October 15, 2012
Dress Codes and Etiquette, Part 1: What Not to Wear to High School in the 1960s
Dress code illustration, 1960s.
Stories about dress code enforcement have continued to pop up in the news. For work, school and leisure, strict rules about proper etiquette are bulleted on website after website. No trench coats to high school. No low-backed dresses to prom. No visible tattoos and piercings on teachers. No hooded sweatshirts if you’re going out dancing. No zippered jackets when visiting a magic castle. No satin (unless it’s from Betsey Johnson or Dolce & Gabbana) to pledge a sorority. Lots of regulations from the powers that be—some with explanations, others just because.
When it came to dressing for high school in the early to mid-1960s, the clean, neatly shorn and well-pressed conformity of the student body, with its tucked-in shirts and shined shoes, was expected. I came upon a handful of strongly worded dress codes from the ’60s itemizing what was acceptable and unacceptable—from clothes to hairstyles, accessories and makeup—and I’ve excerpted my favorite bits or reprinted full guidelines. What could get you sent home from school reflected the cultural trends on the cusp of ’60s counterculture revolution. Perhaps square school administrators were pulling in the reins in anticipation of the bell-bottoms and long hair that were just on the horizon.
From Pius X High School in Downey, California: no “flat tops” or “duck tail” haircuts!
Pius X High School boys’ dress code, circa 1962.
1. The clothing and grooming of the student should reflect his serious attitude toward school and his own person. Two extremes are to be avoided: both a careless, untidy appearance, and a vain, effeminate use of extreme fashions. What the school seeks to promote in a student is a clean, neat, neat [sic], well-groomed, manly appearance.
3. The student may not wear: tennis shoes, sandals, shoes with taps or cleats (they mar the tile in the building), Levis, jeans, denim, pegged or draped trousers, a vest except under a coat, a shirt as a jacket, insignia of other than Pius X High School organizations, dirty or torn clothing.
5. The hair may not be worn in the following styles: “flat top” (any haircut with the hair shorter on the top than on the sides and back), upswept, “duck-tail”, or unusually long.
At Broward High School in Hollywood, Florida: no sun glasses may be worn in the classroom without permission!
Student Handbook from Broward Senior High School, 1965.
GIRLS–
1. Are to wear skirts, blouses, or dresses.
2. Shirt tails are to be tucked in.
3. Extreme sun dresses or culottes are not to be worn and bare mid-riffs are not allowed.
4. May not wear hair scarves, curlers, clips or other hair setting paraphernalia in the classroom.
5. Socks or peds must be worn with sneakers.BOYS–
1. Must wear shirts properly buttoned and long trousers.
2. Belts are required if trousers have belt loops.
3. All shirt tails must be worn inside trousers.
4. Faces must be clean shaven.
5. Extreme or unusual haircuts are not permitted.
6. Socks must be worn.ALL STUDENTS– Sun glasses may not be worn in the classroom without written permission from the Dean.
Thong sandals are not to be worn.
At Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, New Hampshire: no “Beatle-boots” for boys!
Timberlane Regional High School Dress Code, 1967
For Boys:
1. Dungarees, shorts, and Beatle-boots are not acceptable.
2. Faces are to be clean-shaven.
3. Sport shirts may be worn, but fully buttoned.For Girls:
1. Make-up is to be kept in moderation.
2. Skirts and dresses shall be worn at a proper length for teenagers.
3. Slacks and shorts are not acceptable as regular school wear.
Stay tuned as we continue to look back at dress codes and clothing etiquette. In the meantime, do you remember abiding by a dress code at school? Were you ever sent home for wearing the wrong thing?
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Great stuff, some high schools today could use a better dress code. I’m a teacher and I cover up my forearm tattoos with Ink Armor sleeves: http://www.tat2x.com/cover-a-tattoo.html The sleeves work well and I don’t mind covering up at work. You would not believe what kids wear to school these days. There is a “Juicy” on every other girls behind and the some of the boy’s skinny jeans need to leave more to the imagination.
“Two extremes are to be avoided: both a careless, untidy appearance, and a vain, effeminate use of extreme fashions. What the school seeks to promote in a student is a clean, neat, neat [sic], well-groomed, manly appearance.”
Wow, this sounds not only like a dress-code but a warning to male students that they had better be “manly.” This is so wrong for many reasons.
Agreed, you can definitely read into what these dress codes represented.
So, as a female, at Broward in ’65, I could go topless as long as I wore a skirt & my midriff wasn’t bared?
Nice.
