I’m a 90’s kid, and hoop earings were definitely a taboo growing up. Girls in my school used to say, “The bigger the hoop, the bigger the wh*re.” I’m not sure where it came from or why that was a saying.
This was a topic of conversation at one of my favorite restaurants this morning at breakfast. Two servers have a friendly competition wearing big earrings. One server today said she only wears the real big hoops (like 4" across") for special occasions…like halloween. 
She said if she had a hand full of one dollar bills and her big hoop earrings, no one would believe she was a server.
Long story to get to the answer to your question is apparently the bigger the slut factor.
Not slutty, in my group, but also “not done.” I never could bring myself to wear big earrings of any sort, except for dangles with a ball gown. If I had earrings below my ear lobes, I also had gloves up to my elbows.
It’s right up there with wearing your hair down with a formal gown, or peep toe shoes with heels. (sandals are for the beach!!!)
But I am notoriously and ridiculously conservative when it comes to clothing. I still can’t bring myself to wear a skirt without hose. I do love wearing pumps with ankle straps though, they are just so daring! LOL!
I know nothing about earring culture, but I do recollect about five years ago being in a restaurant with a 20-something bartender, and although I have no idea how the conversation came up (no doubt started by my wife), the bartender did mention that her mother had chided her about ‘large bore’ earrings being slutty.
You’d be surprised
People are not always what they project
Dutch here, born end '60. This expert says nothing about hoops being tacky, and he regards a LOT of other things as tacky.
Fashion experts Trinny and Susanna recommend pingpong ball sized hoop earrings. They go with most looks and fit most faces and necks, they say.
Pierced ears, back when I grew up, were normal. But big earrrings…those were viewed as bohemian, extravagant, but more theatrical then slutty.
I guess there was more money to be made with tiny earstuds made of precious stones and metals, so those were sold and worn. You only see those on older ladies, now.
Nowadays, no-one expects earrings to last more then a season, and they are not made of precious materials anymore. To make up for that, they are flashy and colorful and big. That’s how the young wear them.
Ladies growing up in the 80 often wear a lot of tinier earrings, pierced along the edge of their ears. That is kind of dating, too 
My mother thought all pierced earrings were “common”. (She thought a lot of things were common). I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 18 (1971) and allowed to decide such things for myself.
I wore clip on earrings exactly once in my life they hurt like hell.
I only ever see them sold at stores that sell cheap “club wear”. I think of them as kind of ghetto but I don’t get out to da clubs any more and my company is conservative so you wouldn’t see that kind of jewelry here. In other words, I don’t think I know what the standard is these days among the age group that would wear them. As for when I was growing up, lots of girls wore hoops, though I don’t recall them being any bigger than maybe 2 1/2 - 3 " in diameter. I think the giant ones would be more for entertainers, and not necessarily slutty, but more of a costume than what the average girl would wear.
I thought my mother was a dinosaur when she refused to let me pierce my ears as a teenager. Her words? “If God wanted you to have holes in your ears, he’d have created you that way.” (insert teenaged eye-roll here). Thankfully my grandmother wasn’t such a fuddy duddy. She took me to the mall to go Christmas shopping and I came home with pierced ears. My mother was outraged, but the deed had been done. When I was done wearing my ‘starters’, I was allowed to wear stud or button earrings only. Pierced ears were ‘common’, but wearing hoops was ‘low class’. This was said with an emphasis that led me to believe that ‘low class’ was synonymous with ‘streetwalker-ish’.
Of course when I left home for college, the first thing I did was buy a pair of hoops - about 1 1/2 inch, if I remember correctly. 
I do have some 2-inch hoops now, but like others, they are not worn for work, just for going out and having fun. I also have one pair of chandelier earrings that are pretty long which I bought during the craze for them in the aughts, but again, not work wear. Most of the time, I wear my diamond studs or my pearl dangles for work. Sometimes a plain gold 3/4-inch hoop.
I thought the big hoops were pretty, but not necessarily workable for me as I had long hair and knew several people who had gottent their hair tangled in their earrings. I distinctly remember one of Linda Rondstadt’s early albums where she was wearing a pair of great big hoops on the cover photo. She looked great in them.
