Campus looks evolve through the decades
By Mekita Rivas (’12)
These days, a stroll across any college campus will yield an assortment of wardrobe choices. Many students tend to favor athleisure, attending class in comfortable hoodies, leggings and sweatpants. Others pair thrifted finds with everyday basics — think jeans and T-shirts — to craft casual looks that still convey an air of personality.
“I’ve seen just about every fashion trend you can think of while walking to classes,” says Lexie Worden, an advertising/public relations and journalism double major from Omaha. “Everyone has exited their high school days where they worried about finding the right outfit to impress their crush. Now people are discovering who they are and who they want to be, and they use clothing to express themselves.”
Worden describes 2022 college fashion as “unique” and has observed that students are frequently using their clothing as a creative outlet. College is, of course, a time when you make countless self-discoveries; naturally, your personal style is a part of that process.
“We’re all coming to learn what we’re passionate about, and with that also comes evolving as a human,” Worden says. “We’re not who we once were in high school, so a lot of us college students have changed our styles to fit who we think we are and who we want to be.”
This degree of fashion freedom wasn’t always the case. There was once a time, for instance, when women wearing slacks in the Nebraska Union caused quite the commotion.
In November 1965, the Association of Women Students hosted a standards week, where they addressed a pressing sartorial issue of the time: whether slacks were acceptable apparel for female students. “It goes without saying that a well-groomed girl never wears shorts, Bermudas, slacks or jeans to classes, library, activity meetings, downtown or the union,” read the campus handbook.
During the mid-1960s on Midwestern college campuses, women still had to wear dresses and skirts for most occasions. Catherine Pohlman Wolfe (’68) was at UNL in February 1965 and recalls a particularly bad blizzard.
“I remember 11 to 12 inches of snow but who knows — it was a lot,” Wolfe says. “At that time, sorority girls couldn’t wear pants on campus and to classes. Jeans weren’t even an option. ”
Despite the heavy snowfall, students had to attend classes anyway. The concession? It was the first time women could wear slacks and boots.
“We didn’t mind the snow we were trudging through because we were so happy to be wearing pants,” Wolfe says. “Of course, we got to many of the classes, and the professor hadn’t made it to campus, but it was a memorable day.”
Generally, societal norms of the era disapproved of any silhouette that might run the risk of a female student looking “sloppy” and not “feminine enough.”
“You couldn’t even have Bermuda shorts on with knee socks,” says Barbara Trout, professor emeritus of textiles, merchandising and fashion design. “You had to have a skirt on, which sounds archaic to us (now).”
Cindy Porter (’78) remembers that period well. She was a high schooler in Grand Island in the early 1970s, when skirts were still largely the style du jour for girls and women. She had to wear dresses through her junior year in high school until the rules changed her senior year—well, sort of.
“When they did change it over to where we could wear pants, you had to wear dress pants,” Porter says. “You weren’t allowed to wear jeans, either. It was a change of going from a more formal way of dressing to more casual, kind of like how casual Fridays worked eventually.”
By the time Porter came to campus in 1974, the shift away from that level of formality was fully underway.
“The ’70s came, and in the movies you had the low-slung pants and the midriff tops that were a little bit more baring,” Trout says. “But college girls at that time were not so much interested in Hollywood fashion as they were in getting away from home and dressing functionally.”
Large sweatshirts and tight pants, in particular, tended to be a common trend in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It wasn’t so much fashion, Trout explains, but rather to signal a new era of sorts, especially for the liberated young woman. “It was just to show that you were on your own, you were independent, and you could dress a little sloppy, if you wanted to,” she says.
The seeds of this campus fashion revolution were actually planted some two decades prior, in the 1950s, when college students first began to get a taste of a more laid-back approach to dressing. Deirdre Clemente, author of
Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style and associate director of the public history program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, explains that the culture after World War II allowed for even more variety in dress.
“College campuses provided a self-regulated environment in which they could push the boundaries of acceptable dress,” Clemente says. “By the mid-1950s, things really broke out of the social constraints that had existed earlier in the century.”
Men started to wear jeans and sweatshirts. Women began to wear pants and forgo accessories traditionally associated with modesty, such as girdles, panty hose and hats. Ultimately, by the 1970s, virtually all formality had vanished from campus, as did the dress codes that regulated what women could wear (men had very few dress codes).
“It did seem to change very quickly,” Porter recalls. “The hippies idea came about in the late ’60s, but it was kind of slow, I think, to hit Grand Island. Lincoln seemed to be a little ahead of us, so clothes became less structured, more relaxed looking.”
As a textiles, merchandising and design major, Porter regularly shopped at the Hitchin’ Post and the Wooden Nickel (what became known as the now-shuttered Post & Nickel in downtown Lincoln), which first opened its doors in 1966.
“If you went to UNL, that was the place to shop,” Porter says. “Whatever they had was what the trends would usually be, (and they would indicate) what was going to happen on campus.”
As jeans gained popularity, they became a go-to for campus-goers, including Porter, who preferred denim for her day-to-day wardrobe. “I wore a lot of jeans,” she says. “I saved my money to buy the one or two best jeans, and I’d wear them over and over.”
Women embracing pants on such a widespread scale marked a significant turning point in the history of the American wardrobe. Clemente traces the trend back to college campuses on the West Coast, particularly in California. It started in the early 1930s at single-sex colleges in the Northeast such as Smith and Vassar.
“Jeans were very practical and it was all about function,” Clemente says. “In these spaces, women policed themselves. These places had dress codes against pants that were largely written by the women and policed by the women.”
Most of the time, the codes were simply ignored. At co-ed schools, these rules were made and enforced by the administration, specifically the Dean of Women, who was put in charge of monitoring the clothing and behavior of the women. By the mid-1950s, women at co-ed schools were actively requesting to wear pants and parameters were put on when and where.
“For example, at Penn State they could wear them to the cafeteria for certain lunches but not for Sunday dinner or to class,” Clemente says. “This was all about being appropriate for men on campus, who generally hated pants.”
Indeed, a
Daily Nebraskan article from 1965 includes a poll of 10 male students who expressed their distaste for their female peers stepping out in trousers. “I don’t like slacks on girls in public places,” said one student. Another added: “I don’t personally like girls with slacks on around campus. However, I feel during informal hours of the evening slacks are acceptable with a coat over them.”
“Men hated pants, moms hated pants, many professors hated pants, but women still wore them,” Clemente says. “They wore them because the garment is comfortable. College women really paved the way for pants as acceptable attire, and broader society slowly followed.”
Fashion, by its very nature, is cyclical in nature. What goes around does, in fact, come back around. Comfort and mobility were key drivers in freeing women from the standard skirt silhouette, and those factors remain as influential as ever, especially in light of recent historical events.
“During the pandemic when I was doing online school, I don’t think I ever wore anything other than an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants,” Worden says. “We were all locked inside of our homes, we rarely went out, so who did we have to impress?”
Loungewear went mainstream as more people studied and worked from home. For students in particular, trends like tie-dye sweat suits and pajamas as daywear became the norm. The lines between relaxed and formal began to blur even more. Just as they were some 50 years ago, college campuses continue to be the epicenter of burgeoning fashion trends.