Under pressure - Mary O’Regan on why a dress code for the young might not be such a bad thing

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the miniskirt. It has been six decades since fashions that flashed thighs and hugged hips, first became all the rage. It seems a long time, from 1964 to 2024, but a genuine discussion surrounding choices in dress has never taken place, and young people today are paying the price. That may sound patronizing, but bear with me.

Those in favour of the widespread embrace of short skirts and tight trousers often acted as if they had won a major battle. The argument was that dressing as you wished to dress was all about freedom. There was a feeling that things had been too authoritarian in the past, that it had been too easy to make moral judgments about a woman simply because she wore clothing of a certain kind.

Many Irish Catholic women have told me that there was a lack of charity in the 1950s and anyone who was trying to wear something different was victimized by gossip, some of it malicious and harmful. I acknowledge this uncharity and decry it, but I wonder did the miniskirt and other sartorial innovations create a new kind of uncharitable world?

For the young, especially girls and young women, tight revealing clothes may not be ideal from a psychological point of view. It’s all about bodily privacy. The female body changes rapidly in one’s teen years, as a cycle kicks in, and curves appear, and body weight goes up and down. Clothes that are too revealing make these changes public, as it were, even before the wearer has had a chance to make her peace with these changes.

The teenage body changes more rapidly than the mind can catch up. I speak from experience. I had a painful bout of anorexia when I was 12-13 because of rapid body changes. I seemed to become a new person overnight. I was convinced that if such changes kept coming, I’d be very overweight by 15. I realise now that the tight jeans I wore made me too obsessed with my size and shape, but when I mentioned my fears of sudden weight-gain, I was just told to go on a diet.

The silence that met the sixtieth anniversary of the miniskirt tells us that no one now questions the changes wrought by that decade, but we should perhaps break that silence and ask if it is really healthy for young girls to wear clothes that deny their privacy?

Sexualised clothing produces young women who are defensive, anxious and worried. They feel they are being pitted against each other on the basis of their looks and their weight; heavier girls who are unhappy in tight clothes are often told coldly and without any empathy that the problem is their weight, not the clothes.

All over the UK, very young teens, mainly girls, are also being invited to question their gender, and that it’s in the interests of their privacy that they don’t tell their parents of certain decisions they may make.

People who are keen on privacy in this way don’t seem to be quite so keen on the privacy of the body. They allow and promote the idea that teenagers wearing revealing clothes is just part and parcel of modern ideas about freedom; in fact, not wearing revealing clothes gives teenagers the chance to be free of the pressure to appear to be adults long before they are ready. It’s just another pressure.

The call for a code of dress that gives teenagers privacy is urgent and of paramount importance. I believe it needs to be grounded in charity, and we need to make our case from our hearts. Brave people, including people who’ve learned the hard way ought to be supported in their mission to restore a way of dressing that is psychologically healthier. Far from being something superficial or an obsession with externals, the mission to restore charity in dress is key to restoring civilization.