What I wear teaching makes me no fashion plate. I always wear pants not a skirt, to keep warm in winter but even in summer. My job may have me teaching phys ed, sitting on the floor with kindergarteners, climbing a ladder to realign a window blind, lunging forward to demonstrate Cossack dancing, or playing duck duck goose with kindergartners on the floor.  I am dress functionally.  The vest has pockets for my  necessary items, keys, cell phone, pens, eyeglasses and the pockets have zippers. Why? Because, sadly, otherwise I might lose those items. I move around a lot from classroom to classroom, to field to gym, to music room and could easily leave something behind unless it was so to speak ‘locked in’.  There is also a security issue since not many but enough kids may latch onto what the teacher has that it is not worth the risk.  Most teachers lock their purses and wallets well out of sight.  I have been in classrooms where the teacher did not, but I cringe for the lesson that teacher may learn some day.  Maybe it means I am cynical. I hope not. I think of it more as being practical.  When I teach I am ‘on’. This is not remotely about me, is not a fashion show, and I am there to serve, to do whatever it takes.  In some ways I stop even existing and try to wipe away my personal concerns for those hours in front of the kids.    I think that’s the right attitude for a professional. I become the mission, ideally.

That has had some odd consequences however.  When I dress in the morning I dress early and have twice now grabbed shoes that were of similar color but not technically a pair. The kids have noticed and laughed. Me too.  In my youth I sometimes wore a blonde wig for fun and in the intensity of teaching became oblivious to the fact that it was creeping up a little on my head and showing the dark roots of my own hair under. The kids found this amusing too.   That’s OK.  Young teachers today dress more casually than I do, the young men in Bermuda shorts even, both genders sometimes in sweat pants.  A few dress ‘up’ in the sense of wearing high heeled shoes or boots, tight leggings, necklaces and even designer scarves. It’s gorgeous and the kids are often enthralled.  It’s not me but I see that it is them and it works for them.  I just couldn’t run in those outfits or sit in a circle on the carpet with the kids.

What the kids wear is interesting.  For the past several decades it has been jeans mostly, nearly like an unofficial uniform for teens.  But little kids wear a whole range of dresses, pants, skirts, leggings, lots of color.  T-shirts are common for the boys in elementary though some parents do send their young boys to school in shirts. Occasionally I’ll see a child in a very fancy dress or even a suit jacket on what I had assumed was an ordinary day but maybe for the child it is not.  In grades K-6 the kids have to have a pair of ‘indoor shoes’ they leave at school and then a pair of outdoor  shoes or even boots that they wear for the commute. They are to remove their ‘outdoor shoes’ at the school foyer and walk, in socks, to their rooms.

By secondary, this ritual ends and they can wear all day whatever shoes or boots they want.  The reason for the change may be custodial convenience since admittedly little kids are more likely to have been playing in the mud, running through the puddles or romping in the snow and maybe they just never do understand how to clean off their shoes as they go into a building. Whatever the reason, kids accept it all very quickly.

In our climate, which has not changed since pioneer times, winter clothing is essential. The little kids come in snowsuits or winter parkas and teachers have to help them put their ski pants back on even to go out at recess.  They come in their tuques and scarves and sometimes double thick jackets, little Michelin men and women,  snuggled into down.  Their crises of dressing are the same as they have  always been, trying to push on the boot or shoe, needing help lacing it, zipping it though now there may be Velcro to ease that.  They have crises when they lost a boot, or when the one they are to wear really is too tight because they are on the verge of outgrowing it. Every September kids appear in shiny clean new clothes and squeaky running shoes and as the year moves towards June, the clothes wear and shorten. Kids from wealthy homes have sturdier clothing it seems, warmer  clothes for winter, and nice little touches of latest styles, the running shoes with the flashing lights on them, the latest logo on the T shirt. I am sad when I see threadbare shirts on little kids.

