Next time you visit Westfield in Stratford please be aware of their new dress rules.
And don't you dare wear a hoodie.
These signs have sprung up at every entrance to the shopping mall.
They're on all the doors and often repeated inside.
And they're immensely questionable.
For a start, grammatically it should be "is not" permitted, not "are not".
Secondly, where do you draw the line between covered and uncovered faces?
Thirdly, why the obsession with covered faces anyway?
But mainly, are they seriously attempting to ban the wearing of hoodies?
Thousands of visitors to Westfield wear hoodies, they're an immensely popular form of clothing. Several of the shops in the centre sell hoodies, even allow you to try them on before you buy, so this is insane. What they must mean is not to wear a hoodie with the hood up, which would be pretty draconian all in itself, but that's not what they've written, they've written clumsy rubbish.
A number of the UK's shops, banks and other buildings have rules about not wearing skimasks or helmets inside their property, generally for fear-of-crime-related reasons. It's unusual and perhaps sinister to find such a requirement outside a building, although admittedly within an enclosed shopping mall. Such are the downsides of Privately Owned Public Spaces - commercial fiefdoms where management can apply whatever rules they like. Stratford's Westfield was even designed to make it difficult to get around the local area without walking through the mall so it's a bit rich to be funnelled through the shops and then told what you can't wear.
Westfield's obsession with covered faces must be ID related. If you walk around their mall with too much of your face covered they can't identify you from CCTV footage should you misbehave... and they are recording your image, it says so in their privacy policy. It's all part of the surveillance society we're stumbling into, at least when we enter private spaces where everyone is now deemed potentially guilty and must therefore dress accordingly.
And what a hole they've dug by attempting to define acceptable and unacceptable face coverings. Ski mask no, hijab yes, because you can't discriminate against religion only fashion. The bottom row on the poster is only there because the top row begs the question 'where do you draw the line?', unnecessarily dragging patently-acceptable coverings into the whole murky affair. I posted this photo on Twitter and attracted dozens of comments, several of them dubious dogwhistle bleating, so please let's not sleepwalk into that tedious debate here.
The smallprint on the poster says "See website for more details and our code of conduct". It took me a while to find the code of conduct because it's not immediately signposted... and oh look, it turns out they're not banning the wearing of hoodies after all.
Well if that's what you meant why didn't you say that on the poster, you idiots, rather than writing a generic regulation which wasn't what you intended at all. We can still argue that having to keep your hood down is a ridiculous draconian over-reaction, but at least it'd be clearer what's being argued about.
"such as" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I wouldn't want to be the security guard by the entrance who has to rule over what is and isn't acceptable. I assume that an anorak with snorkel hood or bridal gown with veil would also fall foul of the rules, had they been more comprehensively stated, which does suggest hoodies were chosen mainly for their cultural associations.
Of course they're permitted, Westfield would be taken to court if they tried to ban those. Also it sounds like you can request a hijab from guest services, not just a face covering, because this whole regulatory blurb has been really badly written.
If you're going to introduce a dubious policy do try to phrase it properly, otherwise you're just piling uncertainty on top of controversy and it becomes very hard to take your silly rules seriously.
And if you do want to go shopping with your hood up then the Westfield at Shepherd's Bush doesn't have a similar code of conduct, not yet, perhaps because west London's teenagers are still deemed better behaved.
