For a surprisingly long time, we were just supposed to accept it whenever someone told us we were dressing inappropriately.
Considering how insistent some people were with that claim, it was easy to assume that there’s some objective standard for what’s appropriate and we accidentally found ourselves on the wrong side of it.
RELATED STORIES
But the more we see and experience, the clearer it becomes that the standards others seek to impose on us are just based on what they do and don’t want to see . And while we understand that we can’t go walking around without any clothes on, it’s easy to take some of the weight out of the word ‘inappropriate’ when we see some folks’ idea of that concept.
But as one woman’s upsetting encounter illustrates, the clothes aren’t the only things that can be inappropriate in a dress code situation.
While boarding an Alaska Airlines flight, TikTok user Sierra Steadman was wearing the outfit you see here.
As she mentioned in a video , she didn’t think there was anything wrong with her crop top and shorts, but a flight attendant clearly disagreed and asked her to zip up her hoodie.
And as Steadman said, that would normally have been the end of the situation when she agreed and began to do so.
However, a tearful video she uploaded following this encounter suggests the flight attendant wasn’t done dressing her down.
While she starts crying in the clip, the caption Steadman placed over the footage of herself suggests that the employee not only publicly shamed her in front of the other passengers but threatened to remove her from the plane.
As she wrote in the video description, “I’ve never felt more degraded, ashamed, embarrassed, angry or sad.”
In her follow-up video, she elaborated on how this encounter went down after others blamed her for violating the airline’s dress code.
After Steadman agreed to zip up her sweater and walked towards her seat, she said the flight attendant grabbed her arm and pulled her back before yelling at her in front of the other passengers.
In her words, “My problem is with how she acted after I complied with her request.”
And judging by their response after receiving a message from Steadman’s mother, it seems that Alaska Airlines has a problem with how that flight attendant acted as well.
Although they said that privacy concerns preclude them from sharing the findings of their internal investigation, they assured her mother that the situation would be reviewed.
They also apologized to both Sierra and her mother for their experience.
