Every nation, tribe, cultural association, military organisation, neighbourhood club – even street gang – has a dress code. Some codes are elaborate and colourful, some simple and austere, others plain and utilitarian, while some are thrown together from available materials. All serve the purpose of identifying the individual member and demonstrating solidarity with other members of the organisation.

While in the wealthy countries children dress more or less as they please for school, our educational institutions, from basic school on up, have strict dress codes for the youngsters. When I went to Kingston College in the 1950s, we had to adhere to the rule of khaki shirts and trousers, brown shoes and neckties. The latter is a feature of the uniform of many schools, a ridiculous requirement in a tropical country with high heat and humidity. It’s a legacy of our colonial past which we seem loath to abandon.

Military uniforms are generally of the utilitarian variety, reflecting the trade of the particular member – gunner, pilot, tank crew, infantry or special forces. For ceremonial purposes, though, the uniform represents history and tradition with a special effort to impress the onlooker with fussy splashes of gold braid and fruit salad of medals and decorations. Likewise, the police and fire-fighters. Workers in chemical plants, nuclear facilities and foundries wear special gear to protect them from the dangerous environments in which they work. Lawyers and judges have their own uniforms – black robes or suits with contrasting white shirts – and in the case of the high court, another ridiculous holdover from the days of the Empire – the wig.

Jamaicans generally have a penchant for uniforms, and I recall going back through the years that in many offices, while all the management desired was that its employees reported to work looking neat, tidy and professional, the staff themselves got together and designed some form of uniform.

Islamic countries are among the strictest with forms of dress. Right now countries with large numbers of immigrants are facing controversies over the habit of some Muslim women of wearing the niqab, which covers the face. In many of these places the hijab, a scarf which may be wrapped around the whole head but which leaves the faces exposed, is now quite common and grudgingly accepted by the liberal-minded western hosts.

We all remember the draconian hand of the Taliban when they drove out the atheistic communists a couple of decades back and went back to the dark ages. They forced women back into their houses, allowing them to appear in public only when dressed in the hideous burka – a blue or black tent with a tiny grille around the eyes. This horrible garment weighs a ton, drags along the ground and because their vision is severely limited, women often trip on the hems, fall and sustain bruises and even fractures. The most repressive of these societies, Saudi Arabia, employs groups of busy-body men to go around and make sure women are not displaying so much as an ankle in public.

More generally, societies have norms of dress whose rules may not necessarily be plainly laid down in law, but are nevertheless just as rigidly observed and policed by certain self-appointed monitors. I recall as a youngster the commotion aroused by a certain Anglican archdeacon who condemned from the pulpit certain new styles of dress favoured by young women. He felt that the short sleeves and low necks were an affront to modesty and therefore not welcome in the congregation. Some of the older people in our midst bemoaned at length the advent of tight-fitting clothes for both young women and men rather than the baggy apparel that had hitherto been the norm. They didn’t approve of certain new hairstyles and even certain kinds of shoes.

Of course, young people like to rebel against rules, and dress codes provide an ideal vehicle for rebellion. For one thing, it doesn’t cost much, as they have to be dressed anyway. And if it gets out of hand, they can always revert to more conventional apparel, at least when appearing in public. Because of our proximity and exposure to North America, we generally take our cue from the prevailing styles there. In the immediate post-war years, we had our share of zoot suits, which featured high-waisted, baggy pants eagerly snapped up by the boys. Later it was bobby-socks and crinolines for the girls, and then pink and black, with very slender neckties for the boys.

For the most part these styles were just plain silly but harmless. The one constant was that they lasted a while then fizzled out and disappeared as quickly as they came. To my eye, though, the most stupid of these rebellious styles is the one favoured by today’s young men – the trousers sagging down with the ends of the legs bagging around the shoes and the crotch suspended just above the knees. Coupled with this are running shoes either without laces or with the laces trailing along as the boy barely manages to walk in an ungainly gait. To extract keys, cellphone or money from a pocket requires the contortions of a circus performer. They even buy specially made high-rise underpants to heighten the effect, giving rise to the joke that these are turtle-neck drawers!

This style has lasted much longer than fads of the past, and causes consternation in some of the highest places. A couple of months ago a state senator in New York launched an advertising campaign calling on young men to “Raise your pants. Raise your image!” Senator Eric Adams, a black man who spent 22 years as a police officer, is targeting young black men who, he says, are the ones who mostly dress this way. He notes that the practice originated in prison, where the authorities don’t concern themselves too much about whether clothing fits, and don’t supply belts or shoelaces because they can be used either as weapons or to kill oneself.

For Adams, it is another degrading image of black people. The important difference here is that this image is self-inflicted, rather than being imposed by white oppressors. Another prominent black politician in the US has also addressed the issue. While running for the presidency, Barack Obama told an audience on the music channel MTV that while laws which ban sagging trousers are a waste of time, “Brothers should pull up their pants.”

There have been numerous attempts by lawmakers across the US to stop this practice, and all have come to naught because of the difficulty in enforcing it, as well as because they generally fail constitutional tests of freedom of expression. Recently, a crown prosecutor in Britain tried unsuccessfully to impose an order on an 18-year-old to stop showing his underpants in public on grounds that it was an anti-social act.

For many years the US charity United Negro College Fund has conducted an advertising campaign to raise money for the education of black people, using the trenchant slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This had led some wags to comment, “A waist is a terrible thing to mind.” While a big part of the sagging-pants rebellion is to show off the underwear, sometimes it, too, sags way down and displays the top of the cleavage of the buttocks, forming a distinctive upside-down letter Y.

Which, no doubt, is why this bunch is known as “Generation Y”?

OOPS! In last week’s discussion of the way the laser has embedded itself in the modern world, I didn’t, as the Americans would say, “do the math”. I said that microwaves are so small that they are measured in billionths of a metre, or nanometres. Not so. Light waves are in the nanometre range, while microwaves are bigger by several orders of magnitude – around a centimetre, in fact. That’s about the same calibre of those bullets certain, uh, gentlemen, are so casually tossing around in West Kingston and elsewhere. Thanks to the sharp-eyed reader who pointed it out.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca