Holy Names Academy once banned blue jeans.

Luckily, Lakeside students have been fortunate enough to be graced with relatively lax clothing guidelines in recent years.

The wording of Lakeside’s less formal “dress code” also seems to reflect Lakeside’s culture of high student expectations, such as the slightly humorous wording of requiring clothing “suitable for the tasks at hand [that] provide coverage so when bodies are in motion, they stay covered.”

Thanks to a common intuition of appropriate fashion that most Lakesiders share, individualism and self-expression flourish on campus. But despite the triviality of what students are allowed to wear, it’s nothing to be taken for granted. But what about other Seattle area private schools?

Seattle Preparatory School:

What do crop tops, ripped jeans, and tube tops all have in common? Women’s fashion? Correct! Attire that Seattle Prep bans? Also correct!

Mia Lee, senior at Seattle Prep, returns to comment on Seattle Prep’s dress code that is “definitely targeted towards girls.”

She recalls the only time men violated the dress code was ripping Olympic Week (similar to May Day) shirts into muscle tees and toplessness at football matches. But for women, it’s a different story.

“If a girl is wearing a crop top and it’s showing like one inch of their stomach, they can get dress coded,” Mia explains. Indeed, Seattle Prep’s dress code explicitly requires clothing to cover the entire midriff and armpits. Holes in clothing are also forbidden; straps on tops are required.

“I don’t think you could call it a distraction if you’re showing not even an inch of your stomach at school,” she argues. “I think it’s even dumb to give someone a warning… it’s just a piece of clothing and a lot of the time, it’s not even that noticeable”

Punishment for showing off the midsection is JUG — ”Justice Under God” — a disappointingly ironic acronym that entails 30-120 minutes of window-scrubbing, file arrangement, or trash cleanup; most dress-code cases lie on the shorter end though.

However, Mia notes that it’s not wrongdoing that hurts the most; it’s the feeling of being called out and judged when receiving a warning.

“I understand they want us to look put together, but it’s really not a big deal,” she explains.

Another cause for outcry is the inconsistency where rules get applied. Certain teachers are a lot more lenient than others. However, stricter faculty, which mostly tend to be male, can dish out warnings or passive-aggressive “reminders” more often, Mia says.

Seattle Prep also has Mass — once a month religious gatherings where students are expected to dress more proper. Outlined in the mass dress code are “dress pants or a longer skirt/dress; a collared shirt, blouse, or sweater with sleeves.” Ties are “optional but encouraged.”

Ironically, for such a formal event, Mia notices that nobody gets dress-coded. Students wear what they usually would wear — perhaps just a bit longer, to be safe.

But things have gotten better. Two years ago, when the Dean of Students changed, the dress code changed. Now, spaghetti straps are back in style; once scrutinized, strap length is irrelevant as long as it is there.

Despite all the restrictions, Mia observes that students don’t actively try to change the rules. “Yes, we are annoyed that we get warned, but it probably won’t change their minds,” she says.

“To be fair, it is a private school, so they have the right to make these rules.”

Overlake School:

Vidhi Mehrotra, a senior at The Overlake School, explains that there was discussion about Overlake’s dress code when she was a 9th grader. That year, with a change of leadership, students attended an assembly as a reminder on guidelines and expectations. Among the expectations highlighted in the informational assembly was guidelines around dress.

But Vidhi explains that students understand what’s acceptable or not, because of what they see.

“Other students have been set as examples for being dress-coded,” she observes. “There was a student, I think last year, who wore a shirt about marijuana.” They were later instructed to swap his shirt for something less vulgar.

She also adds that when it comes to dress codes, issues mostly revolve around profane language or graphics rather than hemlines. After all, when it comes to length, Overlake’s website only dictates “A shirt, bottom, and footwear must be worn at all times.”

As another example, Vidhi introduced the entire school to a speaker from Claremont McKenna who connected the hip-hop industry and lyricism to current events. To match the theme, she decided to wear a shirt with a rap album cover. For readers unfamiliar with Kendrick Lamar’s fourth album… Damn.

Despite the prominent titular swear word displayed proudly on her t-shirt, Overlake allowed her to wear it — but only for the presentation.

