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Learn about School Uniform Policies, Benefits of School Uniforms, Dress Codes, Culture, Sexual and Social Politics, Fashion and Slumming it

The 1% Big Wig
vs
the 99% Wig Out

Why does the term "Big Wig" represent the fashion of the 1%?

Wealthy men could afford good wigs made from wool. They couldn't wash the wigs, so to clean them they would carve out a loaf of bread, put the wig in the shell, and bake it for 30 minutes. The heat would make the wig big and fluffy, hence the term 'big wig'. Today we often use the term 'here comes the Big Wig' because someone appears to be or is powerful and wealthy.

WIG OUT There was a syphilis outbreak in Europe in 1580 that left most people, including women bald. For nearly two centuries, powdered wigs—called perukes—were all the rage. The chic hairpiece would have never become popular, however, if it hadn't been for a venereal disease, a pair of self-conscious kings, and poor hair hygiene. The peruke's story begins with the syphilis outbreak which sparked a surge in wigmaking. The cost of wigs increased, and perukes became a scheme for flaunting wealth. An everyday wig cost about 25 shillings—a week's pay for a common Londoner. The bill for large, elaborate perukes ballooned to as high as 800 shillings. The word “bigwig” was coined to describe snobs who could afford big, poufy perukes.
By the late 18th century, the trend was dying out. French citizens ousted the peruke during the Revolution, and Brits stopped wearing wigs after William Pitt levied a tax on hair powder in 1795. Short, natural hair became the new craze, and it would stay that way for another two centuries or so.

 

Why do we have School Uniforms and Dress Codes?

Read about school uniforms: arguments pro and con, implementation issues, and benefits and disadvantages.

school dress code

school uniform

Culture: Fashion, Morals, & Slumming it. Low Class vs. High Class, and respect for the uniform.

THE RUNGS ON THE LADDER OF JUDGEMENT

CLASS = STATUS = WEALTH = DISPLAY = DRESS = SPEECH = MORALS = HIGH BROW VS LOW BROW

 

Why have School Uniforms and Dress Codes?

Why do the runways of Europe and the US take the low class street culture for Haute Couture?

Do the kids with Spiked hair know that's the institutional look from leaving a mental ward?

Do the kids know that Baggy, falling down pants that's the look of prison uniforms?

"Regional clothing from our locale" including "bling bling ice ice, grills" and "hoochie hoops."

Damage Done

 

A Misogynist education, that humiliates girls is appalling and abusive especially when delivered by school administrators or news anchors.

evidence on youtube

The State and the Department of Education cannot be permitted to "groom" girls, to believe they are the "prey" who can be attacked by boys at anytime for any reason including what they wear. No means no. It doesn't matter what your wear.
Boys in middle school, high school, college and in the work place are not allowed to be thugs who feel free to insult, and assult female and this has nothing to do with what they wear. It is not the girls responsiblity to control thugs, that is not possible.

He
Supports She

Example: The First Female Fighter Pilot who was the US country's team leader in Syria Strikes and dropped bombs on ISIS is wearing the uniform.

Why isn't respect demanded? Why is a thug like Ric Bolling on the air? see Jon Stewart explain starting 5:00

Fox news thug made the snarky "boobs on the ground" remark and An Open Letter To Fox News About 'Boobs On The Ground'

DEMAND RESPECT

 

All School administrators define what is disruptive.

MANAGING HOT MOMENTS IN THE CLASSROOM

Remember the same "fight" over dress codes in the 1970's?

Dress was considered protected expression with the exception of anything disruptive to educational process. There is already a dress code in black shapeless garments which totally hide their physical shape, and which also covers their heads and faces. Is this uniform also disruptive?

