That puts you in the exclusive company of every single other female since the dawn of high school pictures.
Oh, I remember those, I’m so sorry.
Og, yes. I can’t even blame my mama for that one!
Catholic school late fifties through 1971. School days we wore uniforms. Mom had no choice. It was the Catholic school system that had no fashion sense.
It was an attempt to desexualize you. Ironic how that look has become the bad girl sex kitten uniform of choice.
True enough. I think we should demand some photos to go with all these claims (or not - that’ll be a whole lotta polyester). 
My mom cut our hair (me and my three sisters), and she was a little fussy with the bangs - she wanted them straight, I wanted them to be longer than one inch. I think I have really short bangs in every grade school picture.
As the third girl, I almost exclusively wore hand-me-downs until I started buying my own clothes, so yeah, I wore a lot of funny-looking clothes. My mom’s idea of dressing children was, is it warm enough? Is it clean? Is it in good repair? Does it more or less fit? There were no other considerations, as far as I could tell.
No, mostly I dressed myself funny. I had terrible taste.
I do blame my mother for going along with my hairstylist and inflicting perms on me. Oh, god, are there some bad pictures.
Polos and glasses like that were quite the in thing for the 5th graders in my neck of the woods around the early-mid 80s.
Whoo boy. I had thick glasses and goofy teeth (or braces). I have very thick wavy hair, and in my family we are all hair-ignorant or something so I just had a ton of hair with no shape to it.
When I was 6, my mom sewed me pink overalls and put “Cute kid” on the front pocket. If I actually had been a cute kid it might have worked. In reality, it was just something for kids to make fun of.
Through freshman year I consistently wore the wrong colors and weird geeky clothes. After that it got better, but junior high was terrible. I know, it was terrible for everyone else too! But I did manage a perfect storm of awfulness.
She did, but it was the early 70’s and you should have seen what she was wearing.
Heh - I had the glasses and the awful teeth (and not just braces but Complicated Orthodontics) but I didn’t natively have finger-in-electric-socket hair… so my mom got me perms. Thanks, mom!
My parents couldn’t afford to shop for clothes for 5 kids in places other than K-Mart, so that was what I wore. My mother was friends with some old lady who sold clothes out of her house, so quite often I ended up wearing clothes from there also. Needless to say, my sisters tended to refuse my hand-me-downs whenever possible. I still remember the red cords with a white stripe down the side my mom bought me when I was in 7th grade. I only wore them to school once, and a group of boys surrounded me and mockingly begged me to break-dance for them. I think my terminally unfashionable clothes may have been a factor in my being bullied for years. For this reason, I tend to indulge my daughter when shopping for clothes - if she ever has social problems in school, at least it won’t be because of her clothes.
Holy crap, I was freaky looking as a little kid, even for the 80s and early to mid 90s. I have this really poofy, curly/wavy hair, so of course my mom cut in these enormous bangs which sat on the front of my head like a mushroom - the rest of my hair was in tight braids. I remember complaining about these hairstyles but I was told the alternative was having a boy’s haircut (which my mom always had herself), so I took what I could get.
I also had giant, round, magenta wire-framed glasses (typical for the times tho). And the only clothes I owned until I was like 14 were hand-me-downs from my cousins, who were at least 5 years older and who were dressed funny themselves, and giant t-shirts from thrift stores. Typical school outfit, looking at pictures: too-big acid-washed boy’s jeans safety pinned around the waist to hold them up and holes in the knees, well-used canvas plimsolls (this in the era of gigantic white Nike’s), and either a gigantic boy’s wool sweater, or a gigantic white t-shirt with a picture of something random on the front. I looked homeless.
Add to all this that I was really small and scrawny for my age (and all my clothes were too big), I had buck teeth followed by a decade of braces, and was white as a ghost from living in South Dakota - it’s a wonder I had any friends at all. Luckily my personality has always prevented people from bullying me.
Oh yes. Those look good to you? Because they look awful to me, completely out of control, and you know how hard it is to maintain that look? I would probably prefer my hair to lean towards wavy, but at least it’s better controlled now - and it doesn’t help that it’s really, really thin.
But my saving grace was that I was really, really cute.
They look terrible. But my point is that wasn’t that the in look during the 80s? That permed, curly hair look. I thought you were saying that no one wanted curly hair in that decade…or did you just mean that it was hard to maintain that look?
If your physical looks are anything like your posts, I’m sure you were/are very cute! (Off topic but I always enjoy reading your thread contributions.)
I called it the poodle look. I never got it.
But I had parachute pants.
She is.
My mom dressed me in shit like white bellbottoms with a giant blue anchor on the leg. And frilly plaid shirts with gold threads woven in.
My mom put me in costumes for everyday school.
One day I would be ‘Scottish Girl’ with a kilt, sash, beret, sporin, etc. The next day I would be ‘Indian Girl’ with a leather vest/skirt combo, headdress, etc.
It was pathetic and the other kids made fun of me, but whatayagonnado?
ETA - I forgot she also made me wear skirts everyday with awful synthetic tights. I HATED them and told her repeatedly but she wasn’t interested. To this day if I feel that fabric it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Oh, man, it’s kind of cathartic to hear that everybody’s mom dressed them funny.
My mom was irrevocably stuck in the '50s for her “cool aesthetic.” That meant that I, in early grade school in the early to mid 70s, had to wear saddle shoes to school. White saddle shoes with black saddles and red soles. Oh, how I hated those things! I finally got her to go for tan ones with brown saddles which were less obvious, but it took me until about 4th grade before she finally gave up and let me have Wallabees (which were kind of dreadful too, but I loved them.)
I was a tomboy from my earliest days, so having to wear dresses to school every day sucked too, but fortunately that didn’t even last as long as the saddle shoes. You know how many fights you have when you pit a tomboy girl against a mom who wants her daughter to be “cute”? Ugh.
The worst, though, was hair. When I was in very early grade school, Mom not only made me wear my hair in these two stupid ponytails that stuck out of the side of my head (the kids called them my ‘antennae’) but she also bought me not one, not two, but three identical sweatshirts with “Buffy” from “Family Affair” on them (the only difference was the color–one white, one blue, and one yellow). My nickname (not voluntarily!) for years was “Buffy.” Once I finally convinced Mom that the stupid ponytails had to go, she retaliated (yeah, yeah, she meant well…I hope) by making me wear another even stupider hairstyle: remember the one where you take one small clump of hair from each side, bring them around the back, and fasten them with some sort of barrette? Yeah, that was me until junior high. All I wanted was a nice short tomboy haircut, but…no.
The minute I took control of my own hair, I got it hacked off, and it’s been short ever since.
My mom made most of my clothes until I started school. She would let me pick out the fabric and pattern. One outfit I remember fondly was a bell-bottom jumpsuit. The fabric was royal blue with multi-colored letters and numbers. It was groovy.
The mommade outfits I didn’t like, were the ones where she tried to make me and my sister coordinate. My sister thought she was a miniature Jackie Kennedy. She wanted some little dress suits, she was (10). Mom would use the same fabric to make me casual dresses that I could play in. There was one that was a pink plaid nubby fabric that felt like upholstery. My sister loved her skirt with the matching solid pink jacket.