Were you a sharp-dressed kid?

[Warbaby]

Did you have a suit when you were a kid? How about a fedora? Let's see some photos if you've got 'em...

This is yrs trly in 1949:

 

[Baron Kurtz]

No. I grew up in my brother's hand-me-downs.

bk

 

[sweetfrancaise]

Erm, well, growing up in the late eighties, I didn't have a chance! Acid wash, polka dots, lime green, stirrup pants. Lovely. The choice was limited, and I didn't learn what looked good on me until the past few years.

 

[Diamondback]

I don't recall much, jeans and polos or slacks and polos or suits or khakis have been the "uniform of the day" for as long as I can remember...

 

[Mr_Misanthropy]

80's Chic

I too was a child of the 80's. Lots of corduroy in my past, I'm afraid. Even in high school I wasn't much of a dresser. I blame it on my mother, she dressed me up until I was around 11.

 

[metropd]

Yes Yes Yes

 

[tonypaj]

I have worn what I've wanted to wear since early teens. Sharp dressed as in a kid dressed in "adult" clothes, never, doing my own thing, absolutely. And it continues today, I don't ask for opinions, rarely give any (apart from this board, but even here not too often), and I enjoy my clothes...

 

[Salv]

I wasn't a suit wearer as a kid, but this is me, probably aged 4, in Naples where my dad was stationed with the US Navy:

 

[Warbaby]

Did you have a suit when you were a kid? How about a fedora? Let's see some photos if you've got 'em...

This is yrs trly in 1949:

I didn't mean to imply that my parents dressed me that way all the time, nor that I had any choice in the matter. I was their firstborn and I think they thought it was cute to dress me like a miniature grown-up. I have photos me at 3 years old dressed in a miniature WWII army officer's uniform, at 5 years wearing a little sailor suit, complete with bosun's whistle (which, amazingly, I still have), and various cowboy outfits.

 

[Benny Holiday]

I wish I could say I dressed like that Warbaby, but being an Aussie kid in the 70s and 80s, I typically wore shorts all summer (and I mean just shorts - nothing else!) and just rough-and-tumble jeans and jumpers in winter.

Maybe that's why I dress up so much now, I missed out on playing 'dress-ups' as a kid and I'm trying to make up for it in my adulthood!

 

[K.D. Lightner]

I grew up in the late 40's to mid-50's in a working class neighborhood. My folks, and the neighbors, shopped at the cheapest places they could find -- in those days JC Penney, Sears, dimestores and not much else.

The kids in my neighborhood dressed like dweebs. Pants that were a size too big, belts so long they looped around and hung down, old flannel shirts, lots of white (and only white) t-shirts, white Penney's blouses for the girls with puffy sleeves, jeans in the wintertime that had flannel lining (oddly, coming back in now for adults as well as kids).

The really poor kids got hand-me downs or, just as likely, Salvation Army seconds. Some semi-rural boys still wore bib overalls. In the summer we wore shorts and halters and sandles and some of us went barefoot.

If you were really cool, you got button-front 501 Levis, this was true of the girls as well as the boys. I was dying for a pair, but mother kept shopping for nerd-girl jeans at JC Penney. They had little teeny pockets in back and made your butt look big, even if it wasn't.

When I was in college, and had my own money, the first thing I did was go out and buy a pair of real Levi's -- had to buy them a size too large, then wash them before they fit right.

Oh, and you could also be considered pretty cool if you wore Keds sneakers and/or Buster Brown shoes. I did have a pair of the latter, which I liked, but really wanted a pair of cowboy boots. Father said, no, girls don't wear cowboy boots. By the time I was 11, and was able to prove that girls did wear them, he said "you're too old."

We had one kid who always dressed "stylish" in our school -- he was the class "rich kid" and wore dress pants and shirt, sometimes a bow tie to school. We made fun of him.

No one wore fedoras unless we were playing "house" and borrowed grown-up clothes. Once in a while we played "cops and robbers" and would wear our father's fedoras if we could filch them for a few hours. We did wear lots of cowboy hats -- I had a red one my favorite aunt and uncle bought me and I wore it for years, finally passing it down to my brother.
So, stylish, no, even at Easter we were outfitted in clothes that didn't fit. Baggy suits and oversized dresses, maybe the next Easter they fit. I don't recall any boy in our neighborhood wearing a fedora at Easter time.

