Brotherhood of the drooping pants
Fashion police alert: If your underwear routinely shows above the waistband of your trousers, then you’d best stay out of Ocala, Fla. On July 15, Ocala city council joined legislators in several U.S. cities by voting unanimously to ban the wearing of sagging pants on city-owned or leased property, including sidewalks, streets and parks. First-time offenders would receive a warning. If caught again, they would face up to six months in jail plus a $500 fine.
Ocala Councilwoman Mary Sue Rich waged a five-year battle to have the measure enacted. The ordinance applies to men and women alike, but Rich seems concerned only with men’s southern exposure.
“I’m just tired of looking at young men’s underwear,” she told ABC News. “It’s just disrespectful.”
Apparently a young woman sporting a “whale’s tail” (thong panties visible above the waistband of low-rise jeans) doesn’t bother the councilwoman.
It’s not clear if Ocala Mayor Kent Guinn will sign the anti-sag legislation into law.
“I don’t think it’s a good law,” Guinn told media. “When we start getting into creating laws that prohibit peoples’ freedom of expression and the way they dress, I think you’re getting into some dangerous territory.”
I agree.
I’m no fan of the “gangsta” culture that spawned sagging trousers: I’ll take my baggy pants on circus clowns and Vaudeville comedians, thank you. Legislation that attempts to force people to adhere to someone else’s sense of style smacks of totalitarianism, primarily because the wearing of extreme fashions seldom has dire consequences. True, in 1927 dancer Isadora Duncan was strangled to death in France when her extremely long scarf became entangled in the rear wheel of her open touring car. But that was a stretch. French authorities didn’t pass laws mandating enclosed cars or banning the wearing of scarfs in automobiles.
A few examples of fashion disasters that ended peacefully:
• Codpieces: Although pants were around for millennia, English men in the Elizabethan era thought it infinitely more stylish to wear hose (two separate hose, by way of explanation to those born A.P. – After Pantyhose). This left the crotch covered only by a pair of linen drawers. With modesty in mind, designers rushed to cover the Devil’s Triangle with the codpiece, which soon became ornamental, longer and bulkier. Gentlemen insisted the changes were for protection, not protrusion. Fie on’t! Luckily, codpieces fell out of favor – except among some rock musicians – in the late 15th century.
• Madras shirts with matching belts, wheat-colored Wrangler jeans and penny loafers without socks: If you were a boy in 1965, you wore this combination or risked being shunned by those who did. Adults didn’t seem to mind the trend, but an overzealous teacher at my school sent home one unfortunate lad because he put nickels in his penny loafers. It was the same teacher who, the year before, forced girls to don bobby sox if they wore tennis shoes because she thought the wearing of nylons with tennis shoes too provocative. All this aside, there were no casualties of Madras Revolution of ’65. Madras bled; its wearers did not.
• Parachute and “Hammer” pants: A 1980s phenomenon, parachute pants, usually made of nylon, had a tight waist but baggy legs with elastic cuffs. Rapper MC Hammer took the style to the extreme by wearing modified harem pants. Seen in his video “U Can’t Touch This,” Hammer pants beg the follow-up musical question, “Who’d Want To?”
There’s no need to jockey for position in reacting to Ocala’s ordinance. Briefly put, city council overreacted. Drooping pants pose no threat to life and limb. Believe me: If even one person was killed by tripping over gangsta pants, FOX News would still be covering it.
My advice to Ocala and any community that wants to do a public service by policing wearing apparel: Start with old men in Speedos.