2014 #iammorethanadistraction #DressPolice
Students protest 'slut shaming' high school dress codes with mass walkouts Students around US organise protests after administrators have made them wear 'shame suits' or mandate hemline limits. Studen protests complain at the way girls have been “humiliated” and forced to cover up accusing schools of sexism and so-called “slut shaming”. There is a problem here of state power getting confused with matters of good taste. The state can not mandate "good taste". Student Forced to Wear 'Shame Suit' for Dress Code Violation. Such an approach condoned boys seeing women as sexual objects, said Huffman. "It perpetuates the idea that girls need to conform to satisfy the males. If girls are getting harassed, we should blame the boys, not the girls."

Boys / Men are not allowed to get away with criminal behavior or be conditioned to think "she wore it" so she must be asking for it, it's her fault. This is exactly what leads to the brutal behavior witnessed inside the University Fraternity over and over again, where women have been made into sex objects then raped.

9/19/14 Obama and Biden launched "It's On Us" -- an awareness campaign to put an end to sexual assault on college campuses (fact sheet). The campaign asks everyone -- men and women -- to make a personal commitment to step off the sidelines and be part of the solution. An estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years. Of those assaults, only 12% are reported. Of those reported assaults, only a fraction of the offenders are punished. (Note: The Obama Administration has taken steps to help bring an end to campus sexual assaults by sending guidance to every district, college, and university on legal obligations to prevent and respond to sexual assaults; creating the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to work with colleges and universities on developing critical best practices; and reviewing existing laws to make sure they adequately protect victims of sexual assault.)

2013 In Mississippi, if kindergarteners violate the dress code or act out in class, they may end up in the back of a police car. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But incidents such as this are happening across Mississippi. A report, Handcuffs on Success: The Extreme School Discipline Crisis in Mississippi Public Schools," exposes just how bad it's become. The report examined more than 100 school districts and claimed that black students are affected by harsh disciplinary actions at a much greater rate than their white peers. October, 2012 the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against officials in Meridian, Miss., for operating a school-to-prison pipeline. Mississippi ranks sixth lowest among the 50 states in graduation rates. On a recent Science and Engineering Readiness Index, the state ranked 50th for high school students on their performance in physics and calculus. It came in last on the National Assessment of Educational Progress survey in 2012.

Suggestions and Descriptions of Model Programs

About one in four public elementary schools and one in eight public middle and high schools in the USA have policies dictating what a student wears to school, says David Brunsma, a sociologist who wrote Uniforms in Public Schools: A Decade of Research and Debate in 2005.

Ivy League Plaid Has Always Been Acceptable

Plaid is always acceptable.

*1850 *Woolrich unveils the two-tone plaid Buffalo Check shirt, which is still available today. According to the Pennsylvania-born company's history books, the pattern designer owned a herd of buffalo.
There is a legend about Native Americans who encountered a "Buffalo plaid" fabric pattern, best known in its red & black manifestation on the "lumberjack shirt" worn by Big Jack MacCluskey, a late-19th century Scottish settler in western Canada. They had never seen cloth dyed a brighter red, & thus believed it to have been made from the blood of his enemies and prey.

Now thanks to icons like Steve Jobs: 40 years later they are called "power jeans" which are increasingly common in high-ranking business and political circles. Jeans are now a legitimate part of the global power-dress lexicon, worn to influential confabs where the wearers want to signal they're serious - but not fussy - and innovative. Many leaders wear jeans for a power look, like Barack Obama. Traditionally cut blue jeans carry a whiff of the laborer about them, so denim on a leader suggests a willingness to roll up the sleeves and dig in. There's also something of the rebel in a pair of jeans. In the boardroom, that can read as creative.
But jeans must be carefully paired with a pressed shirt and good shoes to be elevated to business class. And some industries haven't (yet) become open to denim as power wear. Banks and accounting-firm boardrooms, for instance, remain decidedly woolen. New York-based career adviser Jonscott Turco says jeans are generally a "no-brainer" in the media, manufacturing and creative industries, but not in financial services and law firms.

