Spotlight: Freedom of dress

College students of today can be seen wearing pajamas and flip-flops around campus, or any other form of super casual regalia. During the early years of Georgia College, however, any ideas of individual dress were utterly not allowed.

John Harris Chappell, the president during the early years of Georgia College (then Georgia Normal & Industrial College), made it mandatory for all students to wear uniforms at all times, even when they were at home during the holidays. Students ended up having around four to five different uniforms at any given time: a fatigue suit for every-day purposes, a Sunday uniform or “full dress”, a “cooking dress” (which was the same as the fatigue suit but had a white cap, long white apron, and long white gloves that reached the elbows), and a “commencement dress” for graduation.

The girls of GN&IC could buy the uniforms directly from the school, or purchase materials from Milledgeville merchants and make the uniforms themselves. Chappell provided pamphlets to each girl with tedious instructions on how the uniforms were to be made, right down to how many inches the dresses could be from the ground.

Chappell was very strict in that he did not allow students to spend more than 25 cents per yard for material for making the uniforms, and the student could not add any personal touches to the uniforms whatsoever. Chappell enforced uniforms primarily in an attempt to mask the differences between the rich students and the poor. The uniforms changed from year to year just like modern fashion, but uniforms remained mandatory even after Chappell’s death from tuberculosis in 1906, but were eventually abolished in 1934.

Posted by Hilary Thompson on Feb 3 2011. Filed under Features, Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.