The Dress Code

My seven-year-old daughter knows the drill. Stand up straight and put your right hand over your . . . left shoulder to see if that sundress or tank top is less than three second-grade-fingers wide. If it's less than "three fingers wide," she knows it won't fly, and she changes clothes without being told.

Dress codes carry people all the way through high school, but then we drop them like a bad habit (or a "bad haddock" as my kindergartener used to say). The message I think we're trying to send is "You're an adult. You know better." But based on what I've seen over the years, the message that seems to get conveyed is "You're an adult. Wear whatever you want."

Law school used to be a place where people dressed professionally. Jackets. Ties. The works. I know a lot of folks were sorry to see that fade away. I was not one of them. I started law school in 1991. I'd heard about professional school dress codes but honestly didn't know whether they still existed or not. When we were addressed at orientation by the EIC of the law review wearing (fashionably?) ripped jeans, I concluded that the dress code days were gone (said EIC is now a colleague at another law school, and it's all I could do to resist linking to his picture). Fine by me. I was busy working on a serious case of spinal curvature courtesy of my Con Law book; I didn't need to do it in a suit (and, of course, since I went to law school in the capital-s South, I'd have had to do it in heels and a skirt, too). I'm also hopelessly clumsy, so heels and pantyhose would no doubt have resulted in a debilitating stairway accident. Also, I'd spent my adolescence an early adulthood listening to my grandmother say constantly, "You would be such a pretty girl with just a little lipstick." Grrrrr . . .

But even I -- fashion backward, make-up revulsed -- get that your underwear shouldn't show in law school. I graduated high school in 1986, so I understand "underwear as outwear." I'm hip. I'm cool. It's when your "underwear as underwear" is showing that I have to draw the line. Several years ago while teaching at a different law school, I was in the library and saw one of my students bent over looking for a book. With her thong showing. I have no preconceptions about whether other women should or should not wear thongs. I do, however, have some strong opinions about whether I should be able to see it in the federal digest section of the law library. Since she clearly didn't know her thong was showing, I walked over to her and whispered very quietly (no small feat; in addition to wanting to paint me with lipstick, my grandmother also wanted me to keep my voice down), "Megan (not her real name), your underwear is showing."

She looked at me with a look of embarrassment. "Right!" you say. She should be embarrassed!

But she clearly wasn't embarassed for herself. She was embarrassed for me because I'm clearly an old woman who doesn't know how cute it is to have your thong showing in the law library. Doh!

I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe we should all just arm ourselves with those little black strips that they use in tabloid magazines to indicate that Heidi Klum was topless when we took that picture of her on the beach. It could have some kind of painless adhesive on the back (I'm thinking about the level of a post-it note), and when you see someone's thong, you could just politely step up behind them and pat that over the exposed area.