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Clothing, like other aspects of human physical appearance, has various social aspects, and dress codes are the rules that organize them. Dress codes may apply by law, for employees, pupils and students, sometimes as a uniform, for customers of venues such as nightclubs and restaurants, and on special occasions and in social life in general, ranging from formal white tie to casual dress.
For the invitation and workplace codes in full — white tie, black tie, cocktail, semi-formal, business formal and smart casual — see Dress Codes Explained, our guide to the complete formality ladder, and the business formal attire guide for the boardroom standard in full.
For example, wearing expensive clothes can be due to (a combination of)
An observer can see the resultant, expensive clothes, but may be wrong about the extent to which the four factors apply. See also conspicuous consumption. All factors apply reversely for wearing cheap clothes, and similarly for other goods such as a house, a car, etc.
Other messages clothing can give:
Dress codes may apply:
Almost universally nudity in a public place is illegal, except in special nudist areas, which exist in fairly many countries. (However, among some peoples full nudity is accepted or the norm.) For woman bare breasts are also often illegal. In a non-public place nudity tends to be forbidden if another person is unwillingly confronted with it.
Wearing only underwear is sometimes also illegal, and in some countries even less bare skin may already be illegal, especially for women.
Cross-dressing may also be illegal, especially a man wearing women's clothing.
In Tonga it is illegal for men to appear in public without shirt.
Dress codes function on certain social occasions and for certain jobs. A school or a military institution may require specified uniforms; if it allows the wearing of plain clothes it may place restrictions on their use. A bouncer of a disco or nightclub may judge visitors' clothing and refuse entrance to those not clad according to specified or intuited requirements: for example an establishment may not allow the wearing of sport shoes.
A formal or white tie dress code typically means Tail-coats for men and full-length evening dresses for women. Semi-formal has a much less precise definition but typically means an evening jacket and tie for men (known as black tie) and a dress for women. Lounge suit also known as Business casual typically means not wearing jeans or track suits, but wearing instead collared shirts, and more country trousers (not black, but more relaxed, including things such as corduroy). Casual typically just means clothing for the torso, legs and shoes.
Transparent or semi-transparent clothing can play with the boundaries of dress-codes regarding modesty, for example: in a wet T-shirt contest.
Dress codes usually set forth a lower bound on body covering. However, sometimes it can specify the opposite, for example, in UK gay jargon, dress code, means people who dress in a militaristic manner. Dress code nights in nightclubs, and elsewhere, are deemed to specifically target people who have militaristic fetishes (e.g. leather/skinhead men).
Setting a dress code can often lead to great embarrassment. One particularly famous example is that of UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who asked the Bank of England's board to wear lounge suits to their annual dinner, a highly prestigious occasion, as an act of modernism in tune with New Labour thinking (they usually wore white tie). However, he had not reckoned with their determination not to kow-tow, and when sat at dinner, he was the only person not dressed in white tie, to his humiliation, and the glee of the UK broadsheets.
See also shoe etiquette.
Many of the stores and restaurants on or near beaches have such dress codes but do not enforce them. For example, the Sunnyside Cafe, located at the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion in Toronto, Canada, often does not enforce the "shirts, shoes" dress code.
The "no shoes, no shirt" slogan appears so prevalently in some settings that it has become the target of mockery and flagrant disregard. Groups that don't like dress codes, such as bare-footers, often deliberately disregard this specific dress code, as a form of breaching experiment or beaching experiment. Such action research, as well as activism, including deliberate violation by lawyers (deliberately violating no-shirts and no-shoes laws), is becoming more common. Musicians have also mocked this dress code, for instance Kenny Chesney sings the song No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problems.Reverse dress codes, sometimes referred to as "undress codes", set forth an upper bound, rather than a lower bound, on body covering. An example of an undress code, is the one commonly enforced in modern communal bathing facilities. For example, in Schwaben Quellen no clothing of any kind is allowed. Other less strict undress codes are common in public pools, especially indoor pools, in which shoes and shirts are not allowed. This undress code is an exact reversal of the ubiquitous "no shoes, no shirt, no service" dress code that exists almost everywhere outside the public bathing environment.
Places where nudism is practiced may be "clothing optional", or nudity may be compulsory, with exceptions, see manners in nudism.
Various traditions suggests that certain items of clothing intrinsically suit different gender roles. In particular, the wearing of skirts and trousers has given rise to common phrases expressing implied restrictions in use and disapproval of offending behavior. For example, ancient Greeks often considered the wearing of trousers by Persian men as a sign of effeminacy.
Extreme flouting of conventions in this area may earn the label "cross-dressing".
Clothing deficiencies may reduce functionality and/or be unaesthetic, but also be considered socially improper. As far as other people know, a deficiency during the rest of the day after an "accident" such as a button falling off, a stain, or a tear, is more "forgivable" than putting on clothing like that on a new day. For poor people, deficiencies which are difficult or expensive to fix, these are not really improper, but just somewhat sad, but understandable.
Possible deficiencies in clothing itself may include:
One or more safety pins may temporarily alleviate some of these imperfections.
Possible inappropriate clothing relative to the person wearing it includes garments:
Possible "inappropriate" or socially unacceptable ways of wearing clothing include:
Possible "inappropriate" or socially unacceptable situations of wetness include:
Possible inappropriateness regarding day-to-day variation of clothing:
Possible inappropriateness of clothing relative to the occasion (note also the concept of dress code):
Of course some of these clothing faux pas may occur intentionally for reasons of fashion or personal preference. For example, people may wear intentionally oversized clothing. For instance, the teenage boys of rap duo Kris Kross wore all of their clothes backwards and extremely baggy.
