The Denim Decade

In early 1971 students in Nansemond County petitioned the school board to change the dress code, specifically that “the female students be allowed to wear pant suits and that the length of male student’s hair be governed by his parent’s approval rather than…the school board[‘s].”¹ This was their second attempt to petition the board in three months; a week later they tried for a third time and were informed that the proposed revision was thought to be “a little too radical.”²

Students in Blackstone’s Kenston Forest School in 1972 were prohibited from wearing “shorts, or tight Levis” if male, and “kilts, culottes, scooter skirts, hip huggers, jeans, [and] slacks” if female.⁴ But change was coming, even as early as 1971. In Dinwiddie County, the school board condoned the wearing of pant suits in 1971 although it “frown[ed] on the students wearing shorts during normal school hours, and jeans [were] taboo at all times.”⁵

Nansemond was not an outlier. The Waynesboro Dress Code for the 1969-1970 school year forbid girls from wearing: “pant dresses…culottes without pleats…culottes with panels…slacks, panted skimmer or pant suits…[or even] dresses with matching pants [underneath].”³

But by 1977, a headline in Charlottesville’s Daily Progress read, “Pants No Longer A Sign of Rebellion.”⁶  Not only were most female high school students in the state allowed to wear pant suits, but many were even allowed to wear blue jeans – the one type of pants that had previously been banned for many of their male counterparts. Nansemond County, who had deemed pant suits for females as “too radical” in 1971, by 1977 condoned “hemmed unpatched, respectable dress jeans” but not “blue jeans with rivets [or] blue painter’s pants or bibbed overalls.”⁷ But in many other school systems around the state, by the end of the 1970s, blue denim jeans seemed almost compulsory, including those that were “faded, patched, worn, or wrinkled.”⁸

As one entry in Fairfax Hall’s “History of the Class of 1973” succinctly put it – “Allison came in getting in trouble for pants and left wearing blue jeans.”⁹ But despite the quick cultural changes, a 1975 sophomore at Bassett High School in Henry County assured newspaper readers, “It’s not a fad or anything, it’s part of America like hotdogs!”¹⁰

Explore the denim decades with us via these selections from the Virginia Digital Yearbook Project.