School Dress Code 1950s - Hilarious

This is one of my favorite clips from my 1950s 1960s collection used to create my television series, Making Sense Of The Sixties. Hicksville high school, Long Island, right near where I grew up in Levittown Long Island. I wore some of the "not proper school attire" and later became a rebel, as most of my friends did. I wish I had more of this film to present to my subscribers.

[destany]

She'd flip about dress code in this day

[alyssajones]

I love how the teens in their 'bad taste of attire' pose for the camera lol. Especially the girl wearing the tight skirt strutting her stuff 😁

[tishlynn]

They would stroke out if they saw what these kids wore today in middle school!!

[bryanmartinez]

Leather jacket and jeans past: Must be a delinquent.
Today: So classy
Have you seen the price of a real leather jacket today.

[billsmith]

My school should have considered themselves lucky that I bothered putting pants on in the morning.

[imthebossofme]

I actually saw this clip in high school in the 70's. We thought is was extreme back then.

[annainspain]

As late as the late 1970s, large hoops or dangling earrings were not allowed in my midwestern high school. They said it was because they could get caught on someone's clothes in gym class "and tear your earlobe." Truth was we weren't allowed to wear anything that called attention to ourselves. Even printed t shirts, they'd send you to the bathroom and make you wear it inside out.

[jimmymcconnie]

this video is true...my grandpa once put on a leather jacket in school and he got possesed by a demon

[thisuser]

You got to admit, all of the outfits seen are nice.

[knelson]

Lol, crazy kids! Hicksville Junior High Rebels!!! Thank you David. 😊

[creampopz]

Omg I was laughing my ass off when she said extremely tight skirt loll lol that's baggy as hell

[johnroberts]

As a BA in history I enjoyed this.  Few people realize how conservative America really was in the '50s.  Extremely conservative.

[stephaniecastillo]

My grandpa says he got in so much trouble for always wearing all black to school in the 50s. I never understood why until I saw this video 😹

[mswinslow]

I’m a private elementary educator, and my students wear uniforms . I still loved the clothing rebellion of this time period . It screamed I won’t be just like my father, and I won’t be on Valium like my mother !

[gregoryerickson]

If she only knew what people where today....

[NPMayans]

At one high school (Academy of the New Church, Bryn Athyn, PA - near Philadelphia) the students voted about 10 years ago to get red & white uniforms. Although the school had a dress code back in the 50s and 60s, and even a "taste code" in the 70s, it never had uniforms. When asked "why??", most replied that they were just tired of all the dressing competition! They didn't want to have to be self-conscious and try to figure out what to wear. The uniform is light fitting and uses sweaters instead of coats or suits. Search the school if you want to see the uniforms or what they are up too.

[AbandonedRaven]

This is probably my favorite under a minute video I’ve been recommended in a long time. I would love to see her reaction to some of the clothing that’s allowed today.

[michaelquebec]

I know folks are laughing and saying things like "They would gasp if they saw how kids dressed today." However, the reason why this (silly by out standards) dress code was in effect was because upper middle class kids were copying what they thought how inner city gang kids dressed (because of movies like "Rebel Without A Cause" and "The Wild One.")

Upper middle class kids dressed like this as a mild form of "rebellion" (along with chewing gum and occasionally mouthing off, in a very mild fashion.) That's how we remember it today.

And for THESE kids, that was, for the most part, as far as their "rebellion" went.

What made school officials admittedly paranoid (and caught up in hysteria) was reports of REAL gang kids, in places like Highbridge Park, New York, the lower East Side of Manhattan, East Los Angeles, or the Hunter's Point area of San Francisco, who sometimes dressed like this, who did indeed engage in drive by shootings (yes, they had that in the 1950's, in certain inner city areas, and sorry if that goes against the "nostalgic" good old days thinking), and stabbings, and other truly bad things, that wannabe "bad" kids in nice neighborhoods (like the students from this school's neighborhood) mildly emulated, with leather jackets and jeans.

Think of it like today's kids who live in rich neighborhoods trying to look like gangster rappers, with their pants hanging down.

Below is a link about the Michael Farmer murder of 1957. He was a 15 year old partially handicapped polio survivor who was murdered by members of The Egyptian Kings and Dragons street gangs at Highbridge Park, New York over "rights" to use a swimming pool, and it was the 12th teen homicide by youth gangs in New York that summer of 1957:

One of the gang leaders of that murder, at the time of his arrest, did dress like this. Did dressing like this actually cause teen crime? Of course not. (It's way more complicated than simply how a kid dresses.)

But paranoid adults of that time wanted an "easy" way to visually distinguish a "good" kid from a "bad" kid, and as mistaken as that approach was, I kind of see why they did it.

Was there paranoia in the 1950's that often manifested itself in ridiculous ways, such as this dress code? Absolutely.

But...was their reasoning based at least in part, on genuine fears of real events? Yes.

[coreycox]

I like how they are proudly flaunting the rules.

[AtlantaGymFan]

I too was born in 1950. We were always polite to our elders, made sure we did our best in school, and attended church every Sunday. We were very lucky in that we never were afraid to ask for help and truly believed we would have the success our parents did. "Leave it to Beaver" was very close to how our lives were.