It seems that in the first decade or so after blue jeans became familiar casual wear, it seems that they were always bought three inches too long and rolled up at the bottoms. After about 1965, on the other hand, t seems like it was the fashion to buy them at the right length, or hem them yourself, rather than roll them up. If you did roll them up, others might think it looked square and hokey at worst, or at best that you were intentionally cultivating a retro look.
So why did they used to roll them up? Did they use to make Levi’s only in a few different lengths?
Being born in 1946 I didn’t buy many of my own jeans in the 50’s.
I rolled them up because they were too long.
Lack of money made us much more practicle back then. Style be damned, there was nothing wrong with rolled up jeans. Also “gasp” hand me downs were quite common. Jeans were not thrown away because they were faded or had a hole in the knee.Mom just sewed on a patch.
Style was for the rich
Multiple sizes for non-tailored clothing is a fairly recent development. I was talking to a purveyor of “cowboy” clothes who was telling me that in the 19th century, men’s off-the-rack coats came in two sizes: big and bigger. If you weren’t wealthy enough to hire a tailor, then you just made do with what was available, cinching belts and rolling up cuffs where necessary.
It’s also probably simplistic to say that “everybody” rolled their cuffs any more than any everybody today wears their pants around they knees and has their underwear hanging out.
Have you ever tried to keep a pack of cigarettes from being crushed while doing physical work?
I’m not sure when the pocket Tee shirt came into being but I don’t remember them before the late 60s.
People were no less the slaves of fashion in the fifties than they were in the seventies, or they are today. Some folks turned their cuffs up because their pants were too long. Others did it to look “cool.” James Dean did it, man, it had to be cool.
There for a while in the very early sixties, people tucked their pants into their boots, because it was cool. They got shit in their boots, too, if the went out into rough country, and learned not to do that. If you wore boots and jeans in the suburbs, it wasn’t so bad, though. It’s lots easier to be cool in the suburbs. Cowboy pants can be a lot tighter, if you don’t have to get on horses, or do any work.
Tris
“He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” ~ Albert Einstein ~
What I thought about it at the time: Slacks were supposed to have cuffs. Rolling up jeans gave them cuffs, make them look a bit more like slacks. (This was an era when wearing “tennis shoes” to school was embarrassing.)
By the '60s, anything that looked like the '50s was sneered at.
I’ll second justwannano: clothes were relatively more expensive back then (China still preferred to control Korea rather than the American garment market), so your mom took the long view when she bought clothes. Plus, when you rolled them up, you could show off the plaid flannel lining!
Your alternative was in the war surplus stores, since there was still tons of WWII stuff being dumped on the open market (“your mother wears combat boots!”).
Seems there was a lot of that pants-rolling going on in the early- to mid-80s, too. It was a little different than it was in the 50s – you pinched in the hem to make it fairly tight against your leg, THEN you rolled it up.
This may be regional, but everyone did where I grew up (Atlanta). I did and I was upper middle class, certainly not a “hood” and did not smoke. I graduated high school in 1957.
When the stores started carrying jeans in different lengths (about when I graduated) the first “in” thing was to turn up the bottom seam, which as mentioned above was like having cuffs. A few years before that the first light blue jeans came out, but the idea of intentionally fading jeans would have been thought to be silly.
I grew up on a farm in the 70’s in rural Oklahoma. We would tuck our pants into our boots so we wouldn’t get shit on our pants. Literally! Actually we would tuck the part of the pant leg that was on the inner part of your leg (this is more difficult to describe than I thought!), into our boot, and leave the part on the outer part of your legs hanging out. That way you didn’t look goofy (or so we thought), but you didn’t get cow shit on your pants either. Not a bad style considering we were going to beat a kid up in my school for wearing “disco pants”! Jeans and T shirts were the style of the day.
Ahh it feels good to post again. It’s been a while, with the board being so slow and all!
Sorry, overlapping the extra material, then rolling it up was a 50’s thing, at least in NE Ohio where I come from. If you did that, voila, you had “pegged” pants, and we did it for the pseudo-hood look. It was looked at askance by the upright citizens. We was baaad dudes!
I always thought that was a retro thing. Not that the people who did it were trying to be honest to God 50’s style “hodads”, but that punk music fans were trying evoke that 50’s rock look. Come to think of it, the 80’s is when straight leg jeans came back in style for men.
