ALAN PERROTT discovers being unfashionable really can be a crime
KEY POINTS:
SURE there were a few frowns over my school ball cossie, but no matter how antsy the teachers got, I was never likely to be tossed in jail. If, instead, I'd been in another wrong place and time displaying excess undies or wearing a tent-sized zoot suit or in shoes way pointier than my social station, well, at best I'd have needed a lawyer, at worst, an undertaker.
Forget the frou-frou transvestites paraded along catwalks every year, these are acts that really do put crime into fashion. We may live in a fairly benign sartorial environment, but there is a long history of "the man" dictating what is and is not legally fashionable, and were not just talking all that Sharia Law burqa and beards carry-on.
It's seemingly all the rage in some slack-jawed US states where decent, right-thinking folk of a certain age are whipping themselves into an indignant lather over indecent, wrong-thinking folk of a certain age who favour strutting about in trousers at half-mast so the rest can admire their taste in underwear. While this could possibly be dealt with by pointing and laughing, progressive Louisiana burgs such as Delcambre, Kaplan, and Abbeville - with more on the way have - unanimously voted to make flashing your flashiest gruds punishable by six months in jail. But not to worry, it'll fade once the kids realise no babe worth impressing is interested in a bloke with his pants hanging around his knees. That's called natural selection, and while it's a theory rather than a law, it has proven most effective at shutting down dumb ideas.
Sag-hunts aside, most laws dealing with the shirts on our backs have historically been more about identifying haves from have-nots. They are called sumptuary laws, and date back to at least Grecian times when it was written that a free woman should not decorate herself with embroidery or gold jewellery unless she had a commercial interest in attracting male attention. But most were aimed at preventing the hoi polloi from looking like lords and noblemen - a personal favourite comes from 15th century England when too-long shoes were the saggy pants of the day. These shoes, called crackowes after the Polish city they came from, gradually stretched to such stupendous length that they required thin, gold chains to be attached to a gentleman's knees to hold them up. Anyway, because size did matter, a law was passed so that only nobles could have their toes reaching out to a cool 2ft (61cm). Gentleman could get away with up to 1ft, while commoners had to make do with a piddly six inches.
Still, these considerations arent too far from the logic that encouraged the United States to stamp out zoot suits in 1942.
For those who don't know Kid Creole and the Coconuts, these suits were vastly oversized, with legs wide enough for two and shoulder pads Joan Collins would cry for, preferably set off by a big hat with a feather in it.
Clearly very classy, but given the war and everything, the federal War Production Board decided they were a complete waste of fabric and had them banned. Patriotic troops went so far as to give the bash to any zoot suiter they saw and then, to discourage such profligate waste, they'd burn the suits in the street.
But similar crackdowns often come from the opposite direction. In Poland it's a concern about not enough fabric rather than too much that is pushing a bill to ban mini-skirts. According to the Catholic lawmaker driving the issue, mini-skirts are a central weapon in womens campaign to entice men into sex. It's no surprise that Mr Zawisza (Artur Zawisza, a Catholic member of the breakaway "Right of the Republic" party) is also seeking to ban heavy makeup and see-through or low-cut blouses.
For balance, it's men getting a caning in North Korea, where television is being used to instruct men in correct Communist hairstyles. The best bit is the official comb-over which allows men over 50 to grow their hair up to 7cm to disguise baldness. While the campaign isnt yet threatening prison, those with "bad" haircuts get put on telly so they can be publicly chastised.
All good fun, so let's have some more. Here are some fashion laws that may or may not still exist, but someone obviously thought they were a good idea at some time:
Alligator suits are illegal in Louisiana;
Male prison inmates in Iowa are restricted to wearing high-heels no higher than 5.7cm;
It's illegal for men in Miami to wear strapless gowns;
Women in Merryville, Missouri, are banned from wearing corsets, while women in Norfolk, Virginia, once couldn't go out without one they even had a corset inspector to make sure;
Students at Ireland's Trinity College were not allowed to walk about without carrying a sword;
In Vatican City special shoulder covers are available for women showing too much of a good thing.
And a good thing, too.
