A group of high school students challenged the notion of dress codes, sparking a heated debate about whether it’s still necessary or archaic.

The viral TikTok video was posted by 16-year-old Evita Frick-Hisaw, known as @baggyjeanmon on Tiktok. The video showed live clips from a walk-out protest that happened last June 3 at Natomas Charter School’s Performing and Fine Arts Academy in Sacramento, California.

Frick-Hisaw shared with Newsweek that the protest was held after they learned about the school’s plans to place student clothing on their agenda.

She confirmed with Newsweek:

“The school principal was going to have an assembly on dress code so in response we wore crop tops to protest. It was a day-long process, we showed up in crop tops and they started dress coding people.”

The video opened with Frick-Hisaw and her schoolmates wearing crop tops or other outfits that reveal their midriff. Some of them had statements like, “Am I distracting?”, “Skinny Pass?”, and “Distraction?” penned on their stomachs.

The protest was just one of many protests around the world which opened the conversation about how women bear the blame of harassment just because they dress a certain way.

One poster even demanded, “Teach boys to focus, not girls to cover up.”

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Just recently, a high school in Florida received backlash.

They decided to edit photos of 80 female students. Bartram Trail High School insisted that girls’ shirts must be modest.

Riley O’Keefe, a 15-year-old student from Bartram Trail High School shared with WJAX:

“The double standard in the yearbook is more so that they looked at our body and thought just a little bit of skin showing was sexual,”

In Sacramento, the movement garnered support.

This led to Frick-Hisaw’s TikTok video being viewed over 3.1 million times and liked by over 1 million viewers.

A comment on the video said:

“They can hold an assembly to tell girls how to dress but they can’t have an assembly to educate boys on how they should respect other people’s bodies,”

Not even agreed with Frick-Hisaw and their protest as they felt it was “childish”.

But with the implication of such dress codes, Frick-Hisaw provided context to their response to the administration:

“So the reason why we did all this is because we were gonna have an assembly on dress code, and we felt the dress code was sexist towards women and also perpetuating rape culture. That made us very uncomfortable.”

Even with the comments against their movement, the responses remained overwhelmingly supportive.

Some of them argued that even if they were dress-coded, they still got jobs and became successful. Others are also mentioning that prejudice against tattoos and hair color should not be a basis of skill.

At the end of the video, the protesters were taken into the theater to “finally have a real talk” regarding the dress code. Frick-Hisaw said that the “talk” was a starting point for a collaborative discussion between the school administration and the student body.

Watch how the protest unfolded by clicking on the video below.

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Source: YouTube – Inside Edition, Newsweek, BBC, Twitter – @JoeMcLeanNews, TikTok – @baggyjeanmom