Fifties Fashions

Fifties' fashions were unique and compared to today, very conservative. Let's start with hairstyles. Girl teens preferred a "bob", bangs, and/or a ponytail and really cool guys had a DA (duck's ass) greased to the hilt, but not many Woodsdale boys would be caught dead wearing their hair like that, as it usually signaled either a "hood" (short for hoodlum) or a drag racer-type. There was some drag-racing going on, but it was not "advertised". I can remember home perms (Tony) and now and then going to the beauty school above Murphy's for a haircut, but generally I preferred it long which was a real nuisance when swimming at Oglebay as there was no such thing as a hairdryer there.

Skirts were full in the 50's...the better for twirling on the dance floor. So a netted slip called a crinoline was required. (See above). My sisters and I shared several crinolines .... one that I remember best was multi-colored in about six layers. Drindle skirts were full, but had a hemline that came straight down. For school many of us wore straight skirts with wide belts...a required fashion accessory. Though there were poodle skirts in abundance, my sisters and I sported "Lady and the Tramp" skirts. My dad brought home these printed panels with the characters from the movie (two dogs) on them and you sewed them together into a skirt. Didn't set any trends that I know of.

Shoes? Well, if you were a girl kid you wore MaryJanes...black patent leather with a strap across the arch. Boys wore Buster Browns after sticking their feet in the fluoroscope at the shoe store to see through the shoes so Mom could tell how much growing room she was going to get out of THIS pair. As a girl teen, saddle shoes or penny loafers were required and if you opted for the loafers...you had to have two very shiny pennies to put in them. Shining saddle shoes was a bummer as the white would get on the black and vice versa....mine had corrective insoles because I tended to stand on the outside edge of my feet so these magic shoes (recommended by Dr. Maury) were hopefully going to keep me from getting bowl-legged. In eighth grade as an experiment, I wanted to see if I could start a fad so started wearing plaid, multicolored shoe laces and sure enough it took off...at least at Woodsdale Junior High.

Oh yes, and what did you wear with your penny loafers??? Bobby-socks! They had to be turned down a requisite number of times and some farout radicals "rolled" their socks down.

One fashion I really liked was wearing your father's old white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the tails hanging out over jeans or "pedal pushers" . Many a teenage boy came to our house to get his pants "pegged". That meant sewing a seam down the legs to make them skin tight. As a result we often had a living room full of guys sitting on the couch with a blanket over their legs in just their underwear while we girls were upstairs at the sewing machine. The guys also used to sit in the bathtub (theirs, not ours) in a new pair of jeans to get them to shrink tighter to their skin.

Have I forgotten any? Do you have any to add? If so please post them! Just add a comment to this with your email address and I'll send you an invite to be a contributor.