2016 Palantir is the Palo Alto, California, data analytics company co-founded and backed by billionaire Peter Thiel and does work for the CIA and FBI went to the Pentagon to bid on a contract wearing slacks and an unbuttoned dress shirt without a tie so they lost the contract.

Commercializing, marketing, merchandising the poor is historically rooted in ideas about sex, morals AND CLASS from Victorian England.

THE BOSTON BRAHMINS

THE RUNGS ON THE LADDER OF JUDGEMENT

CLASS = STATUS = WEALTH = DISPLAY = DRESS = SPEECH = MORALS = HIGH BROW VS LOW BROW

2016 Why do we have Dresscode Rules in the Courtroom?

"NO PAJAMA'S IN THE COURTROOM"
Judge Craig Long recently put up a sign in the lobby of his courtroom. It says, "pajamas are not appropriate attire for district court." Long says he's seeing more and more people coming into his courtroom wearing pajama bottoms. He hopes the sign will help people know his rules. “We have a growing problem of people not dressing appropriately for court. And I just put it out there as a reminder of the code of conduct that should be followed when appearing in court. It's not a law. It's not a rule or something that we can enforce. It's just basically a reminder,” Long said.

Historical Fashions and Vintage Clothing Styles Archives 1880s - 1930s Men's and Women's Clothing Styles on Board the Steamships

Background Story: Poverty in Victorian England.
Villanova professor SETH KOVEN explores the remote, difficult world of Victorian philanthropy and brings to life the wealthy men and women and their relations with the poor and the slum-dwellers.
His book is "Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London."
Chapter from "Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London" Seth Koven
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7850.html
and
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7850.pdf

<snip>
"The intimate, turbulent, and often surprising relationship between benevolence and sex, rich and poor, in Victorian London is my subject. I came to this topic circuitously through the history of elite men's and women's philanthropic endeavors to bring "sweetness and light" to the dark spaces and dirty inhabitants of the metropolis. As I immersed myself deeply in the sources, I found it impossible to keep sex, sexual desire, and sexuality out of their story. So what began as an inquiry into class-bridging institutions and social welfare programs took on a life of its own, propelled by several insights. First, it became clear that debates about "social" questions such as homelessness, social hygiene, childhood poverty, and women's work were often sparked by and tapped into anxieties about sex, sexuality, and gender roles. To understand how elite men and women thought about the poor required me to reckon with how they thought about sex, gender, and themselves. Second, I discovered that the widely shared imperative among well-to-do men and women to traverse class boundaries and befriend their outcast brothers and sisters in the slums was somehow bound up in their insistent eroticization of poverty and their quest to understand their own sexual subjectivities. But how and why were these movements, both literal and imaginative, connected? And what were the consequences of such linkages for the histories of class, gender, sexuality, and welfare? An inquiry into the set of social practices and relations that Britons called slumming promised a means to untangle and knit together in a new way the history of sexual and social politics. Once I started looking for slumming, it was hard not to find it everywhere." </snip>

CHARACTER EDUCATION: What does it mean to be an educated person?

Crippled by Their Culture

Crippled by Their Culture By THOMAS SOWELL
Wall Street Journal April 26, 2005; Page A14
Mr. Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution 4/17/05 (his comments start about 1/2 way through the program)
"For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population -- whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever -- have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race -- that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.
Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.
If this disparity is not due to race, it is equally hard to explain by racism. To a racist, one black is pretty much the same as another. But, even if a racist somehow let his racism stop at the water's edge, how could he tell which student was the son or daughter of someone born in the West Indies or in Africa, especially since their American-born offspring probably do not even have a foreign accent?
What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior.
There have always been large disparities, even within the native black population of the U.S. Those blacks whose ancestors were "free persons of color" in 1850 have fared far better in income, occupation, and family stability than those blacks whose ancestors were freed in the next decade by Abraham Lincoln.

What is not nearly as widely known is that there were also very large disparities within the white population of the pre-Civil War South and the white population of the Northern states.

