“… an indecent or vulgar manner…”

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — You can get killed for what you wear — a red uniform in Concord in 1775, a yarmulke in Nuremberg in 1939, a hijab in Gaza in 2021. Luckily, if you’re in high school in America in 2021 — or 1961, or 1921 — the worst penance that your fashion choice can get you is humiliated, suspended, expelled or kicked out of your graduation. Or all of the above.

My most formative encounter with The Dress Code was in ninth grade. It had to do with a shortlived male affectation called — pardon the expression — a “dickie.” A dickie, as I recall, was a turtleneck sweater sans sweater, comparable to those starched mock-shirtfronts that used to spring from the bodices of pompous characters in Mack Sennett’s silent comedies. If you aspired to “cool” in ‘62, you teased the sight of your dickie beneath a shirt that was unbuttoned rakishly to highlight the mock-turtle effect. If you can’t picture this, I don’t blame you.

Ironically, I did not own a dickie. But I had a black turtleneck. One innocent freshman day, I wore it under a corduroy shirt whose dubious hue fell somewhere between grapefruit and muskmelon. True to the vogue of the moment, I left three buttons dashingly unsecured and forwent the tucking of my shirttail.

This teen-chic ensemble riveted the notice of Otto Breitenbach, football coach, former U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant and the most fearsome figure in all of LaFollette High School. When Otto was abroad in the corridors, in his trademark blue nylon windbreaker and deathly silent crinkle-soled athletic shoes, a warning whisper preceded him from lip to lip, around every corner in every wing.

“Otto’s coming.”

Otto was an enforcer without portfolio. No one knew which law he might lay down in any given instance, whether any such law existed, or why he had chosen to enforce it on this on this particular pupil. He might never again thusly enforce. But having enforced, Otto left a lump that stuck in your diaphragm for life.

“What the hell are you wearing, Mr. Benjamin?”

In one life-altering second, my entire perception of selfhood drained into my Keds. “Um,” was the only syllable I could manage.

Otto looked me up and down with an icy contempt that caused frost to form on my soul. I knew, without specification, that my non-dickie, my three open buttons and my untuckedness had rankled Otto’s impeccable concept of scholarly decorum. I had failed him, failed my alma mater and failed America.

Otto said, “I never want to see you looking like this again.”

Curtain.

Otto left me, crushed, crestfallen, enervated — and a changed boy. Forsaking any pretense to hipness, I spent my remaining high school days in sweatshirts, blue jeans and four-dollar sneakers — none of which, thank God, were proscribed in the LaFollette Dress Code.

Was there a LaFollette Dress Code? No student ever saw it or could tell you where to look it up. This is typical of dress codes. You had no idea you’d offended ’til Otto — or, equally dreaded, vice-principal Mr. Wendt — braced you in the C Wing and said, “Mr. Benjamin, what the hell are you wearing?”

The Code’s air of sadistic caprice is its charm. For example, when the authors of the St. Johns County (Fla.) Student Code of Conduct contrived (although nebulously) to put The Dress Code in writing, they closed with a clincher that invalidates every previous dictum: “Nothing in these rules shall be construed to pre‐empt the principal’s authority to act in specific cases when, in the principal’s judgment and discretion a student’s dress threatens to (yada yada yada)…” In other words, God’s in his Heaven and The Code comes down, at last, of course, to Otto.

Before I met my Otto, I’d had six years of The Code in a Catholic grade school. Boys at St. Mary’s were pretty much allowed to be sartorial slobs. My pants, for example, were habitually ripped at the knees, my shirtsleeves caked with boogers. Once, bleary-eyed and running late, I wore my pajama tops to school, rousing not a second glance from either from classmates or Mrs. Schober.

But girls?

Around seventh grade, the nuns hit the warpath. Girls were regularly forced to their knees for skirt-length inspection. Girls were banned from wearing nylons. Lipstick? Fuggedaboudit! At the first hint of a sinful jiggle, a bewildered girl would be sent home and told not to return ’til she’d made pilgrimage to the Cash Store and acquired a training bra.

For a while, in the Seventies, The Dress Code slipped out of vogue. Teachers and parents started to whisper, “Hey, let the kids wear what the kids want to wear.” This was brief respite. Ronald Reagan was elected, a blue-ribbon education task force fomented an ominous report called “A Nation at Risk,” and school boards across America began to see the looming Rapture in tank tops and flip-flops.

So, last month, I knew — we all knew — how Riley O’Keefe, a ninth grader at Bartram Trail High in St. Johns County felt when an anonymous faculty prude altered her yearbook photo. If you examine the original studio shot, you can discern a faint hint of Riley’s budding cleavage, roughly similar to the shadow between Shemar Moore’s pecs. The surgery inflicted on Riley’s demure little bosom might have gone unheeded if the zealous censor had availed herself of a little digital tech. An airbrush, Hugh Hefner’s excalibur, could have whited the offending concavity so subtly that even Riley wouldn’t have caught on. Instead, the prurient spinster of Bartram Trail attacked Riley’s incipient hooters with a ruler and a Sharpie — and then tagged 79 other girls in the same manner. But no boys — not even the swimming team in their peek-a-boo Speedos.

Faster than you could say “news cycle,” Riley’s Before and After popped up in the local news, spreading “virally” to NBC, CNN, the Times, the Post, USA Today. In full view of a million strangers, a nice freshman girl with a dazzling smile, wearing her best outfit, stood accused (anonymously) of exposing her “body parts in an indecent or vulgar manner.”

The Dress Code has a thousand merciless tentacles. This spring in Louisiana, Jima Smith, spent $138.50 to rent a cap and gown for her son, Daverius Peters, to wear at his graduation from Hahnville High. As Daverius was hoofing it toward the ceremony in his cap, gown, mortarboard and spiffy new Alexander McQueen black leather sneakers with white rubber soles, an unnamed (why don’t they ever print these people’s names?) moralist cut him off. She said the kid couldn’t graduate in front of his family and finally, yes!, kiss high school goodbye. But why?

“Your shoes, son. They violate The Dress Code.”

Think back. What were you wearing under that polyester robe on graduation day? Any damn thing you wanted to wear, right? Nobody could see. It was your liberation day. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks!

Except for Daverius, sideswiped by one last look so dirty that he had to listen to “Pomp and Circumstance” from outside the gym.

Except that Daverius was saved, by another faculty member. A “paraeducator” (Hey, you got me! That’s why I used the quotation marks) named John Butler gave Daverius his shoes and watched Commencement in his socks. If ever there was a milestone in the feckless history of The Dress Code, it has to be size 9 Daverius balling up his toes, shuffling toward the stage, inching up the steps and stumbling toward his diploma in a pair of size 11 tan loafers…

… which also, by the way, violated The Code, which specify that Hahnville boys are supposed to wear “dark dress shoes.”

What? You want another irony? Good, I’ve got one. John Butler’s daughter Jaelyn, also graduated in Hahnville’s Class of ’21. In the post-diploma family photo, look! She’s wearing open-toed slingback heels (and quite a bit of cleavage).

Score one win for the girls!