Has a community or neighborhood association ever implemented a dress code? I was wondering while watching The Twilight Zone. I didn’t see the entire segment, but it looked like this troublesome teen girl’s family had moved to this community where all the kids, it seemed, had to wear khakis and white dress shirts–all the time. Granted, that was fiction and should be taken witih a grain of salt. But then I remembered reading here that, with the appearance of short shorts on women in the 1950’s,
Which seems pretty intrusive today. But did that sort of thing also use to prohibit or require other types of clothing, or amount even to a full fledged dress code? Of course, I speaking primarily of the Western world here, mainly Europe and the English speaking countries.
Once again, I don’t yet have a link. Although I will search sometime before the weekend ends. I did see on 60 minutes that the country of Bhutan, which is governed by Buddhist monks, has a dress code for its citizens. It is not a drab, communist like dress code. It is designed mainly to encourage egalitarianism and interaction between people from different families and income levels.
A little closer to Europe, Mustafi Kemal banned the fez when he was the dictator of Turkey. His reason was part of a push to modernize what was left of the Ottoman Empire along European lines. On the plus side, he somewhat succeeded. He ended the Moslem religious control of the government (or as much as the U.S. secularized itself from christianity), and created a modern, secular state. On the minus, he chases out the Greek from Asia Minor, recaptured land that was designated from Kurdistan, and he BANNED THE FEZ!
The only fez’s seen now are on crazy men on go-carts.
This came up in my Property Law class, circa 1989.
It came to light in a discussion of discrimination in housing. One could not in modern day America build a subdivision exclusively for Orthodox Jews and limit sales of houses there only to people of the “right” religious persuasion. There are, however, communities where the population is predominantly made up of Orthodox Jews, and courts have upheld rules passed in such communities that adult males must wear a hat of some kind when outside.
So yes, there are some instances of a sort of dress code being established and enforced in a community, and such codes can be upheld as lawful so long as they are reasonable and non-discriminatory.
In effect, practically everywhere in the U.S. there is some limited dress code, in that people are obliged to stay dressed; as Mark Twain observed, naked people have very little influence on society.