Although Southern whites were only about one-third of the white population of the U.S., an absolute majority of all the illiterate whites in the country were in the South.
The North had four times as many schools as the South, attended by more than four times as many students.
Children in Massachusetts spent more than twice as many years in school as children in Virginia. Such disparities obviously produce other disparities. Northern newspapers had more than four times the circulation of Southern newspapers. Only 8% of the patents issued in 1851 went to Southerners. Even though agriculture was the principal economic activity of the antebellum South at the time, the vast majority of the patents for agricultural inventions went to Northerners. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Northerner.
Disparities between Southern whites and Northern whites extended across the board from rates of violence to rates of illegitimacy. American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville.
None of these disparities can be attributed to either race or racism.

Many contemporary observers attributed these differences to the existence of slavery in the South, as many in later times would likewise attribute both the difference between Northern and Southern whites, and between blacks and whites nationwide, to slavery. But slavery doesn't stand up under scrutiny of historical facts any better than race or racism as explanations of North-South differences or black-white differences.

The people who settled in the South came from different regions of Britain than the people who settled in the North -- and they differed as radically on the other side of the Atlantic as they did here -- that is, before they had ever seen a black slave.

Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved.

When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?

CULTURE IS LEFT

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" [ Cracker - A Cracker is a Creagaire: a hard, misely person ] before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity.
Crackers By the 1760s the English, both at home and in colonial America, were applying the term (cracker) to Scots-Irish settlers of the southern backcountry in southern Georgia and northern Florida.

Amazing Origin of the words
KU KLUX KLAN, CRACKER, and JIM CROW

Cracker - A Cracker is a Creagaire: a hard, misely person


That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.{source} (MUSIC BELOW)
Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks -- not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow.

Hear Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style and you can hear it.

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.
Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that -- and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it.

Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of ghettos, whether in the North or the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" culture -- and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with.

CULTURE OF HONOR

Teachers, Dress Code, Evolutionary Psychology, Culture of Honor, Reputation

An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Cultures of Honor
Evolutionary Psychology 3: 381-391 Todd K. Shackelford, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Psychology,
2912 College Avenue, Davie, Florida 33314, USA.
Abstract: A key element of cultures of honor is that men in these cultures are prepared to protect with violence the reputation for strength and toughness. Such cultures are likely to develop where (1) a man's resources can be thieved in full by other men and (2) the governing body is weak and thus cannot prevent or punish theft. Historically a herding culture operating outside of formal government, the southern United States has a rich culture of honor. In this article, I briefly review research conducted by Nisbett, Cohen, and colleagues on the southern culture of honor. I then present several important but unanswered questions about the development and maintenance of the southern culture of honor. I next argue that current models of the development and maintenance of cultures of honor and violence can be informed by an evolutionary psychological perspective. I conclude with a tentative evolutionary psychological analysis of the development and maintenance of the southern culture of honor.

Bryan Palmer explains the connections between
charivari, rough music and forerunners of the KKK.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
If people want to use honor to achieve moral and political ends, they have to use it well, not just wield it willy-nilly. To motivate honor, you have to be honorable yourself. And, sadly, too many of those who speak of this concept get it twisted.
Honor's a powerful concept that can either spark moral progress or shame once-great nations. Honor's an ambiguous, subjective concept, one mixed with morality, reason and social custom. “Honor involves being entitled to respect. To care about you honor is to care not just about being respected, but also being entitled to respect.” Honor must be earned, and stems from a system of codes that prescribe and define “respectable” behavior.
“The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, explores the ways in which this seemingly obsolete concept helped dismantle three contemptible traditions: dueling in Britain, footbinding in China and the Atlantic Slave trade. And these case studies, he says, provide clues on how mankind can use honor to eradicate today's equally shameful practices, like “honor killings” in Pakistan.

Honor is not just a concept, it's a biological function.

