Where, Oh Where, Has All Our Class Gone?



Queen Victoria of England



            There was a time when it was considered scandalous for a woman to wear a dress that exposed her ankles. A time when monarchs told us what colors we could and could not wear, depending on our social class. I’m glad this time is far behind us.



1920s Flappers



As a feminist nerd, I wish I could go back to the 1920s and join the flappers who shocked America by hiking up their skirts. I respect the 1960s Mods who cut them even shorter. By the time Madonna came around in the 1980s, the feminist movement and sexual revolution had paved the way for her breed of shock: a graphic book entitled “Sex” and regular concert performances done in leather leotards or corsets.



Credit of Professor Hallay
Fashion Writer and Social Critic



            But unless we become a society of nudists, that’s it. There’s nowhere to go from here – we hiked up our skirts and even tossed them off in favor of undergarments. So we just got stuck. Fashion hasn’t evolved for the last three decades because we’ve reached the climax of this particular direction. Since miniskirts became accepted by consumers, we’ve regularly lowered and raised hemlines on a whim, dependent on personality, mood, weather, and trends.

            But nothing has changed. Our “entertainers” still present themselves on stage in leather leotards, expecting us to be shocked. The media backs them up, putting it into our heads that we are, in fact, shocked and perhaps even offended.  Do we have such a collective one-track mind that, after raising hemlines over the course of a century, we can no longer see any others ways to evolve fashion?

Grammy Awards 2012
(BTW, Fergie, Victoria's Secret sells orange bra and panty sets.)

            We’ve gotten to such a sad point (culturally) that the Grammy Award Shows, one of the most formal events in the American entertainment industry, had to issue a dress code. Normally, the idea of a dress code offends me, as I feel I should be allowed to express myself independent of rules. However, this was really no more than a “common sense” guideline for classiness: all they wanted was for the ladies to dress like such, covering their breasts, buttocks, and genitals.



Grammy Awards 2013
Some stars neglected to follow the rules...
Others seem to have swapped for bad choices at the last minute.



            Can you even believe they had to say that? I can’t! The most pathetic thing about this “Grammy Dress Code” ordeal is that a number of notable women didn’t bother to listen. It’s time that we remember that “pushing the envelope” doesn’t mean being overly sexualized. That isn’t what the women of the 1920s or the 1960s had in mind and that isn’t what we should be aiming for today.



King Richard III
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We shouldn’t need a monarchical figure to tell us how to dress like the ladies we are. If we found Richard III after all this time, we should be able to find a trace of class leftover from those days. 



- Alexis Archer