Hair? The boys mostly had "butch haircuts," sometimes cropped so short they were bald and got badly sunburned (a dangerous thing). If boys wore any kind of hats, they were those beanie things with points around the crown, don't quite know what they were called. Girls wore straw hats at Easter and to church. Nobody wore hats in the summer unless they were playing cowboys.

In the winter, girls wore headscarves and half froze to death, boys wore hunting caps, some wore stocking caps, or we had hoods on our oversized coats. And mittens attached with clips so we wouldn't lose them, and big clumpy galoshes over our shoes. The feet would start burning and turn numb in minutes. I would come in from playing outdoors every hour or so to warm up my feet.

So, even though we weren't stylish, we had some sense of style within our working class culture.


karol

 

[Warbaby]

Wow, K.D. - what a wonderful childhood reminiscence!

My parents were far from wealthy - my dad drove a delivery truck for CocaCola after the war. It's quite possible my mother made that little suit. She made a lot of her own clothes and clothes for me as well. When I was in the 2nd grade we lived in Tombstone, Arizona and my mother made matching cowboy shirts for my dad and I for the Helldorado Days. Black satin with white satin yokes and cuffs, white piping, an embroidered cowboy on a bucking horse on the back of the yoke and cowboy boots on the front. I remember the details well because I still have both of them!

 

[Dixon Cannon]

No. Oshkosh By Gosh, hadn't been invented yet.

..and I could only afford one tie!
-dixon cannon

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Warbaby -- Wow, I would have loved to have a cowboy shirt when I was a kid; heck I love them even now.

All I wanted to do was dress like a cowboy -- shirt, hat, chaps, guns and boots. Sometimes I fantacized I'd be adopted by my aunt and uncle, the ones who gave me the cowboy hat, because I knew that, if I wished, they would make sure I dressed in western clothes. Totally.

Most of us weren't interested in dressing sharp, whatever that was back then, we wanted to look adventurous, not like our mothers and fathers. It was much, much later, like the 1980's, before I began to appreciate the way my parents dressed in the 40's.

karol

 

[Mike in Seattle]

Outrageously well-dressed as a kid for going to church and so forth. I don't know where in the early to mid-60's you'd fine them but Mom found little tweed sportcoats and suits and such. Blazers with some little emblems on the pocket (I had red, my younger brother had blue one Easter I remember in particular). I also remember one particularly snappy outfit, and I'm thinking 1968-70 - turtlenecks, Nehru jackets (mine was mint green) and an enameled Maltese cross around my neck. I remember it vividly because they were only in style for about 15 minutes, and all my cousins remember it. I jokingly suggested to a cousin she look for one for her grandson last Easter and she said, "Ya know...Aunt Gracie always dressed you two to the nines. You always looked like you stepped out of a catalog or magazine, but that year - what in the hell was she thinking? Your brother looked like an 8 year old Peter Sellers on the way to a love-in."

 

[Warbaby]

I also remember one particularly snappy outfit, and I'm thinking - turtlenecks, Nehru jackets (mine was mint green) and an enameled Maltese cross around my neck...."

That's so totally cool!

 

[Brinybay]

Did you have a suit when you were a kid? How about a fedora? Let's see some photos if you've got 'em...

No suit or hat, just an overcoat, and only because Mom dressed me (I'm on the left in front). More interesting is Grandpa's hat, looks like a bowler.

 

[Mike in Seattle]

That's so totally cool!

Actually...as time's gone by and I remember that outfit, for the time, it was totally cool and very nifty and I can't think of anyone else we new, child or adult, who wore one. But remembering it in my mid-teens to twenties, I was on board with my cousin Jan - "What WAS my mother thinking?!?!?!!?" Jan's boys were a few years younger than us, but pretty rambunctuous - sportcoats on those two would've been shreds in minutes.

And I have to laugh out loud when I see pictures of Peter Sellers in a Nehru jacket because my brother did look like a minature version of him - slicked down hair, glasses, somewhat bucktoothed grin.

 

[Tomasso]

The grammar and high schools which I attended required a uniform consisting of a maroon school blazer, grey dress pants, cream shirt and navy blue tie. Outside of school it was denim and corduroys. And, I usually had a blue suit for church, weddings, holidays and such. I don't recall wearing a fedora until well after college.

 

[Warbaby]

Warbaby -- Wow, I would have loved to have a cowboy shirt when I was a kid; heck I love them even now.

karol

Born to be a steely-eyed gunslinger...