugh at the trouble she had? The dress code I went to school with WAS STRICTER THAN 6 OF THESE. It was very, very close to school #7, with a few differences: we could wear shorts as long as they hit the knee, and the rule was that if you knelt on the ground, skirts had to touch the floor. Luckily, it was the mid-80s, the height of Jams fashion, and everybody wore baggy shorts.

I had a friend who almost got sent home for wearing two different color shoes--she wore one white and one red Ked sneaker, and a white sock with the red shoe and a red sock with the white shoe. The only reason she didn't get sent home was that it was the first day of school, and the assistant principal allowed it because it was "fun" for the first day, but she was warned very strictly about doing it again.

We could wear T-shirts with designs and pattern on them as long as they weren't advertising "adult" stuff like alcohol, cigarettes, the Sex Wax surfer shirts that were popular then, etc. Spuds McKenzie, the Bud Light dog, got so incredibly popular, though, that they gave up on sending kids home for wearing Spuds McKenzie shirts and allowed them if we put masking tape over all mentions of Bud Light.

NOTE that the CHEERLEADERS and the dance squad wore their uniforms all day at school on pep rally Fridays, which consisted of micro-mini flippy skirts with matching panty-style shorts and sleeveless waist-length crop tops. We all thought it was bullshit that they could wear that and we had to wear knee-length skirts and shorts with sleeved shirts.

Toby's school was even more strict than mine, but he went to a Jesuit school and was responsible for the dress code being changed the last year he was there to specify that you could not wear a black shirt with your black blazer and black tie.

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I recently watched that video too. I find the whole arbitrary dress code thing really baffling and weirdly more restrictive than the mandatory school uniform I had to wear.

Even though we were supposedly all wearing the same thing, at the time I attended the rules were sufficiently lax that as long as we were wearing some form of a white shirt, navy blue skirt or trousers, black shoes (or "shoe-like" boot), and the school jumper with embroidered logo, we could get away with a surprising amount of variance.

During my time a lot of girls enjoyed wearing shockingly high platform wedges and skirts that were either so long and tight it made walking difficult, or so short they were in danger of flashing their underwear and constantly ~~skirting~~ pushing the limit on what constituted "mid-thigh".

I was boring and just wore long trousers and sensible looking boots, though that's mostly because my mum could buy navy trousers in bulk for cheap and I prefer comfortable footwear that wont send me in to tantrums over adhering to style trends. Secretly I always wanted to wear the male uniform option of blazer and school tie though, because I thought it looked awesome. These days I think all of my clothing would pass any America school dress code standards, but that's because I generally feel weird in skirts, can't walk in anything resembling a heel, and buy lots of plain multi-pack t-shirts and blouses because I'm lazy and it doesn't really matter what I wear when I barely leave the house. XD

I wear yoga pants pretty much exclusively, but since I buy them with very slight flares instead of tight all the way down my calf, as long as my shirts are long, you can't really tell they're yoga pants. :D So I might be able to skirt the rules with that.

Toby would get thrown out of his school if he wore what he wears today. Off work, it's mostly T-shirts with some sort of funny image, with cargo shorts in the summer and cargo pants in the winter. On work, it's a slightly more adult version of that, with plain colored shirts instead of T-shirts.

We only got shorts in, I think, my freshman year of high school. No restrictions on skirt length, so...that was weird.

We fought for (shorter) shorts, it being Texas and all, but no dice!

Edited 2016-05-31 20:11 (UTC)

We were never allowed to wear shorts at any of my schools, even though the students fought hard for it. A lot of what the writer wears wouldn't be acceptable in even some of the more permissive office jobs I've worked, and I can only imagine how she'd deal with being in Catholic school for three years as I was, when you wear uniforms and daily get judged on your shoes, tights/socks, jewelry, and hair decorations.

Yeah--the dress codes at some of the places I've worked wouldn't accept what she wears on a regular basis, even on Casual Friday.

Technically we're not even supposed to wear jeans during the regular school year, but given that the Systems department as a whole is slightly more prone to having to crawl around under a desk fiddling with wires at the drop of a hat, nobody blinks an eye at us.

Toby tells me that at his Jesuit highschool, his junior year they made a rule outlawing monogrammed shirts because of some sort of perceived status tussle going on. Shows you how affluent the average attendee there was. (Toby and his brother were scholarship boys.)

We were allowed jeans at my (non-Catholic) schools and more casual office jobs, but they had to be neat looking and not have any holes in them. My mother wouldn't allow me to wear jeans until I was in six grade, just corduroys and pants, and once I got the green light it's been jeans all the way!