Late Wednesday night, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution mandating a coat, tie and slacks for men on the Senate floor. It ended a week of brouhaha and handwringing over Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to relax the chamber’s dress code to allow Sen. John Fetterman to wear his trademark hoodie and gym shorts before the storied body.

This is a tune fashion historian Deirdre Clemente has heard before. Shorts, in particular, have a long history of eliciting outrage. Whether it’s Dartmouth students baring their legs during the Shorts Protest of 1930 or country clubs forcing women to wear trenchcoats over their shorts on their way to the tennis court, traditionalists will often appeal to values like “respect” and “decorum” to preserve existing fashion mores.

And yet everyday people simply pushed back by continuing to wear shorts – so much so that it became impossible to regulate. Even though the Senate has reined in Fetterman’s perceived excesses, Clemente wonders just how long the newly official sartorial standards of the Senate will last.

“Despite the buttoned-up outrage and jokes from Susan Collins about wearing a bikini on the Senate floor, fashion is born of culture, and culture is dynamic,” she writes. “And cultural forces are almost impossible to beat back.”

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