My mother wore a red dress to her wedding. She didn’t have a traditional wedding, so she didn’t want a traditional white dress. She didn’t even buy the dress; she confessed to me only recently that her friend did. She and my father signed a piece of paper at the city hall in Lexington, Kentucky, and had coffee cake and a party at their apartment with friends and family. She likes to joke about how both my father and she forgot the rings in front of the justice of the peace, so they just put them on later that day, May 1, 1995.

I am not planning on getting married anytime soon, but I am graduating from Drake University in a few weeks. And white is deemed the unofficial color of graduation for women, whether high school or college.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Others are wearing white. It’s a plain backdrop against colorful cords or other honors. It symbolizes the end of an era and a new beginning.

Whatever the reason may be, the color white has a sordid history with tradition and accepting the status quo.

It’s a uniform, and an eraser of individuality. It’s tradition.

That all being said, not all traditions are bad. On Thanksgiving, my extended family exchanges ornaments for Christmas, and that’s always a fun time. And when I visit my aunt in North Carolina, she always buys me a book. Cute, right?

There is joy in traditions, but that doesn’t mean all of them are worth following. “It’s the way it’s always been done” is not a valid excuse anymore, if it ever was. So, I want to renegotiate the terms of traditions and my role in them, because in addition to being a creative, I’m also a politics major who has adopted an institutional way of examining the world.

I have an off-white dress that I (my mom) bought at a Plato’s Closet last summer. It’s knitted with black stripes, and I bought a matching white slip to wear under it from Depop. It extenuates my height and my frame, and I love it.

Yet, it’s not totally white. It’s not short, it’s not pure with ruffles. It’s not the dresses I’ve seen graduates wear while posing for graduation photos on campus in years past.

I know, I know, it’s not revolutionary of me to wear a slightly different shade of white to graduation. In fact, it screams, “Who said I can’t wear my Converse,” and “I’m not like other girls.” If you know, you know.

It’s not my intention to start a revolution, quite the opposite, actually. I want to tweak the unofficial graduation uniform in a way that suits me and what I currently have in my closet. I want to fit within the confines of tradition, honor its purpose, while still allowing myself to push the boundaries, albeit slightly.

My mother didn’t want the traditional wedding ceremony — uniformed bridesmaids, an aisle, a church, a salad course — so she didn’t want to wear the traditional white wedding garb. But she still wanted to feel beautiful. She still wanted to wear something she normally wouldn’t on the day that became her wedding anniversary.

So, in comes her red dress with matching lipstick, and (oh look!) my off-white, black striped dress lags behind. 

Read more from this author at her Substack, Caroline’s Current.