Nosaka Nagisa: The Japan Sumo Association Sporting Guidelines, Chapter 6, Competitor Regulations, Article 39, Paragraph 2, stipulate that female competitors will wear the mawashi over a leotard, and it is preferred that they wear a brassiere. The rules are the rules, and I kept to them to become number one in the world. But, I actually want to take it off. I want to do sumo in a mawashi alone.
Yokuta Beruko: So... you're an exhibitionist?
Nosaka: (bright red) I'm not! I wanted to be a rikishi! And rikishi are naked, right?!
Yokuta Beruko: So... you're an exhibitionist?
Nosaka: (bright red) I'm not! I wanted to be a rikishi! And rikishi are naked, right?!
Throughout history, various societies and organizations have mandated different styles of clothing in particular settings. And throughout history, people have sometimes chafed against these standards for what is considered appropriate to wear.
This is most often a trope seen with female characters, since expected fashions for women have historically often been more restrictive than men's dress codes. It can also potentially show up in a Law Procedural or other legal context: for example, in the United States, Title VII of the 1965 Civil Rights Act
disallows dress codes that discriminate by race, sex, religion, or against other protected classes. In Japanese school settings, Nonconformist Dyed Hair can come into play: Japanese school dress codes typically forbid students to dye their hair, so adolescents with unusual hair colors or styles can be seen as delinquents and be told to dye it the more typical black—even if it's their natural color.
Supertrope of Anti-School Uniforms Plot, where a full storyline is built around a revolt against a school dress code. If a character reacts by customizing their uniform while still technically following the dress code, it overlaps with Non-Uniform Uniform.
See also Our Nudity Is Different, where acceptable levels of skin exposure are different in other cultures, and Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child, where a parent or guardian wishes their child would conform more to standard gender roles including clothing.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bloom Into You: Koyomi ditches the ribbon on her school uniform because she thinks it's cute, and she has a strong dislike of cute things.
- Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Nosaka Nagisa has wanted to be a sumo wrestler all her life and is now the women's world champion, but the dress code for women's sumo requires a rikishi to wear a leotard under her mawashi belt, preferably with a bra. She dreams of being able to fight in just the mawashi since the male rikishi she admires get to. After joining the main cast's adult modeling agency, Nosaka gets to fulfill her dream and faces off against Eve Ogundipe in the Tournament Arc in just a mawashi and nipple pasties. (The pay-per-view tournament doesn't have a dress code aside from broadcast regulations not allowing competitors to go fully topless, at least not on purpose.)
- Sailor Moon: Subverted with Makoto Kino. Her wavy auburn hair and a school uniform with long sleeves and long skirt make the teachers think she's a typical delinquent who has dyed and permed her hair against school rules and is flouting their uniform. Turns out, the hair color and its wavy texture are her own by nature, and her uniform is that of her prior school, as her new school doesn't offer one in her size.
- Wasteful Days of High School Girls: In the second episode, the homeroom teacher, dubbed "Waseda" by the girls, asks Minami "Yamai"note Yamamoto why she has blonde hair, questioning if she was trying to look like a foreigner. She tells him she's half Dragonian and half Altamian. He tells her to bring a birth certificate later. Then he asks Akane "Wota"note Kikuchi why her hair is a bit lighter and her skirt a bit shorter than the day before. She strikes a demure pose and suggests it's because she's half-Chochiki and half-Hokkaido (areas known for wearing short skirts and for coloring their hair respectively). "Waseda" shrugs it off by saying, "Well, that settles that." Wota angrily retorts, "No, that doesn't settle that! How about a witty comeback or something?!"
Comic Books
- Berrybrook Middle School: One subplot revolves around a girl being expelled for donning Sailor Moon cosplay instead of clothes approved in the dress code.
Film — Animated
- Wendell & Wild: Once Kat is relocated to the RBC school, she finds that she is expected to wear a uniform. Being a Goth, she decides to wear it her own way: she tears the skirt and stitches it back up with safety pins and keeps wearing her black platform boots instead of the shoes that came with the uniform.
Literature
- The Berenstain Bears: In the Big Chapter Book ...and the Dress Code, students at Bear Country School tend to try out new fashions in the spring. Miss Glitch, however, forces Queenie to go home and change one day because she doesn't approve of Queenie's outfit (a very short mini-skirt), resulting in students going more over-the-top than usual in support of her and culminating in a mass rebellion when Vice-Principal Grizzmeyer, who's temporarily in charge while Principal Honeycomb is away, tries to institute a school dress code that eventually boils down to banning any outfits he doesn't like.