A common deliberate violation of clothing taboos is the removal of the shirt, together with pulling down the pants to show the underpants
The trend in underwear has moved toward underwear that looks less like underwear, e.g. instead of white briefs that say "Mr Brief" or "Fruit of the Loom" in large letters around the waistband, trends have shifted toward undergarments that look like bathing suits or beach shorts. However, some people are going back to the plain white underwear with bold underwear-like lettering around the waistband, i.e. familiar underwear brand names around the waistband, to enhance the violation of the taboo against showing underwear as a fashion statement. For women, deliberately showing bra straps has also become fashionable.
Mooning is the deliberate baring of the buttocks as a gesture of teasing or contempt.
Some people strip down to their underwear as a fashion statement, as a form of protest, or to get attention (i.e. for advertisement), in cases where one does not want to go as far as being nude. As a fashion statement, Tommy Hilfiger ran a series of large billboard advertisements showing mixed-gender groups wearing only their underwear in public. For example, groups were shown at outdoor splash areas, frolicking in nothing but their underwear. This implied a certain spontaneity, as one might find at an urban beach where people decide to strip to their underwear to cool off in a fountain on a hot summer day. Traditionally, people would need a bathing suit, but because of the popularization of underwearing, the taboo against showing underwear has been weakened, and in some ways reversed, making the showing of underwear actually fashionable.
Some groups protesting against fur have adopted the phrase "I'd rather be in my underwear than wear fur". Members may confirm their words by stripping to their underwear in public.
As a form of attention-getting, freshpair.com has created "National Underwear Day" and had large numbers of models walk through Times Square wearing nothing but their underwear. This helped to draw tremendous attention to the day and to freshpair.com.
Social attitudes to clothing have brought about various rules and social conventions, such as keeping the body covered, and not showing underwear in public. The backlash against these social norms has become a traditional form of rebellion.
Also, during the 2001 anthrax attacks, large numbers of people stripped to their underwear in parking lots and other public places, for hosing down by fire departments, often in front of TV news crews covering the events.
On the other hand, some people are unwilling to violate their self-imposed and fully internalized social norms of body covering, even in a situation where mass stripdowns and washdowns could save their lives.
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Clothing, like other aspects of human physical appearance, has various social aspects. Wearing specific types of clothing, or wearing clothing in a particular manner, can have the deliberate purpose, or the desirable or undesirable side-effect, of being interpreted in terms of class, income, belief and attitude. An observer who sees expensive clothes may conclude that the wearer is rich, likes to spend money on clothing, spends a large part of income on clothing, or managed to obtain clothing cheaper than usual, and may be wrong about the extent to which any of those factors apply; all of them apply in reverse for cheap clothes, and similarly for other goods such as a house or a car. Other messages clothing can give include stating or claiming identity, and establishing, maintaining and defying social group norms. A dress code exists wherever a setting tries to control those messages in advance, telling people which signals are wanted and which are barred before they walk in.
Dress codes may apply in several distinct ways. They apply by law in some places, for employees, pupils and students, sometimes as a uniform and sometimes depending on the day, as with Casual Friday and business casual attire. They apply to customers, for example for a disco, nightclub or casino, or as more relaxed rules such as shoes required and not bare chested in shops and restaurants. They apply on special parties, where sometimes a special kind of clothes is the theme of the party, and they apply in social life in general, where an invitation's wording quietly sets the standard. A school or military institution may require specified uniforms, and if it allows plain clothes it may place restrictions on their use. A bouncer at a disco or nightclub may judge visitors' clothing and refuse entrance to those not clad according to specified or intuited requirements, for example an establishment that does not allow sport shoes.
The named levels of formality form the best-known dress code vocabulary. A formal or white tie dress code typically means tail-coats for men and full-length evening dresses for women. Semi-formal has a much less precise definition but typically means an evening jacket and tie for men, known as black tie, and a dress for women. Lounge suit, also known in effect as business dress, typically means not wearing jeans or track suits, but wearing instead collared shirts and more relaxed country trousers, including things such as corduroy. Casual typically just means clothing for the torso, legs and shoes, a floor rather than a style. Misreading the level has social costs: setting a dress code can lead to great embarrassment, as when UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown asked the Bank of England's board to wear lounge suits to their annual dinner, an occasion where they usually wore white tie, and found himself the only person at dinner not in white tie.
Dress codes usually set forth a lower bound on body covering, backed in many places by law: almost universally, nudity in a public place is illegal except in special nudist areas, and rules such as the American 'no shoes, no shirt, no service' signs at restaurants and shopping malls set minimum standards for customers. But codes can also run in reverse. Reverse dress codes, sometimes called undress codes, set forth an upper bound rather than a lower bound on body covering, as in modern communal bathing facilities where no clothing of any kind is allowed, or public pools, especially indoor pools, in which shoes and shirts are not allowed. Between legal minimums, institutional uniforms, venue rules and social levels like white tie, black tie and business casual, the dress code is the point where clothing stops being only personal choice and becomes a shared language a group uses to recognize appropriate dress on sight.
A dress code is a set of expectations or rules about what clothing is appropriate or required in a setting. Dress codes may apply by law, for employees and students, sometimes as a uniform, for customers of venues, and at parties and social occasions.
A formal or white tie dress code typically means tail-coats for men and full-length evening dresses for women. Semi-formal typically means an evening jacket and tie for men, known as black tie, and a dress for women, while lounge suit or business dress means collared shirts and trousers rather than jeans or track suits.
The aphorism 'no shoes, no shirt, no service' captures a commonly promulgated dress code in America, appearing on signs at commercial establishments such as restaurants and shopping malls. It sets a minimum standard of body covering and footwear for customers to be served.