General Dress Code
Competitors' dress restrictions are based on the following guiding principles: • Dancesport has important artistic elements, which grooming and dress should enhance but not dominate.
• Adjudicators should not be distracted by unusual or outrageous grooming and dress from assessing each couple’s demonstration of their relative technical skill, artistry, and floorcraft.
• Further dress restrictions are imposed on juvenile competitors and lower grade couples so as to ensure that: ▪ Entry into competition should be as accessible to as many people as possible.
▪ The cost of entry should be as cheap as possible relative to the minimum standard of dress required for competition.
▪ At the outset, the emphases for competitors should be on ability, not dress. As competitors move through the grades more emphasis is given to grooming and dress but never to the exclusion of ability.
▪ During the formative period of their introduction to dancesport, new competitors and in particular juvenile competitors (as well as their parents and teachers), should have virtually no other consideration than to develop their technical ability.
▪ The health of juvenile competitors does not suffer because of inappropriate footwear.