Hey, the public elementary school we moved away from in 1970 didn’t allow girls to wear pants.
We weren’t allowed to wear pants at all, let alone jeans, until my junior year in '68. But we also had skirt length rules. You were made to kneel, and if the hem of your skirt/dress didn’t touch the floor, you had to go home and change. I almost had that happen to me, but my skirt just barely grazed the ground, so I was o.k.
Touch the floor plus two inches!
When we went into town, we rolled our waistbands up.
Heh, your school was more conservative than mine! In elementary school (Catholic), we 'd roll the waistbands on the skirts of our uniforms. But the nuns would check, so you’d have to keep an eye out.
I spent quite a lot of time at a skating rink called Roller Bowl which was located in the inner city. I guy named Frank Cernik opened a rink called Skateland out in the suburbs in 1968. We all showed up for the grand opening and were not allowed in because we were all wearing jeans. The guy at the cage said “We don’t need you hoodlums here.”
That was a rather odd boarding school in the first half of the 1960’s. It did, however, have horses.
The other boarding school, in the second half of the sixties, only let us wear jeans while cleaning (IIRC on Saturday mornings.) I don’t remember jeans at the first one at all; we wore uniforms to class, dresses to dinner, jodphurs to ride and IIRC gym costumes with not-very-short shorts for gym.
Anyone who tells me that the 1950s or any time before that was more moral than today has another thing coming. I think a lot of the morality in the past was just performative prudishness that was used to put on a proper front and support various authoritarian social structures (churches, patriarchy, etc), while masking evil: oppression of women, white supremacy, child abuse…
I have given this example on the boards before. In the USA until the 1970s, being a flight attendant, then called a stewardess, was a highly gendered job reserved exclusively for young women. In many ways it was considered a desirable job – you were paid more than women got for various other work, got to see the world, and might find a well-off husband among the passengers. But in exchange for being given this privileged job as a woman, you had to adhere to very strict standards for appearance, poise, and “morality.” Typically, a stewardess had to be unmarried, divorced or widowed, and certainly not a single mother. A case is recorded from circa 1960 when a young woman who had a child out of wedlock supported herself and her child by working as a stewardess. After three years, the airline somehow found out. They gave her the option of either leaving or of putting the child up for adoption! I can’t for the life of me imagine in whose book this could be considered moral. Clearly the airline cared only about having a squeaky clean image, and not about the interests of the child and the mother. Disgusting.
Or take this example. Actress Grace Kelly came from a strong Irish Catholic background; certainly that was the tone set by her wealthy businessman and athlete father Patrick Kelly. Her German-American mother converted to Catholicism on marrying (and raised her children strictly with liberal use of corporal punishment). The Kelly children went to Catholic school; when Grace wanted to be an actress, her father was dead-set against it for he considered being an actress one step away from being a prostitute. When she won an Oscar, he brushed it off. He was probably happy when Grace married Prince Ranier of Monaco and could no longer act. But old Patrick was a serial womanizer who apparently thought nothing about cheating on his wife. Surely he was taught in Sunday school or by whoever cathechized him that “thou shall not commit adultery” is right there in the 10 Commandments, but apparently it didn’t apply to him.
I was class of '72, too. Our school did away with the dress code at some point during my sophomore year. (There was a picture in the yearbook of six or seven kids standing outside the school, all wearing clothes that wouldn’t have been permitted earlier.) After that the closest we came to a dress code was the requirement for boys in ROTC to have military haircuts.
In grade school or junior high boys weren’t allowed to wear jeans with rivets.
Interestingly, 1972 seems to recur as a turning point. I have looked extensively at old yearbook pictures (in particular back copies of yearbooks in my Toronto high school’s library), and micro-mini skirts seem to dominate around 1970-71. When the miniskirt crossed the Pond to North America (was it in 1967?), it seems to have caused quite an uproar; it appears to have been generally accepted as streetwear and school clothing by 1969. But while some schools may have allowed pants on girls (and jeans on either boys or on both sexes), it seems to have taken a few more years before the majority of school administrators relented.
I remember when, in the 1990s, we had the end-of-year farewell ceremony for departing teachers, and there was one teacher who had started work at our school circa 1971. She made a comment to the effect that when she started working there, most girls had hair down to their waists (perhaps a slight exaggeration), and no one, student or teacher, wore blue jeans. Conversely, I saw in a yearbook from around 1972 or 73 where the issue of freedom of dress was being discussed in an article (it seems that around then whatever dress code was in effect was loosened or abolished). I vaguely recall reading a comment from the principal at the time to the effect that students should have freedom of dress if they use good judgment.
I used to skate at the skating rink (Levittown) in the OP, probably late 70s or early 80s. They still had the no jeans restriction then.
For blue jeans, the big turning point was 1976.
That’s the first time that Calvin Klein sold jeans. And they did it with a big, bold move. As part of their regular (and very popular) fashion show, they added a then-shocking display of sexy models walking the runway wearing jeans.
That’s the defining moment for when jeans moved to respectability. For the previous 5 , maybe10, years or so, there had been a confusing transition, as shown by the sign in the OP; Wearing jeans had been seen as questionable—only occasionally acceptable, but more often was associated with dirty work on the farm.
Didn’t white Levi’s often get a pass back in the day? Even the sign in the OP specified “blue”. Denim wasn’t the problem; the color of the denim was.
In the late ‘70s, my mom invested in a new skating rink. It was high-tech, with a blue plastic floor that took care of the biggest downside to classic roller rinks. I mean, those places were freakin’ loud.
In the late ‘70s when I was in high school, roller rinks were considered the last refuge of Disco. By the early 80s punk bands could rent them for self-promoted gigs.
The girls’ grammar school I went to in the UK had a uniform which didn’t have trousers as an option until the early 2000s, a few years after I left - a new, male, head took over, it was one of the first changes he made.
Hell, the college I worked at just a few years back tried to bring in a ban on blue jeans for staff while I was there, with a claim it was ‘unprofessional’- to massive pushback, especially from the animal care, agriculture and horticulture departments…
Boy, look at all these farmers!
Aw, c’mon, Eileen…
I “don’t have permission to access [that URL] on this server.”
It is a catalog page on the Levi website. Whatever the problem is is on your end, not theirs.
With this song? 
