Put On Your 70 Style Clothing!

I think we should have a 70 style clothing day.  Think about it.  Kids in school do things like that to have fun and it is usually pretty amusing (even the older kids like it).  I know it sounds silly to have a 70's day, but it could be one in a series of special, one day theme holidays.

I don't even turn on the news anymore because all you hear is economic gloom and doom.  Declaring a 70 style clothing day could be a fun distraction and might actually stimulate the economy a bit as people looked for the old fashions in unorthodox places!  Wouldn't it be great to see the anchors on all of the nightly news shows donning 70's fashions?

We could make it really fun.  Politicians in every town could drive around with our tax break money and give a dollar to everyone dressed like a hippie or a disco queen on the special day!  President Obama said he wanted to "spread it around", didn't he?  Once you received your dollar, your hand would be stamped with a special seal and you could get a free chunk of government cheese or something.  Remember eating that in the 80's?  Good stuff.  Really.

Why stop at 70 Style Clothing Day though?  We could come up with new incentives (or just do it for fun) and have dress like an 80's Prep Day and then prepare for 90's Seattle Grunge Eve!

Maybe we could even have competitions between towns and cities.  Instead of having professional sports teams wear those ugly throwback uniforms, they could face off wearing bell bottom jeans and tie dyed t-shirts (just on the special day though; they get paid enough to dress decently).  I'm a Pirates fan, so what have I got to lose?

Personally, I think it would be kind of cool to see the dress up day for the early part of last century.  Everyone in the country walking around in vintage fashions would be pretty neat to see.  I always have a hard time imagining what the country looked like back then in color.  That must be a condition of growing up watching re-runs in black and white.  Even when I see the rare color film footage on the History channel, it freaks me out a bit.  The 1940's and earlier were in black and white as far as the pictures in my mind are concerned.  Why not raid the vintage stores and attics of the country and let us re-live our country's history a bit?

I apologize for this random bit of silliness.  Every once in a while, I drink too much coffee and my mind starts zipping around outside the box.  I think I'm OK now.  But I'd still like to see a day devoted to 70 Style Clothing.

By the way, I don't own the stuff in found on the page links.  I'm just here to point you toward it.  Hopefully, if you are looking, you will find what you want.  eBay has become the place to find that stuff now that it is popular again.  Click on any of the items or use the handy search box on the right if you want to look for something.

OK.  So I was looking back over my bookmarks and the first thing I did was realize that I really need to take better advantage of the folder system.  It seems that I'm a virtual slob (that isn't me in the photo though).  My wife would probably have a comment to add here, but she never reads what I put online.  I want to share some of the stuff I find amusing and I hope you'll find that your visit wasn't too much of a waste of time.

Do you remember Tuffskins?  They were the heavy duty "jeans" sold by Sears.  Every year, as summer vacation drew to a close, you would see herds of small, elementary aged boys being led to the local Sears fitting rooms.  Once there, all of the mothers would go about the ritual of shaming their sons by forcing them into dark green Tuffskins and then shouting for all to hear that they seem a little loose in the crotch.  Or, worse yet, they would announce that they were going to grab some "huskies" for them to try on.  The horror.  I was a husky.  Husky was Sears' way of avoiding the placement of a "Fat Kid" tag on the back pocket.  Oh...it still makes me cringe.  After the "husky" memory, what I remember most is the funky colors and reinforced knees.  They always felt like cardboard.  It didn't matter if you washed them 100 times, they still sprang back into their original shape.  Sadly, Tuffskins are one of the first "vintage" items I've been unable to locate on eBay.  I think they deserve to be in a museum somewhere if nothing else.

I managed to wear holes through my Tuffskins enough times that my Mom relented and bought me more traditional Levis and Lee jeans, but I seem to remember that they were the kind that turned your legs and underwear blue until they were washed several times.  They were also BELL BOTTOMS!  For those who might not know, bell bottom jeans were specially designed to find their way past the chainguard on banana seat bikes.  It happened to me on more than one occasion.  They looked something like these:

[nms:bell bottom jeans,3]

You can see more of these using the eBay search box on the right, but I don't want to fill this blog with rss feeds from eBay.

I actually remember my Mother telling me to tuck my jeans into my tube socks with the colored stripes at the top to avoid the embarrassment of getting trapped in the chain.  I never thought of it at the time, but that must have looked pretty darn amusing all by itself.  No wonder I didn't have a girlfriend until high school.