Figure 1.--
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Figure 1.-- |
Prter grew up in Southern Califrnia during the 1960s. He remembers a great deal about clothing and hair styles during the period.
My own experience growing up in Southern California was that I got enough sunburns that it eventually got so I would always wear a shirt when I went outside in the summer preferably one with a collar. I also liked to have hair long
enough to cover my ears and the back of my neck. This was actually a year
round preference: in the summer, I wanted my hair to keep the sun off and
in the winter, I wanted my hair to keep the wind off.
I was in elementary school in the 1960s, and I never had any awareness of formal shorts ever having existed. I grew up thinking of shorts as being inherently casual wear. (I think that while older people may have thought that formal shorts were closely related to adults' formal slacks, in my mind when I was about 6, shorts were closely related to swimming trunks.
Occasionally, when there was an unexpected chance to swim, kids would use
shorts if they didn't have a swimming suit.) It was only when I got older that I became aware that there was a time that formal clothing for children might include shorts. I can remember, when I was a child, occasionally seeing a picture of children in the "olden days" wearing shorts in school and thinking that they were more casual back when the picture was taken. I also occasionally saw framed pictures of boys wearing shorts from a few decades earlier and would think that they were photographed in their play clothes. Only in retrospect, do I wonder if the boys had dressed up in their best clothes to have their pictures taken.
Outside school, there would be children wearing shorts, but most children would wear long pants, even in the summer. Shorts then were always mid-thigh length or slightly shorter. I don't remember knee-length shorts.
There were also cut-offs where someone cut the end off of worn out pants to make shorts. Unlike regular shorts, I remember cut-offs being knee length (I assume the pants were cut at the knee, because the knees are where children usually wore holes in their pants). Cut-offs always seemed to be made from jeans and not other types of pants. Now people seem to throw away worn out or damaged clothing instead of fixing them or making things like cut-offs. On the other hand, now one can buy pants manufacured as cut-offs and buy jeans made to be look severely damaged to the point of having large holes in them. I've seen from the price tags
that today's pre-damaged wear can be very expensive. The clothes that are
manufactured looking multilated only seem to be made for adults and older
teenagers. I don't think I've seen them in children's sizes.
What I remember as being prevalent when I was in kindergarten was for boys
to be wearing long pants that they were "growing into," so the bottom couple
of inches would be folded up. At the end of recess every day in kindergarten, the boys had to unfold their pant "cuffs" to let out any dirt
or sand that got in them and take off their shoes to shake out any dirt and
sand. In retrospect, a good reason to have growing children wear shorts is
so it won't be obvious if the size isn't exactly right.
People I knew tended to think of shorts as being too informal for school, so children in my school would rarely wear shorts to school and it was only the children in kindergarten through 2nd grade that would ever wear shorts to school. (I remember once overhearing a boy who looked about 6 or 7 years old saying to a boy in his class who was wearing shorts, "I don't think we're allowed to wear shorts.") In junior high school and high school, some people would wear shorts, but it was still rare (someone might occasionally wear shorts on a hot spring day). Gym teachers might wear shorts, although they would wear mid-thigh length regular pants and not the trunks the students had to wear.
Rules for what students wear during gym class in the United States vary from school to school. So what I describe applies to the schools I attended. All of the schools that I went to were public (state) schools in California during the 1960s and 1970s. The elementary school and junior high school that I attended had lax dress codes, and the high school had no dress code. My impression is that in general, junior high schools and high schools in the United States have specific rules about what can be worn in gym class even if the school has no rules concerning what students wear the rest of the day. The phrase "gym uniform" may not be the best way to describe this requirement, since usually the only thing that is uniform about the clothes is the color of the trunks and possibly the color of the T-shirt. If most of the students buy their gym clothes from the school, that may add more uniformity.
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