Informal assignment #3 :change within the establishment

change within the establishment

tianzong 

(up: modified legs with short summer uniform. down: unmodified winter uniform)

If you are a student in China (below college level), you are very lucky, the same time very unlucky. Being a student in China you can receive the best and the most restrict fundamental education you can get in the world, academic-wise, of course, meanwhile you need to suffer from a series of meaningless rules that restrict your personal preference of life.  This includes fashion.

I lived in a city named Shenzhen (literally translated “deep hole”),in Canton, China, a place forty minutes to one hour drive from Hong Kong. Like other schools in other provinces and cities, we wear uniform during class time. Although Shenzhen is a fairly modern and developed city with over two million people, the school uniform is very poorly designed. 

I recall that we were actually quite satisfied with the summer sporting uniform consist of shirts (blue for boys and white for girls), and blue short pants, it was comfortable and helped to alleviate the heat of the summer. But when it came to the winter uniform, the student of the city thought did not accept it as it was. There is no style at all if compared to the uniform in other countries, Japan and Great Britain. The entire winter outfit was big and saggy, but most of all, my fellow classmates were outraged by the loose legs of the pants, therefore the students, both middle school and high school, launched a revolution in the style of uniform, against their schools.

In order to solve the problem of oversized pants legs, first they found tailors to slim the legs, making them very thin compare to the hip hop sized barrows. At the same time in terms of the size of uniforms,the they intentionally bought uniforms of smaller sizes; usually a guy who wore XL would got a L, and girls who wore M would got S. This changes were swiftly made and in very large scale, surprisingly. It was astonishingly fast that overnight the fashion in my school changed, most of my schoolmates, if not all, switched to individually tailored uniform pants with slim legs, as well as very short shirts. This became a change within the establishment, since what we changed was not the entire uniform system, but only modified some features of the uniform. Even so, the school would not bear such change.

Although it took a while for the school to respond, eventually later the school “outlawed” the modified types of uniform. But since it wasn’t written in book, students didn’t give a damn and continued to wear what they liked. The school heads saw that they claim didn’t really work as they expected, soon they informed the teachers to educate their students not to wear these slim pants to school, meanwhile they attacked the behavior of students using the public opinion. First the teachers told us that we should focus more on studying, and ridiculously tried to convey that slim legs were not good for our health because they limit the internal circulation, this worked a little bit just because they were the teachers and the authority.

After the school saw no progress in changing our dressing, the teachers who in charges of student discipline decided to enforce the school’s will: when the students on duty see you in those modified clothes, they would take points off from that class( like the schools in Harry Potter,  we did the same thing). Therefore in order to reduce the loss of the points, our teacher demanded us not to wear such uniforms, and overtime the number of students wearing slim pants dropped, also the laws of the school became loose, so the students switched to the tight, short pants again.

This “movement” was a great example of “crime on fashion”, despite the fact the laws of People’s Republic of China did not say that “the students shall not wear modified uniforms”. Look at this event from today’s view; I can’t see anything wrong about the students’ behavior that we have the rights to choose our own style, as long as it doesn’t violate the real rules.

I think what we violated was the will of the school, the establishment. It refers to the teachers, a few group of people who were able to make valid decisions and affect other people according to their own favor. Perhaps they thought the dressing of us weren’t decent enough that slim pants made us looked sexually provocative, and it was indeed changes that we put on our uniform that could be seen, therefore it’s a violation on the norm inside the school, it was a violation on the idea that the students should spend all their energy on academics instead of clothing. No matter what, the struggle on uniform was a precious memory for all the students that had gone though this struggle, whether we succeeded or not, we challenged the authority and projected our fashions.