High Schools Have Officially Declared War on Yoga Pants

Kim Kardashian, not a high school student, in yoga pants. Photo: Getty Images

Fashionable students at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School aren’t happy. An addendum to the dress code will require those that dare to wear yoga pants, cover them up with shorts or a skirt. But nearly 200 girls are planning to protest the ban with “First Day = Yoga Pants,” where they’ll show up breaking the new rule. “We can’t help we were born girls and we shouldn’t have to pay for it either because boys can’t ‘control’ themselves,” Seana Aiolupotea, an event organizer, wrote on Facebook.

The school’s principal, William Terranova, said, "It's absolutely about professional dress and making sure all students are work-ready." But Aiolupotea, who is senior class president, argues that not only are yoga pants trendy, they’re also affordable, with cash-strapped kids being able to purchase two pairs for the price of one pair of jeans.

The students at at Cape Cod Tech aren’t alone: Western High School in Parma, Michigan won’t allow its pupils to wear America’s pant du jour when they return to school in September: yoga pants are officially banned. Administrators revised the student handbook this summer, focusing on the dress code section that now bans yoga pants, leggings, and stretch pants from being worn to school when it starts on Tuesday, September 8, according to mlive.com. "We are not trying to impart style on our students,“ superintendent Mike Smajda said of the new rules, which also apply to Western Middle School. "We just want to eliminate disruptions and distractions.”

Various other changes have been made as well, including ensuring that shorts, skirts and dresses are mid-thigh length and formal dresses have to meet similar hem length requirements and not reveal excessive cleavage.

Despite yoga pants’ ever-growing popularity, there’s still a lot of backlash—and not just on school grounds. In February, a Montana lawmaker introduced House Bill 365 in the House Judiciary Committee that proposed extending the state’s indecent exposure law to include clothes that expose the nipples or give the appearance or simulate a person’s buttocks, genitals, pelvic area or female nipple. "Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway,“ the legislator said. The addition was eventually tabled.

Those without government access have taken issue with athleisure as well. Veronica Patridge, a Christian blogger, made a vow to no longer wear the leggings in public, a decision that weighed "heavy on her heart” for months after her husband confessed that it’s hard for him not to look at women’s derrieres clad in figure-hugging spandex. “I try not to, but it’s not easy,” he told her, according to her to blog. After making the pledge, she admitted her “conscience is clear” and she feels she’s “honoring God and my husband in the way I dress.”

But the real battleground, when it comes to spandex, is the school courtyard. A mom in Parma, Ohio (not the same aforementioned Parma, Michigan), fought for a similar prohibition of the pants from her son’s school district. Donna Dresp has led a crusade against Parma City School District, where skin-tight clothing is forbidden, to up the ante and abolish "suggestive clothing,“ such as "booty shorts” and anything else “not lady-like” that might distract her teenage son. Esther J. Cepeda wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune titled “Ban yoga pants from schools,” in which she argues that “parents who don’t insist their children treat school as a place to learn and respect others, not a fashion runway bestowing the “right to rock tight pants." Devils Lake High School in North Dakota, Skyview High School in Montana, Rockport High School in Massachusetts, and many more public institutions across the country have all succeeded in their efforts to block the trendy pants.

Except these outlaws haven’t halted the steadfast growth of yoga pants: According to NPD Group, U.S. sales of women’s activewear soared 21 percent to $18.5 billion in the year ending June 2015. Lululemon has tripled its retail stores in the past three years, its main competitor Athleta has doubled its free-standing outlets, and nearly every clothing brand has attempted to capitalize on the demand from Tory Burch and Alexander Wang to Old Navy and Target. 

And students are fighting back. In an open letter, 18-year-old Ashley Crtalic wrote that dress codes are shaming young women and “teaching the girls that they are dangerous, and the boys that they are weak and must be protected. You couldn’t protect me from the unwanted physical touches or verbal taunts, but you sure as hell could protect those boys from seeing my collarbone.”

Many other young women have raised their voices — or shared their frustration with the sexist rules on social media, subsequently attracting national attention — whenever they’re met with dress code criticism. #CropTopDay began trending after a student started a hashtag campaign following a teacher’s complaint that a shirt she was wearing one day looked “too much like a sports bra.” And on the most extreme end of the spectrum, Stacie Dunn took her fight to Facebook when her daughter was sent to the principal for wearing a shirt that revealed her collarbone.

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