Men in Europe are skirting the issue. Literally.
A group of boys at Isca Academy in Exeter, England are wearing skirts to protest their school’s pant-only dress code. The students asked if the academy could modify the dress code since it’s summer and, well, it’s too damn hot for pants, but were told shorts were not part of the uniform. "We're not allowed to wear shorts, and I'm not sitting in trousers all day, it's a bit hot,” one of the boys protesting told the BBC.
So, what’s a guy to do when he wants to learn with a cool breeze against his legs? Borrow from his female counterparts, of course. In the heat of the moment (literally and figuratively), the students discovered one workaround — wearing the girls’ uniform, which includes the option to wear pants *or* a skirt. And they decided to show up to school wearing the latter.
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Claire Reeves, a parent of one of the students, told the BBC: "I feel extremely proud of them all for standing up for their rights," she said. "People are always talking about equal right for males and females and school uniform shouldn't be any different."
This isn’t the only instance of men protesting in skirts, either. In France, male bus drivers are required to wear long pants as part of their uniforms (one employee, Gabriel Magner, told the Guardian it was "a form of discrimination"), but with temperatures reaching almost 100 degrees, you can see why some men might prefer to have their legs out. Enter the black knee-length pencil skirts drivers are now wearing.
Here's the thing: Men wearing skirts is not a new phenomenon: Marc Jacobs is fond of them. Jaden Smith wore one in Louis Vuitton’s spring 2016 ad campaign, and Kanye West was seen in a Givenchy kilt on numerous occasions while on the Watch the Throne tour in 2012. With gender-fluid fashion becoming more and more the norm, why are so many still reinforcing such dated stereotypes?
Until things change, more of these protests, please (and more making rompers for men a thing).