Figure 1.--The boys at this British prep school wear plain grey sweaters during the school day. They rarely wear blazers.
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Figure 1.--The boys at this British prep school wear plain grey sweaters during the school day. They rarely wear blazers. |
The jumper or sweater is one of the most utilitarian of all school garments. No where is it more commonly worn than in Britain. At most, but not all schools, the boys would hang their blazers up when they got to school and wear their jumpers while at school. Except for a few nice summer weeks, it is usually chilly enough that the jumpers were needed. At school after sdchool in England it was the jumper that was mostly worn during the school day during the cooler months. One of our British contributors tells me that wearing jumpers around school was not always so common as it now is. In fact at his prep school in the 1950s, he very seldom removed his school blazer, even in hot weather. They had to await permission for "shirtsleeve order". A old boy at a grammar school tells HBC that the boys there were not permitted to take off their balzers without permission of a member of staff. That was apparently why blazers seemed to wear out pretty quickly and were an ongoing expense for parents. Nowadays, with harder wrearing materials the blazers can be more durable. Some prep schools in the 1990s have dropped blazers altogether and substituted pullovers with the school crest or initials.
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