And the worse part was waiting for the bus in a skirt in freezing temps. No fun! Was there-did that.
I can imagine…
Great roundup! I went to high school in the nineties and I can’t remember any dress code rule that bothered me. My high school pretty much let you get away with wearing anything, even pajamas, to school (and yes, that was a fad for a while).
And for anyone else who hadn’t heard the name before, here’s what “Beatle-boots” are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatle_boot =D
Thanks for the link, Keri!
Love this
Thanks, Sam!
Like someone once said, the past is another country: They do things differently there.
In my school, girls were first allowed to wear pants starting in 1970 (8th grade, for me). Prairie-style wear (think John Denver) was just coming into fashion, and girls were not allowed to wear long dresses. I went to school in a “granny dress” (ankle-length calico) and was promptly sent home to change. It’s a good thing home was only a mile away. I was furious!
No long dresses? Why? It seems like more covering = more modesty, which I assume is what principals are going for. So no long dresses, but pants were okay?
The last day of school, 1968, a group of us wore culottes to school. We were sent home to change – immediately. This was in a small Nebraska farming community. We still laugh about it at our class reunions.
Even culottes got a bad rap! What grade were you in at the time?
Great post. Thinking back to the mid-90s and early 2000s when I was in middle school and high school, flip-flops and tank tops were the most popular banned items. I wonder if those have gone the way of banning above-the-knee dresses and skirts.
When i was in High School: i dressed pretty out there, and if i ever got negative comments, my mom would tell me about getting sent home from school in the late sixties because her skirts were too short. If there was suspicion by a teacher that a skirt was too short, young women were made to sit/kneel on the floor…if your skirt didn’t cover the knees, home you went. My mom went home a lot.
I like your mom, Lizz. :)
Oh man, I went to high school in the late 60′s in a conservative southern city–Oklahoma City–and I remember a lot of those rules. Didn’t get sent home for short skirts, but a lot of girls did. You really had to be careful going up stairs, it was a three story building, and hold your skirts close to your body. The boys had a game of standing at the bottom and watching! (My BF at the time warned me about that one.) Things seemed to loosen up my junior year, 1971, and we were finally allowed to wear pants. I was so happy because winters are cold and blowy there and my coats just weren’t long enough for the walk home some days. I did get away with hotpants then, but mine weren’t really short as my family were conservative Lutherans, you just didn’t do that kind of thing. A lot of the girls would wear curlers and stuff, but just the excuse they were in the Cosmetology (hairdressers) classes.
Thanks for sharing this anecdote, Ruth, and your strategy for going up the stairs! Also, did you see Threaded’s post about hot pants?
I was a sophomore the year of the “Culotte Caper” :-) One of my friends, the superintendent’s daughter, didn’t make it out the door of her home that morning with her culottes – her mama put a stop to that.
My parents were both class of ’69; my mom got in trouble for wearing a miniskirt to school, until the principal called her mother and found out that Grandma had helped her sew it! And my dad went to a Catholic boys’ school that required all the young men to wear suit jackets every day. Because they were future businessmen, of course.
I strongly agree that highschools should not have dress codes. I think its wrong that kids have gotten set home over what they wear. Unless its like extrememly revealing then i dont see the problem. It shouldnt matter what color clothing the kid has on or whats on it.
I think this is a great blog.I believe dress codes should go a little back to the older days but not a strict.
My high-school wardrobe looked very much like the left hand side of your first exhibit. Perhaps, it’s because that was the dress code I had to abide by. St. Ignatius College Prep (SI) was an all-boys school (It went co-ed after I graduated). Many of us didn’t “dress to impress” during school hours and kept alternative clothing in our locker or our car if we had one. If anything, “grooming” was the challenge. “Shave Inspection” was one of the more dreaded phrases during that time.
Your first pic was of my high school. We looked like a bunch of golfers. This was eight blocks north of the corner of Haight and Ashbury, which had a slightly different dress code in the 60′s!
