Los Angeles, United States

Two US women from California were removed from a Spirit Airlines flight last week for wearing crop tops, which apparently violates the airlines’ “dress code” for passengers. A flight attendant on the New Orleans-bound flight instructed the two friends to disembark from the plane at the Los Angeles International Airport, as per a local news station.

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The women named Tara Kehidi and Teresa Araujo were visiting New Orleans to celebrate Kehidi’s 30th birthday when the incident took place. Both were first wearing sweaters when they boarded the flight but later removed them because the AC was not working.

“We were wearing crop tops ... just like a little bit of stomach showing,” Kehidi told the ABC news affiliate KABC. When a male flight attendant told her and Araujo to “put something on.”

The friend asked: “Can we see a dress code? Like, is there a policy that says we can’t wear crop tops on the plane?”

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A third woman sitting in the row in front of Kehidi and Araujo told the station that the temperature on the plane was making everyone uncomfortable and most of its passengers had to remove their sweaters. 

“I said, ‘Well, if your body is inappropriate, then so is mine because I also have a crop top under my sweater.’ And I took my sweater off and I was like: ‘So if they’re kicking you off the flight, then they’re also going to have to kick me and my toddler off of the flight,’” said Carla Hager, the third woman who was travelling with her child.

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Ultimately Kehidi and Araujo gave in to strange demand and offered to put their sweaters back on, but all three women along with Hager’s toddler were removed from the flight with no refund.

“Everyone in the plane was looking at us,” Araujo said. She said that she and Kehidi felt they were being “treated like criminals”.

Most of the airlines have dress codes but often they are vague and are left up to flight attendants to decide and enforce them upon passengers, especially many female passengers. The enforcement is often sexiest in nature.

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The airline’s Contract of Carriage says to KABC that passengers may be asked to leave a flight if they are “inadequately clothed, or whose clothing is lewd, obscene or offensive in nature”.

The women told KABC they were interested in pursuing legal action against Spirit. 

The budget airline has a history of mismanagement: from putting an unaccompanied minor on the wrong flight to stranding thousands of passengers with cancelled and delayed flights.

(With inputs from agencies)