Living: What The Kids Are Wearing

• Share

"I think dress guidelines are stupid," Lisa Bequette was saying just the other day, before beginning 8th grade at Maryland's Mount Airy Middle School, northwest of Washington. "I would wear a cropped T shirt to school. Why should they tell me not to show my belly button?" Good thing she is a little too young to meet Brendan McReady at a mixer. McReady, a junior at Bethesda- Chevy Chase High School, has some sentimental regard for the school uniforms at an alma mater: "Everyone wore the same thing every day, so perhaps it was easier. You'd get up, throw on the clothes, and you looked slimy all day. But who cared? It was all boys."

One thing is clear as kids all over the country have begun to troop back to class this fall: whether instilled by peer pressure or insisted upon by academic administrators, dress codes are in every school. Bicycle shorts, those shiny, shape-hugging racer bottoms made of Lycra, are strongly discouraged in New York public and private schools, tolerated at South High School in Minneapolis, where they are currently very popular, but dismissed as flashy by students at Country Day School in Charlotte, N.C. Traditionalists, who would not wear such shorts even on an Exercycle, claim that standard uniforms (blazers for boys, pleated hopscotch skirts for girls) have social as well as practical value. For one thing, they ease the economic burden of providing kids with money for trendy items like mock reptile sneakers, dressy ensembles featuring bold plaids and checks or color-dunked designer sweats.

& Mary Anne Schwalbe, head of the upper school at Manhattan's Nightingale- Bamford, says, "We like our uniforms because we feel in a city like New York, where there is so much competition, there shouldn't be competition in clothes." But, she adds, "the girls are getting more creative with what they can do with the uniforms, but we also keep a supply of regulation garments on hand in case a girl stretches the rules too far." What happens if a student shows up in an outfit that nothing in the school closet will quiet down? "We send her home."

The social leveling that uniforms can sometimes accomplish is being sought by some inner city schools as well. At Helene W. Grant elementary school in New Haven, Conn., uniforms are just being inaugurated for this school year. Detroit's Mumford High School is raising a ruckus by handing down a get-tough dress code aimed at eliminating flash. The code's language is starchy enough for a military academy ("Misdirected students preen about, modeling flashy, expensive clothing and exerting little energy in their academic pursuits"); on the proscribed list are leather coats, jogging outfits, shorts, designer glasses, designer jeans and "custom-made briefcases."