In an attempt to revolutionise the social attitudes towards gender expression through clothing, the government in World 273 puts children in charge of curating social guidelines of fashion. They are the storytellers of gender identity through clothes. Every year, they come together to tell each other stories in every local community, listen to each other and co-create the guidelines, which are religiously observed by the adults (by law).
This experiment ran for 9 years before the idea that garments are just garments became universally engrained, and the experiment stopped. It remains as a holiday for children, every year, to dictate their parents’ gender expression for the day. The experiment had other unexpected social consequences, including improving attitudes towards nudity, creative approaches with new materials, and the blurring of lines between formal and informal wear.
This World was contributed by Raffaele Baldo (located in the UK), building on fictions contributed by Xi Fang and Salome Egger, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
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