Dress Code

What do you like to wear - and what would you like to wear? Ever been tempted to wear something that you are not supposed to? Well, I would never have thought that of you, I am quite shocked! What we wear is not especially dictated by fashion as by what our culture dictates; but who, behind the culture, is doing the dictating and why do they feel the need to do so?

When you are born you were given an armful of 'your' culture and indicated, by peer pressure, that you have to maintain it. Why? why should we care for one particular brand of culture when there are so many others to choose from. Let's face it, the culture we are responsible for is only an accident of birth - if circumstances had left our parents stranded elsewhere and they either chose or were pressured to change to suit their new local culture, that is the one we may now feel most comfortable with. Or, what if our real parents had sold us, we were adopted, or our parents' culture ceased to exist for some reason? No one culture can be argued as being intrinsically better than another, crime and beauty still occur in both and the people we engage in argument with are likely to be partisan, including ourselves.

One of the problems is that it is difficult to see what elements of a culture are human necessities today, and those which are remnants of former necessities or even something imposed by a devious group of people intent on protecting their position in society. Which parts are useful as part of a ragbag of essential reserve skills that might be needed if the society came under some pressure, such as a war breaking out? A lot of the difficulty is that even the concept 'culture' is ill-defined, too often it is abused by the 'high culture' people, or the 'look at the pretty dancing' people or even the 'no, you are not going to have the advantages I never had access to' people. Culture is not about being pretty, being quality, it's about a functioning society ensuring some level of safety for the group and it includes the icky bits performed by the undesirables scrabbling a living at the lowest levels. It is the best that previous generations could do with what they were given combined with their best efforts to adapt the conditions they lived under.

Changes to culture can be scary, because we might make the wrong decision and hence become excluded from society, left to a lonely existence outside the group. Older people also find changes difficult because they fear that if they are no longer valued then who will protect them? What will our elders do if they do not understand our new culture, how can they advise us in a new environment when they are no longer strong enough to maintain their position in any other way? As humans we can be very lazy, riding the wagon of culture and letting ourselves become distanced from the changing reality, allowing a generation gap to appear and then grow yawningly wide. It is easy to blame bad influences from foriegn cultures instead of remaining current and responsive to the new problems of the young.

Another way of viewing the issue is to imagine yourself living two hundred years in the past, no, not as a member of the ruling classes, not even as a learned person, but as an average person. How similar would our lives be, and how much would our current knowledge of our culture allow us to slip in successfully, unnoticed? One might pull off an 'evening at the bar', or 'talking to the family', but how long before we begin to see the great gaps in our understanding of daily life and chores, with no time off and people from the 'big house' who see us as a lower form of life?

The chances are that the intervening centuries have seen a paring away of what each generation considered undesirable in their culture, and we are descended from those people who were flexible enough to withstand these changes, even if they were unaware of the extent of the changes they were involved in and what the previous generations had already discarded. If you are a man and there is no skirt or dress wearing in your current culture, then the chances are that somewhere in the history of your culture the skirts or dresses simply faded away or developed into something else.

In summary, the limitations on what one can choose to dress in are imposed on us as we grow up by the previous generations who confuse 'what life was like in the culture when I grew up' with the total sum of the culture of all past generations.