This is my experience except we were required to wear skirts or dresses up until 1971 when pantsuits were allowed. Girls could not wear jeans in my school district until sometime around 1974.
I wear jeans to work most days, but I still change clothes when I get home. Sweats or pajamas in the chilly weather and a sundress in the summer. And the super scrubbies on the kitty litter/spray paint/deep clean the bathroom days. those are the very old sweats with paint stains cut off at the knees and a very stained (but clean) t-shirt. These are clothes that cannot be worn any further than the mailbox.
Often this month’s “good clothes” became next month’s play clothes. It was a financial thing. Keep the good clothes good as long as possible and then, once they are stained/worn out, wear them doing things where you get dirty, like play or yard work.
I went to public school in South Africa, which meant school uniforms. So yes, I definitely changed. If I remember right I couldn’t wait to get out of those things.
My kids don’t do that, and go to school and play in the same clothes. They tend to get hand me downs from our local social network, so we don’t spend very much money on this. Good thing, because they play hard and clothes do not last long. Yes, we’re the parents who send their kid to elementary school with pant holes in the knees
Nope. Two pairs of Lee jeans (worn alternate weeks) and two shirts (a MTW and a TFSS). Took them off when I went to bed at night. There were probably a few more shirts, for variety, but they were worn 3 or 4 days.
I was born in 1971 and have no recollection of such a concept, for me or anyone else.
I went to Catholic schools, but in Ontario, Catholic schools are public schools; there’s two public school systems, one Catholic and the other not. Kids don’t wear uniforms until high school in the Catholic system.
My mom used the term “play clothes” to talk about clothes that weren’t nice enough even for school–often because they were worn out or just super sloppy. Shorts were also inherently play clothes: I was born in 1976, and shorts-at-school was still a novelty when I was growing up: some allowed it, some didn’t. So like in the spring/summer, my mom would do an inventory of what we had, and take us shopping for “play clothes”–shorts and cheap tops, generally. We’d wear them on the weekends, and every day in summer. I don’t think we changed every day after school, but we certainly changed after church, and my mom might say something like “don’t wear play clothes” if we were going somewhere nice-ish. I knew what that meant.
Absolutely. Catholic grammar school with uniforms all the long eight years: Salt and Pepper corduroys, white short sleeved collared shirts, and black leather shoes. Who’d want to try and play in that outfit?
