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 Sartorial SparksBy PALA GARCIA
During the recent winter break, all female orchestral players at Juilliard were notified by e-mail of changes in the dress code, the most drastic of which was the prohibiting of pants. Henceforth, it said, only skirts or dresses may be worn as concert attire. This change did not particularly irritate me; many other students, however, were irked, since they already owned perfectly decent orchestra attire and now had to purchase additional clothing for a seemingly irrelevant policy change.
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| Pala Garcia |
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I was curious about the specific reasons for these new rules, and spoke informally with orchestra personnel managers Doug Quint and Paolo Bordignon, who are responsible for enforcing the dress code policies. For those who are not familiar with Quint and Bordignon personally, they are by no means old-fashioned or puritanical. Furthermore, anyone who has performed in orchestra is amply aware that announcements were made at virtually every dress rehearsal reminding musicians to dress modestly. When I spoke to Quint and Bordignon, they admitted that the main cause for the change was that they felt these admonitions had too often gone unheeded. The two were forced to repeat such announcements many times over (Quint once going so far as to humorously remind orchestra members—in so many words—that Carnegie Hall is not, in fact, an appropriate venue in which to put one's lingerie on display) and yet some students would still show up to concerts dressed inappropriately by Juilliard standards. It was already evident to most students that school authorities had been unfavorably impressed; however, I wondered whether such sartorial lapses had offended our audiences. I consulted Mike Finn, associate dean and director of performance activities, who said that isolated instances of audience complaints had occurred. Thus, the change had been effected through an agreement among the School's president, dean, and other administrators. Recently, I was most surprised to learn that a number of top professional orchestras require female musicians to wear skirts or dresses, and forbid them to wear pants. The New York Philharmonic finds women's pants unacceptable for evening concerts during the main subscription season and summer season. The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra requests its female musicians to wear either skirts or dresses for its Carnegie Hall performances. The Chicago Symphony dress code is extremely specific regarding women's sleeve lengths ("no more than three inches above the wrist while playing") and skirt length ("seven-eighths"). Juilliard's new rules have been modeled closely after these professional dress codes.
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The new orchestra dress code should be seen as a sincere effort to prevent the indecorous from making the rest of us look amateur.
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Some Juilliard students seem to think that women are unfairly burdened by the newer, stricter dress codes. Of course, women do not have the convenient universality of the tuxedo, and so we must use our own judgment, which apparently failed the School's expectations. A school orchestra dress code will never possess the authority that it might otherwise have in a professional setting. At Juilliard, an inappropriately dressed student might at most endanger his or her grade, whereas offenders in professional orchestras may jeopardize their income. However, since the tasteless few could not be put right, the rest of us students unfortunately must endure the minor inconvenience. Considering how explicit the managers had been in previously enforcing the dress code, I find it hard to believe that a mandatory shift from pants to skirt or dress for women would prevent those who are inclined to look "inappropriate" from doing so. For Quint and Bordignon, I envision a future of battling tight, stretchy skirts with mile-high slits. I wish them luck. In the professional music business there is often a disparity between the wishes or opinions of donors, board members, and managers on the one hand, and the opinions of audiences on the other. The politics of the music business require us to constantly reconcile the demands of bureaucracy, the concertgoing public, and our own artistic desires. The new dress code should simply be understood as a sincere effort to prevent the indecorous from making the rest of us look amateur. This issue obviously does not pose a terrible threat to our moral or personal freedom, but it is interesting as a minor instance of how even we students are subjects of an environment of musical bureaucracy.Pala Garcia is a third-year violin student.
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