The Skinny Jean Fiasco

Your Parents Picketed against Vietnam. We picket for skinny jeans.

One crisis. Two frazzled administrators. Ten confused teachers. Two hundred distraught fifteen-year-old girls. The culprit: skinny jeans.

It was community service day. The sun shone brightly and faces and necks glistened with sweat. It was a day like most others in our beautiful town in Belize. Today students would be displaced throughout the community in order to complete acts of service, anything from cleaning yards to getting prolife-petition signatures. We split into groups with a teacher in charge of each group and prepared to leave the campus in order to execute our mission. As we gathered in the yard, tensions grew at the gate. Why weren't we leaving yet? We were all supposed to be on our various community service routes. We come to find out we are not leaving because the girls in skinny jeans are being examined and placed into two groups. The girls were specifically asked not to wear skinny jeans this day and were now facing the consequences. Miss B., like myself, was growing impatient to begin our service day.

Miss B: Why hasn’t your class left yet?
Mr. M: If your class isn’t going, then my class isn’t going. If your girls won’t work then my boys won’t work. We have to show them that we are serious about this. We have a sit-in so they will give us what we want.

Girls passionately plop onto the grass, justice blazing in their eyes. I can hear echoes in the distance of my mind: We won’t go down without a fight (a fight for trendy jeans?). Second , Third, and Fourth Form girls line up on the streets with jeans of a casual fit, jeans of a snug fit, and jeans in a third category of fit that is simply unable to be defined. Administration points to the “pass” and “fail” lines of skinny-jean acceptability. Young ladies everywhere erupt in disbelief and cry out against those chosen to “pass” and those chosen for the “fail” lines. (Is there such a thing as Calvinist predestination for skinny-jeandom?)

We, the other teachers, look around us in confusion: How much longer is this going to take? The boys classes, on the other hand, don't seem to mind the delay at all. They are stretched out on the field or busy chatting with the girls. The principal is then seen coming out of the building and I run to his side in order to find out a way to taper the tension rising on Mt. Carmel High School grounds.

“Mr. R,” I say, “I think we are losing the letter behind the law here.”
“Yes, yes, Miss Bethany, I agree.”
“Well maybe next time we have a casual day…”
Mr. R’s face grows serious and he looks at me and says, “Miss Bethany, there will not be a next time.”

Alas, casual days have become a rarity at MCHS. There was, though, a fashion show that displayed proper attire for MCHS dress-down-days at one point. The horror that next year’s casual day could bring is unknown to me and perhaps it will become a lost art for community service day. We can only wonder.