In response to Keri’s link concerning Beatle Boots…
My wife was born and raised in Liverpool England before coming to the US in ’64. She has often times referred to the boots of that time as “winklepickers”. They were great, apparently, for climbing fences if someone was chasing after you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winklepicker
I graduated from high school in 1964. Dress code rules were decided on the spur of the moment by whichever administrator was feeling offended by a garment, but rules were not published until after I graduated. Thus several girls were sent home to change out of muu-muus and came back in sundresses with spaghetti straps, which of COURSE knew were forbidden (along with culottes & any kind of trousers on girls). The officials didn’t have the nerve to send the same girls home twice in one day. Boys, on the other hand, got away with an “Ed Norton” Day once a year – wearing high-water pants, undershirts with vests over them, & tacky hats – because they did it en masse. My senior year they organized themselves & wore Bermuda shorts with white dress shirts, neckties, sport jackets, and dress shoes and socks. They were VERY clean and neat. When that worked a few times, they were safe as far as future wearing of Bermuda shorts was concerned – they;d been given tacit permission. I heard that the following year a dress code was published, saying that boys could wear shorts if they were “at least 4 inches above the knees.” In other words, 4″ above the knees OR SHORTER. It was like the rule about girls wearing “skirts, blouses, or dresses” – any one out of three!
Since I went to Catholic girls’ school, we wore uniforms. In HS, that meant plaid pleated skirt, navy collarless blazer over a short sleeved peter pan collared white shirt, white ankle socks, and soap and water saddle shoes. After a 4 hour falculty meeting (no student input)it was decided that knee high socks might also be acceptable, but only in cold weather. Skirts had to be no shorter than 1″ above the knee when kneeling. Even within these restrictions, we managed to insert some individuality. One girl replaced the buttons on her blazer with soda pop bottle lids. Each club to which we belonged had a discrete small button or pin that we were allowed to wear. Also, we could wear our boy friends’ class pins,as well as our own. I graduated in 1969. It wasn’t until about 15 years later, that uniforms were abandoned all together. I don’t know what the dress code is today, as I live in another city and don’t see the girls on a daily basis.
I went to a public high school during my freshman and sophomore years. As far as dress codes went, there basically wasn’t one so it was anything goes. I wore jeans and hoodies in the colder months and shorts and t-shirts when it was warmer. For my junior and senior years however, my parents sent me to a private Christian school that enforced an old fashioned dress code similar to the 1960s dress codes in the article. Girls were required to wear modest dresses or skirts and blouses everyday, not only to class, but to any and all school events, even sporting events. I even had to wear a dress to football games! I didn’t like it at first, but quickly grew to accept the dress code rules and even to agree with them. I think a dress code helps to set a more formal environment that helps to mitigate the disciplinary problems that unfortunately are rampant at many public schools. It maybe old fashioned, but I do think encouraging students to dress and act like young ladies and gentlemen is a good thing.
I’m currently in high school, and here is our dress code:
No clothing which:
-Unduly exposes or reveals skin or undergarments. This may include tank tops, halter tops, tops which are strapless, low cut, or expose midriff, pants worn low or loose which expose skin or undergarments. (Pants bit was added for this year. Belts and gym shirts are kept on hand for violations of this rule. Skirts also must each fingertip length)
-Causes or is likely to cause a substantial or material disruption to school activities or the orderly operation of school. This may include buttons, display bands, armbands, flags, decals or other badges of symbolic expression. (this includes things on backpacks; one of my friends was made to remove her collection of anime buttons from her bag)
-Involves any form of headgear inside the school building during the school day. Specific examples of head gear include hats, visors, scarves, bandanas, sweatbands and forehead bands. Hats and head-gear will be confiscated according to school policy. (Religious headgear has to be approved before the start of the school year and have a note from clergy. Sometimes extra wide headbands are confiscated; hoods on jackets or sweatshirts are also not allowed up, you can’t even just be stepping in the front door from the rain and not be yelled at)
-Causes a health and safety risk for students. This includes the requirement that shoes or sandals be worn at all times in the school building. Sunglasses may not be worn in the school building during the school day. (I had a friend who went without shoes for the better part of three years, so this isn’t too well enforced. Flip-flops were just allowed when I was in seventh grade, it was a huge thing)
-Depicts profanity, obscenity, the use of weapons or violence.
-Promotes use of tobacco, drugs, alcohol, or other illegal or harmful products.
