Clothes Encounters: Where were the modest plaid skirts, bow-tied blouses, and shiny loafers my girl friends and I wore to high school?

By Rose Madeline Mula

Recently, I was walking by the local high school at the closing bell.  As I watched swarms of kids spilling out the doors,  I wondered if someone had laced my lunch yogurt with LSD. Or maybe I had somehow wandered onto the set of a movie whose costume designer had gone berserk. 

Cropped screenshot of actress Audrey Hepburn from the trailer for the 1953  film Roman Holiday; Wikimedia Commons

Something was definitely wrong with this picture.  Earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings, bizarre hair-dos, purple nail polish … on the boys.  Even weirder, one of them was actually wearing a bathrobe and slippers.  I swear.  The others sported second-skin-tight  bicycle shorts or kaleidoscopic, ridiculously baggy pants obviously stolen from Barnum & Bailey.  Topping these were huge sweat shirts emblazoned with obscene slogans and very graphic graphics.

As for the girls, most of them looked like they had just sashayed off the runway of the old burlesque house.  I could not believe they had been allowed into school in those snug, crotch-high skirts, necklines that dipped to their navels, and combat boots.  Where were the modest plaid skirts, bow-tied blouses, and shiny loafers my girl friends and I wore to high school?  Probably in the Smithsonian along with the boys’ neatly pressed corduroy trousers, white shirts and argyle socks.

When I got home I pulled out the old family albums to see if maybe my memory had finally deserted me completely.  Could our clothes really have been so different from those of today’s kids? Ah, yes.  There we were, all gussied up, in those black and white photos with the curlicue edges.  Those were the post-depression years, so none of us were well-heeled; but we certainly were well-dressed.  And well-coiffed.  The grammar school me smiled shyly at the camera, my long banana curls clipped in place with a huge taffeta bow.  I was wearing my favorite puffed sleeved, Shirley Temple frock, ankle socks, and gleaming patent leather Mary Janes.  My girl friends looked equally ladylike.  And the boys — all natty and neat in their knickers, knee socks and newly shorn heads.  No ponytails, dreadlocks or Mohawks.  Fortunately.  If a boy had walked into class with any of the above, Teacher would have flat-lined before she had a chance to send him to the principal’s office.