My favourite compliment throughout my whole life has always been about my style.
I wore a tiara as a casual accessory and plastic high heels to the grocery store at age five.
As a kid, the only kind of play I liked was dress up, and as I aged, my own closet was where all the fun was. It was a curated version of garments that were a reflection of me.
My runway was my classroom. But unfortunately for me, there was a dated dress code. No shoulders, and knee-length shorts, so bleh.
I tried to make my sparkly wardrobe work with this dress code. But the bottom-length rule was unrealistic in the summer, and my mom agreed, so I wore what I wanted.
At 11, the weather was getting warmer, and I decided to wear shorts and a tank top to school. The outfit wasn’t unusual for me, a black and white flowy tank top, paired with my favourite high-waisted denim shorts.
The shorts had four exposed silver buttons down the front, and the tank top hit just below the top button. It wasn’t revealing. Not to me, and not compared to what other girls were wearing that day.
The morning had barely begun when my teacher asked me to step into the hallway, and he asked me to put my arms by my side. Confused, I did.
He told me my shorts were too short and that was it. No conversation, no curiosity, no attempt to ask how I felt. Just a rule.
He called another staff member, who brought me to a supply closet lined with sports jerseys for tournaments. He handed me a men’s XXL basketball jersey and told me to put it on over my outfit for the rest of the day.
The jersey swallowed me, hanging past my knees. It felt like a walking punishment.
I didn't know it then, but this would be the first of many dress codes. It taught me that teachers had the power to police my body, to just throw on something twice my size to hide whatever they deemed an issue.
In high school, the problem shifted. It wasn’t about shorts anymore. It was about my chest.
It quickly became obvious that the same tops that looked “fine” on my flat-chested friends were suddenly “inappropriate” on me. I wore the same tube tops, the same tank tops, the same fitted T-shirts, but only I got warnings.
At 15, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, wearing a tube top, and a teacher tapped my shoulder and asked if I had a shirt to put on over top of my outfit. Fed up, I responded no, not meeting her eye. She asked again, firmer. I said, "Are you going around asking all the girls wearing a tube top this, or is it just me?"
She then sent me to the principal's office.
What starts as a dress code becomes a mindset: Will this top get me the wrong kind of attention? Are my shorts too short? Should I bring a jacket? These aren’t questions born to understand one’s personal style. They’re critiques of a young woman’s development, of her own body.
Across Canada, dress codes have long been criticized for disproportionately targeting girls.
The dress code whittled me down to not show my identity through clothes, and this sticks with me now, even as an adult.
Now, I’m 22, and I still think about 11-year-old me in that capacious jersey, and I think about the other times I was dress-coded after that as a teen.
To this day, I hesitate when I get dressed for school. I evaluate the cut of my shirt, the way clothes cling to my body. I never analyze this when dressing for things other than school.
As a college student, I don't even have a dress code. But it is still ingrained in me what is deemed school-appropriate.
I have always loved fashion and the way it reveals who you are without words, giving me confidence even before I entered kindergarten. So having that expression stolen from the tiara-wearing five-year-old still enrages me.