-Promotes the use of tobacco, drugs, alcohol, or other illegal or harmful products. (This includes the Threadless “Communist Party” shirt)
-Contains sexually suggestive messages (including the Nike “Just do it” products)
-Depicts gang affiliation (this includes colour bans at some schools. my school bans gold, which is actually one of our school colours)
-Contains language or symbols that demean an identifiable person or group or otherwise infringe on the rights of others (no political party apparel)
-Contains rude, disrespectful, or discourteous expressions inconsistent with civil discourse and behaviour. (this has go so far as to ban wearing apparel for another school if we have a sports match against them that week)
My elementary school uniform code was rather stricter. What I remember:
Girls: White shirt with a peter pan collar; green plaid pinafore dress over the the blouse (knee-length) or green plaid skirt (knee-length), only from the school outfitter (I discovered the second bit when we had ‘tag inspection’ and they discovered mine was an identical one from a less expensive school uniform supply shop); black or brown dress shoes without laces, no saddle shoes allowed; white or hunter green knee socks or white or hunter green tights; white or hunter green cardigan with school insignia allowed November to February; Khaki skorts with school insignia allowed after May 1st; hair tie but be green plaid, hunter green, white, or match hair colour; no wide headbands or bandanas; knee-length black skirt for concerts
Boys: Khaki pants with school insignia; white oxford shirt (long-sleeved until May); khaki shorts with school insignia allowed after May 1st (one boy wore his sister’s skirt to school and got away with it); white dress socks; black or brown dress shoes with matching laces; blue blazer and a tie fifth grade and up; hunter green knitted vest with school insignia allowed November to February; black dress pants for concerts
All students: must have current PE uniform; no open toed shoes without a doctor’s note; all white tennis shoes (separate for PE and regular wear); religious headgear had to be white or hunter green; no sweatshirts except school ones for outdoor PE; no jackets or sweaters tied around waist
At one point navy skirts and pants and socks were allowed, as were light blue shirts
Only time I (intentionally) violated the dress code was at a catholic high school I was trying to get kicked out of. I wore a bootleg t-shirt depicting jesus on the cross recieving oral sex from a nude, kneeling woman. There was no nudity, as the image was angled just so, but the message was clear. I also didn’t tuck it in. This was in 1993.
My middle school (late 90s) decided one summer to institute a rule for the following school year that all shoes must be 95% black, brown, or blue (the extra 5% was leeway for a logo). So I went out and got a lovely pair of baby blue and silver Skechers, the kind with elastic laces. When I got to school, I got in trouble because they were not “the right blue”. As a sassy 7th grader, I told them that they’d just said blue, not specified any particular blue. They threatened to call my mom (I said go ahead!) and they did. They told her that Your Daughter is wearing the wrong color shoes, and she said, “But they’re blue, right? What’s the problem? I just spent $40 on those, I’m not buying any others. You said blue was ok.”
Problem solved.
Four additions for those who attended Catholic all-girl HS in the late 60′s, early 70′s
1) The jewerly restriction of women’s jewerly only was lifted the year before I began – before that, you could not wear your BF’s class ring (resized through the heavy use of bright yarn).
2) My HS included girls from working class neighborhoods (like mine) up to the high income neighborhoods. The blouse and shoes were limited by color and style but these items could be purchased anywhere. Even though we wore the same uniforms (wool blazers and pleated skirts), you can see very subtle difference in the quality of blouses and shoes. My stuff was from Sears, the rich girls, Marshall Fields.
3) Because we wore blazers, my skill in ironing only the front the blouse came in very handy once I entered the work force.
4) To avoid having your hemmed undoned because you failed skirt inspection, once we left the campus, we would raise our skirts above our knees by rolling up the fabric around our waistbands.
I’m American, but my family lived in the West Indies (on the island of St Vincent) in the late 1970′s. My sisters and I attended a girls’ Catholic school where we had to dress in uniforms: pleated dark-bluish-gray skirt about halfway between ankles and knees, short-sleeved white blouse (tucked in), white socks, and white or black shoes. We had to wear our hair pulled back or put up in some way, and were strictly limited on the color of hair trims that we could wear; I got in trouble once for wearing blue hair clips instead of ones in white or black. I also got in trouble for not wearing my patent-leather belt sometimes, and for not keeping my blouse tucked in as neatly as I was supposed to.
I remember it wasn’t until the last part of my freshman year in High School (1968) that girls could wear pants that zipped in the front (boys pants!!) Up to then, your pants had to zip on the side ot back. I remeber too, having to kneel and if your skirt hem didn’t touch the ground, you were sent home. But then by my junior year, we could wear “hot pants”, though ours were far longer than the shorts a lot of teens wear now.
Catholic High School- 1956-1960. Horrid knee length maroon uniform with white nylon blouse,worn with a full slip to preserve our modesty. We had to wear stockings- panty hose not yet invented. As one of eight children with not much money, I would run out of ‘nylons’ and draw a fake seam line up the back of my leg. Sister always checked and I was busted. There was also the ‘no patent leather shoes’ rule, because the boys could look up your skirt. I think I spent more time trying to get around the rules than I did studying.