A thread in Cafe got me to thinking about my Junior High and High School years.
I lived in a pretty conservative small town. A lot of the girls in my junior high wore **short skirts with opaque hose. It wasn’t revealing at all. Most of the parents were fine with it. I don’t remember any controversy at school. We didn’t have a detailed dress code. Any “appropriate” clothing was fine for all students.
I felt a little sorry for the girls on cold days. They shivered a lot for fashion.
Maxi dresses got popular for a year or two in my high school years. Then it drifted back to above the knee skirts. I think the hose was semi opaque. It still didn’t show much. Short skirts at school were an optical illusion in my town.
How do you remember short skirts in junior high school? Were opaque hose expected? How about high school?
IIRC college girls and adults wore sheer hosiery.
**short skirts - were two or three inches above the knee. Nothing extreme.
Dates were a different story. Some of the girls in my high school wore sheer hose. If, their parents allowed it.
It varied from girl to girl. Some were pretty conservative and stuck to jeans. My high school gf wore jeans on dates unless we were going to a school dance.
I remember the lead of our school theatre play refused to wear a costume that made her uncomfortable. The teacher gave it to a different student. She studied dance and was more accustomed to costumes.
In grade nine the kilts were well below the knee’s by probably two inches, but as 10 and 11 past those kilts started to approach the mason dixon line. I believe the school uniform policy was knee high socks, but can remember girls wearing black or white hose. Outside school time, it was ususally Jordache or similar jeans, not many mini or micro skirts outside halloween.
In the seventies we got to wear pants for the first time, so for awhile the big deal was making sure we weren’t wearing jeans. Yes, the rule was “dress pants” only, at least at first. I think there was some discussion about how to decide whether corduroy pants were jeans or not.
Girls in skirts mostly wore regular panty hose. Parents sometimes required opaque hose or tights.
I wore alot of leotards and tights under my clothes because i would have dance class right after school. I was probably an odd ball. My sisters wore lots & lots of panty hose. If I had a dress on for an occasion or church I wore panty hose. But short mini skirts were not usual at church.
The lil’wrekker had many, many more dress code rules. Skirts were required to be one dollar length above the knee or longer. No leggings. No sleeveless tops. No capris pants. No torn jeans. No tee shirts with logos. No super highheels. No sandles No shorts No bra straps or thong straps showing. No rainbow colors in your hair. Probably more I’ve forgotten
I’m a man wearing normal length (not short) shorts for my body and I’d describe how my shorts sit the same way, maybe even 5-6 inches above the knee while sitting down. Yeah, in the early 90s I wore baggy clothing including shorts that were knee length. For me, short skirts on women (back then and now) pretty much had no inseam, maybe 3-4 inches and well above the knee. At some point my school (mid-late 90s) did the fingertip test thing, which for most girls was well above the knee still. Not much hosiery in my era, unless it was during specific fashion trends.
I went to a Catholic elementary school, but it went through 8th grade – i.e. the first two grades of junior high. We had to wear a skirt/blouse/cardigan uniform, but I can remember we’d roll our waistbands. Something the nuns kept an eagle eye out for! Skirts got SUPER short in high school, though for a while they had the “skirt must touch the floor when you’re kneeling” rule. I was also in southern California, and we were more worried about being too hot than being too cold. I mostly went bare-legged, rarely wore panty hose – hated them – but sometimes wore opaque tights for the “look.” We’d go to Albert’s Hosiery in Century City and buy dance tights and ballet flats. It was a very popular look.
As for modesty, we often had short shorts that matched our skirt or dress, so you didn’t have to worry about how you were sitting or going upstairs.
Damn! I totally forgot about patterned (including fishnet) tights! I didn’t like them much. They weren’t comfortable. But my mom said only prostitutes wore fishnets, so I’d wear them occasionally just to bug her.
Looks like most of the girls usually wore jeans or slacks… here’s my senior class picture. I’m in the third-to-last row, nine in from the right, looking like somebody dropped John Lennon into a prep school.
I went to junior high and high school in Illinois in the 70s. We wore pantyhose under our minis. At that time, only little elementary kids wore opaque tights, and none of us would have been caught dead in them. We had a dress code in junior high, and girls were not allowed to wear pants. I walked about 12 blocks home and yes, I froze. It was a relief to get to high school, where we could wear pants.
Socks and, in the winter, leotardos (woolly tights). But we were quite conservative re. skirt length: the mid-thighs my niece now wears would have caused earthquakes, whether it was at the Nuns (aaah, that plaid!) or at the public high school (whose female students were much more likely to wear jeans than any kind of skirt).