- Dear America: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: Molly Flaherty leads a protest rally at her Catholic school against the dress code, during which the group defies it by wearing normal shirts and pants. It doesn't go as planned: they're all suspended and her parents blow up at her.
- This is the entire plot of the young adult novel Dress Coded by Carrie Firestone. Molly's middle school has a draconian dress code. Several teachers go out of their way to humiliate girls who violate it and it isn't enforced fairly. More developed girls are punished while flat-chested girls wearing the exact same outfits are ignored. So Molly organizes petitions and protests to try to get the dress code modified.
- Kris Longknife: Both Kris and Vicky Peterwald are deeply displeased at the standard dress uniform for female military officers in the Society of Humanity and later its successor states, which consists of a white business jacket and a shapeless long skirt.
- In Mutineer, Kris narrates when she has to wear one for an official function that it was clearly designed by male officers to make female officers as unattractive as humanly possible.
- In Target, Vicky outright refuses to wear the standard dress uniform and commissions one all her own from an admiral's fashion designer wife, ending up with a slinky white gown paired with a bolero-style jacket for her party salad.
- Invoked in RWBY: Roman Holiday. When Trivia/Neopolitan is sent to Lady Browning's Preparatory Academy For Girls, they are all expected to wear uniforms. Trivia, annoyed by this, rips up the uniform and makes a new outfit out of the pieces, shocking and appalling the other students. The teachers, however, reveal that it is that rebellion and creativity they are actually looking for, as they were actually a front for the criminal organization Spider training the girls to become spies and assassins.
Live-Action TV
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In "Pilot", when newly-instated Captain Holt commands that Jake wear a tie to work, Jake protests this by first wearing the tie under his shirt, then by wearing the tie properly, but with a speedo instead of pants (which backfires when Holt calls the rest of the precinct to come look at the speedo). Deconstructed when Jake discovers Holt's past as a shunned, openly-gay detective who has had to fight to get his own command, realizing that Holt's reasons for a dress code are benevolent.
Jake: Oh my god, I just got the tie thing! [...] It's a uniform! We're a team! It's important to you, because you were kept off the team for so long, and now you're the coach, so you want us all to wear the same uniform.
- Fam: In "It's Been A While", Clem and Nick go to the principal's office when Shannon is suspended for breaking the school's dress code. Clem gets into an argument with the principal over the sexist reasoning behind forcing a dress code onto girl but not boys.
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: In "Day Damn One", Will is adjusting to prep school and the uniform of navy blazer, button-down shirt, and tie. He first tries to wear the neck tie as a headband, claiming the rule book doesn't say HOW the tie should be worn. Seeing that the blazer is lined in a bright red print, he wears it with the liner facing out. The administration appears to just give up and he wears it like that until graduation.
- After happening upon Nurse Peter Riggs tending to patients in jeans and a T-shirt, Strong Medicine's hospital head Dr. Jackson goes on a rant about unprofessional dress and promptly sends out a memo specifying that nurses are to wear a proper nurse's uniform. So the next day, Peter shows up. . .in a nurse's uniform consisting of a white dress and cap. Dr. Jackson is even more infuriated, as Peter is now basically cross-dressing, but the latter calmly points out that he's following the instructions given.
Theatre
- Everybody's Talking About Jamie: Openly-gay Jamie New skirts the rules on dress code at his British public school multiple times, especially when news gets out he performed in a drag show. When the school bans him from dressing in his drag persona for prom, supposedly to prevent him from hogging attention, he shows up in a simple dress, explaining that the rule never said he couldn't wear a dress, just that he couldn't wear drag. Pressure from the other students eventually gets Miss Hedge to bend and let him into prom.
Video Games
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: Susan rebels against the newly mandated school uniforms (which she sees as too gendered since the women have to wear skirts) by wearing the boys' uniform. Tedd later stands in solidarity with her by wearing the vest from the girls' uniform, protesting that the girls having to wear vests when the boys don't is more ridiculous than just the skirt vs pants.
Real Life
- The Norwegian women's beach-handball team was fined $1770 in total because they wore shorts in protest during their 2021 bronze medal match. League regulations said female players had to wear bikini bottoms and the material MUST cover no more than 10cm on the sides. Restriction for men was the shorts "can't be too loose and SHOULD be 10cm above the knee".