“Social psychologists,” Appiah writes in “Honor Codes,” “acknowledge a fundamental human disposition to care about hierarchy and respect, with respect understood as something that is derivative of hierarchy.” We humans, in all of our social glory, crave respect, and not receiving it, or being actively dishonored, can have devastating results, as we saw too clearly in a recent series of gay suicides.
“We're social creatures and part of our sociability consists in requiring the respect of our fellows in order to flourish. To be denied that respect is a terrible burden.” Appiah's assertion helps shed light on key aspect of honor — its “what,” respect, only works when coupled with a “who.” Yes, identity, as happens, plays a significant, three-pronged, role in honor.
The first way identity figures is within the honor world, “The class of people giving and taking of respect matters.” Then honor and one's own identity have an interaction, typically along gendered lines. And, finally, honor influences shared identities, often through nationalism, which is exactly what happened when China abandoned footbinding at the end of the 19th century.
Though there were already laws prohibiting footbinding and a vocal movement against the practice, for centuries considered “honorable” among the elite, it wasn't until China began interacting with more industrialized states that the nation as a whole was forced to either defend or discard this honor. They chose the latter.
Laws and activism alone don't work; minds, and a collective sense of honor, must be channelled in new directionThe press can play a significant role in raising awareness, and sometimes shame, to help dismantle “dishonorable” actions. The state, too, helps. In order for honor to flow toward a more righteous end, there must be a shared level of respect, the aforementioned honor world's must be expanded. A counter protest, led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, called “Rally to Restore Sanity,” which, amusing as it may be, does nothing to help create the dialogue needed to save America's honor.

 

Nobrow:

The Culture of Marketing,

the Marketing of Culture

Highbrow, Lowbrow, or Nobrow
December 14, 1999 GUESTS: JOHN SEABROOK *Staff Writer at the New Yorker *Author
"It used to be that reading poetry, going to the opera, or attending art galleries meant you were part of the cultural elite. Watching television and mainstream movies, and listening to top 40 hits was considered more common, a kind of cultural slumming. In America, where equality is the ideal, people don't like to talk about class distinctions, but they love to show it. But lately, it's getting harder to distinguish one from the other as professional wrestlers become governors, Michael Graves makes high priced teapots for Target, and Metallica dabbles in symphonic music. Join Michael Krasny and guests as they take a look at the changes in culture and class: High-brow, Low-brow or No-brow?"
Nobrow: that the distinction between high culture and low culture has collapsed, making the idea of highbrow and lowbrow absurd. If, after all, the home of serious, complex journalism, hitherto unworried by such troubling concepts as marketing and sales, was now running features on rap musicians and chasing a fragmented mass market, what hope was there for those who thought of themselves as the cultural elite?

Culture of Celebrity - "culture" no longer, for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. "The celebrity, is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness". Boorstin

>Zoot Suit Drape Shape and Reet Pleats Cab Calloway knew something about extreme styles. In his The Hepster's Dictionary he listed "ZOOT (adj.): exaggerated." Just under it, necessarily, was "ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit." He makes it sound patriotic, but some Americans looked at the zoot suit and were as horrified as only an older generation looking at the peculiarities of a younger generation can be. If the zoot suit was truly American, so were the anxieties it caused, and the race riots it sparked. Kathy Peiss, a professor of American history, has looked at these interpretations of a peculiar garment, its history, and its influence.Harold Fox, Who Took Credit For the Zoot Suit, Dies at 86

Dress Codes of Mexican Gangs
In the early 1930's and 1940's the fashionable Zoot Suits were inherited from a man named Mickey Garcia. The Zoot Suit or the Pachuco look is composed of a felt hat with a long feather in it called a “tapa” or “tanda”. The shirt was creased and called a “lisa”. A “carlango” or long, loose fitting coat was used. The shoes, known as “calcos”, were French toe style or Stacey Adams brand and were constantly shined. To perfect the style a long chain was attached to a belt loop that hung past the knees and into the side pocket of the pants (Valdez, 2000).