My wife calls them ‘slut earrings’. She says the bigger the hoop the more the woman is advertising her ‘availability’. I don’t know how serious she is, but since she told me that I’ve found women wearing big hoop earrings more alluring.
According to my wife, big gold hoops are for the Latinas. Mind you, my wife is a Latina herself so she doesn’t mean “whores” by this but rather that it’s a standard Latina fashion choice.
Of course not. But this isn’t about what you are, this is about what you project.
I’m slightly younger than the target age group (born in the mid-70’s). I don’t know that they ever really struck me as slutty, per se. It’s more that big hoop earrings aren’t really appropriate for some situations - sort of like large chandelier earrings. Or really, now that I’m thinking about it, any larger earrings, regardless of style. I wouldn’t feel appropriate wearing them to the office, for example, or to church or a funeral, although I might wear them to a wedding. To be fair, I wouldn’t wear them anyway - I rarely wear big hoops at all because of the tendency to get caught in random shit and immediately proceed to hurt like the dickens. In my brain, big hoop earrings are party or clubbing wear. Similarly, big chandelier earrings are formal wear.
I’d give someone wearing big hoop earrings (or big chandeliers) to, for example, the office the very minor side eye for slightly inappropriate dress, but that’s about it. Unless, as previously mentioned, she were Latina - I also tend to associate that particular style of earring with Latinas and my brain would give that one a cultural flag.
To offer an otherwise OT perspective (male, born in 70): pierced ears were considered glamorous when I was young, but the only person of the large group of cousins older than I to wear hoops was the carefree cousin. She’s at least 15 years older than I, was a schoolteacher, married/divorced several times (aint gonna take shit off nobody), and drove a TransAm. She was and is the picture of awesome.
Her siblings were all very near my mother’s age - I actually thought of the generation in question as my aunts and uncles until I was 30 or so, and still refer to them as such. Grandma got pregnant with mom at 43, and mom’s nearest sibling was 10 years older than her. I don’t think any of my other cousins (aunts and uncles, whatever you want to call them) on that side of the family had pierced ears.
Maybe from that association, maybe from some other source, perhaps from some primal urge - I’ve always associated it with a woman who’s more adventurous than most. I wouldn’t say slutty, but willing to take a chance.
Around ten years after the time period in question? I only had to take my 1" hoops out for jobs that said the “pirate look” wasn’t really working for them. Yep, a customer actually described me as looking like a pirate. People think strange things about jewelry in general, and piercings specifically.
In my circle hoops were not slutty nor vulgar; because the uptight females in my circle would never say those words. Any dangley earring was inappropriate.
You did not wear them to meet your dad for lunch at the country club after his golf game. You did not wear them to your boyfriends graduation from Yale**. You did not wear them in the presence of your inlaws-to-be until long after they became your inlaws. They were OK for frat parties, concerts and hanging around in the dorm.
Both my parents would not allow my sister or me to pierce our ears. My mother* said “only PEASANTS have pierced ears.” My father said “You’ll look like a tinker.” (what ever that means.)
When I was 18 I begged our family Dr to pierce my ears. I figured at that age as long as I did not have a “back alley” piercing my mother would not be too upset; although why I gave a crap what she thought back then is beyond me. Oh wait right I was still drinking the cool-aid at that age.:smack:
*mother was a wacky bitch as I have eluded to in more than one thread.
**At my boyfriends graduation I looked so “Junior League/DAR” he did not recognize me.
Tinker is another derogatory name for the already derogatory(?) word gypsy, I believe.
A tinker is a traveling mender of metal goods. So the term ‘gypsy’ is meant as ‘itinerant’, not necessarily Roma.
Thank you for that morsel of knowledge
Thank you both; Dad was intolerant to say the least.
Born in early 60’s and hoops weren’t worn because that’s what streetwalkers wore. That seemed to change around the mid-seventies and you began to see hoops in JC Penny. My mom & I actually went and got our ears pierced together.