However, Vidhi still emphasizes that dress has gotten less stringent as she moved into high school from Lake Washington School District’s Evergreen Middle School, where she had more quantitative restrictions like skirts not exceeding fingertip length.

Vidhi reasons that “my school is not religious. But we’re pretty liberal. People aren’t super biased towards genders in [fashion] at my school.” She clarifies that however, when people think of clothing length, it’s usually more focused on women.

It’s the same for the school’s unspoken mutually agreed dress code.

Eastside Preparatory School:

Thirty-four words. That’s the length of Eastside Prep’s (EPS) very short dress code: the shortest among schools mentioned thus far. It quickly goes over clothing “appropriate for a school environment,” banning “offensive, sexually suggestive, violent, drug/alcohol references.” In fact, the brevity skips over the requirement of footwear at all times, meaning that students can technically walk around barefoot (though it might raise more than a few eyebrows).

When asked about this, Summer Reese, sophomore at EPS, simply replies “Honestly I think they just don’t care too much.”

And indeed, this speaks to EPS’s lenient attitude towards the dress codes. “Everyone is comfortable with it,” Summer explains. “No one at my school really gets dress-coded.”

Funnily enough, fashion still sometimes takes an interesting turn. Freshman Thomas Diamantopoulos points out that once, he wore an all-blue outfit to school and was called a smurf.

Holy Names Academy:

In an all-girls Catholic school, the expectation would seem to be ironclad regulations around dress in particular. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that this is not the case.

“Holy Names girls are pretty radical, creative, and very expressive in their fashion,” says Aura Sukapanpotharam, senior at Holy Names Academy (HNA), who describes their dress code as “pretty relaxed and chill.”

“It has the very basic things, like no vulgar sayings,” she explains. “No unsafe things like heels or any difficult shoes to walk in because there’s a lot of stairs” — thanks to HNA’s quadruple-decker building. Overall, it allows for a lot of individual aesthetics with comfort.

But freedom of fashion wasn’t always a given at HNA. In fact, just a few years ago when Aura was still a freshman, leggings and pajama pants were the trend.

“They said that sleepwear, pajamas, and loungy clothing are technically not permitted in the dress code,” Aura explains, “But there was a point in time where everyone was just wearing pretty much pajamas to school and they had to crack down on that.” The reasoning was that HNA “wanted to prepare us for more professional settings especially since we were so used to these ‘slouchy’ clothes coming out of quarantine.”

Holy Names is still a religious school though, and despite its “relatively diverse and not traditional” student body, Aura explains that wacky rules have still existed — such as a ban of blue jeans in particular several years ago.

“I don’t know why specifically, but I know because some people bring it up from time to time,” she says. “It’s part of Holy Names lore.”

Last year, however, the administration acknowledged the prevalence of comfortable clothing and decided they were fine. Though there was no specific movement to thank for this change, Aura reasons that the adults likely decided that comfortable clothing wasn’t a considerable impediment to learning.

HNA’s origin comes from a trio of sisters who founded the academy, and so modesty has been a value. But times have changed, and so their dress code has too.

Specific items on the code though include covering the “three B’s” — bust belly, and bottom, covering tattoos and piercings (ear piercings and nose studs excluded), no slippers or heels (once again, stairs), no excessive makeup, skirts past the mid-thigh, and lastly, hats without bills.

Though slightly more stringent than most other schools, it’s “pretty basic stuff,” Aura says. She adds that nobody gets dress-coded anyway… except during liturgy, unlike Seattle Prep’s relatively casual Mass.

When students go to church roughly monthly, more formal clothing is necessary. Perhaps it’s time to skip the hoodie and ripped jeans and put on a dress or cardigan, Aura explains.

Ultimately, she explains that since the dress code fits well with how students “expect the school environment to be,” the rules generally aren’t a point of contention.

“HNA is more stringent than public schools, but honestly one of the chillest religious private high schools,” Aura elaborates. “Dress coding is so rare that I haven’t heard about someone getting reprimanded in a long time.”

Last, she points out that the dress code isn’t something “you think about when getting dressed in the morning.” Thankfully, a sentiment shared among most, if not all Seattle area private schools.