In secondary, fashion is meticulously studied in a way that is meant to appear nonchalant. It’s fun to notice how precisely the students have combed their hair, gotten the cut they wanted, what they ‘ve chosen for that vital first day and first impression.  The whole world seems dressed with the care of a coming out party, a grad – for that first day.  As the year goes on, the clothes get  more casual, but not much. Teens are super aware of what impression they leave.  Schools have in past years made rules about the jeans, to make sure they come up high enough to not expose a midriff, navel or buttocks and to make sure that any rips strategically put into jeans do not reveal much.  There were limits put on the ‘sexiness’ of clothes by requiring that the girls’ tops have straps and that those straps be thick enough not just spaghetti straps.

Kids play with those rules or get upset about them. In grade 4 for example a child dressing like a teen may be worried her top won’t pass the criterion . I heard a girl ask her male teacher if it was OK if she took her sweater off because under it all she had was a T shirt with straps. He reassured her that it was OK, that the straps were not spaghetti but “lasagna”.  Other kids want to break the rules. Some teenage girls apparently leave home dressed as the parents think appropriate and then at school change grabbing the outfit they really want to wear from their locker.

Kids are allowed to wear shorts to school nowadays, or skinny jeans, tights, even apparently quite short skirts. I heard a guest speaker one year give a presentation in the gym to several hundreds of  junior high students about boys and girls and respect. He was suggesting girls dress modestly because if they dressed in any alluring way in school boys would notice them but not necessarily with respect.   It was a lesson I liked to hear but I also noticed the dilemma. It is not for the schools to dictate fashion per se, only decency and in that I think our dress codes are more lax really than that of most adult jobs.  That may be the joy of childhood too, a casualness but we do have to prepare kids for the world having a dress code.

There are some schools in Calgary with school T shirts and many have phys ed ‘gear’ that is nearly a uniform.  It is comfortable, functional and has the school logo on it.
Some schools called “traditional learning centres’ are in the public system but may have a rule to wear a school uniform all day. The girls usually wear shirts with knee socks or dark pants. They wear sweaters and blouses, dark shoes. There are some options within the rule but not many and the reason is usually to create a climate where there is no distraction from the clothing and no competitiveness.  Boys are similarly in dark pants and dark shoes.  Once I was teaching at a traditional centre where the kids all wore uniforms and then on one Friday they were allowed ‘casual dress’. When they appeared that Friday I was struck by how suddenly different they all looked. They were now wearing their colorful tops, pinks and yellows and bright pants, skirts, jeans, whatever they felt like and I realized that the adjustment was partly mine.  When I look at kids wearing uniforms I have way fewer hints about their personality or taste than if they are wearing clothes they picked. 

If a child lacks money and that problem is severe, the child will still come to school clothed of course, just usually in clothes that are less fashionable. The T shirts may be more frayed, the cloth thinner, the colors more faded.  In the winter the child may not have appropriate gloves, the coat may be too thin for the weather or overly large.  In a city of over a million people one might assume that extreme poverty would not exist since so many people are around to care.  But it’s out there. We do have food banks and shelters for the homeless and I am aware of situations where kids sleep with their parents in church basements but then are bussed each day to school.  Once I taught at a school where two of the grade ones seemed just to have thinner older clothing.  It turned out they were new to the school and were staying with their mom at a women’s shelter.   I felt for those kids but at least they were safe.

There are ways to get clothes cheaply but they’re not free.  We have second hand stores where you can even buy brand name clothing that someone has discarded, and even for my own kids I got a lot of clothes that way. They’re fun, not too costly and the kids outgrow things so fast why would you buy new?  And yet by the time kids are teens they usually are embarrassed to have hand-me-downs or second hand. Parents struggle if money is tight to keep the teen happy and dressed well enough.  It’s not easy.

The hairdos are also interesting.  In 2012 teenage boys usually have short hair though a few wear it longer. It is more common to see boys with longer hair in elementary, maybe when parents are still experimenting with styles and not becoming traditional.  It seems that teens, as always historically,  rebel from parental styles but in ways that match each other, so not very rebellious really.  In hair styles the shaven head is not too common but we’re seeing a lot of hair dyed bright blue or purple or pink. The hairdos of spikes, cemented into shape literally, are not common any more but the spikey short hair cut is for guys and for girls the long hair style is in again, with causal ponytails.

Little kids still have barrettes, bows, hairbands, sometimes braids, pigtails or wear their hair long. It seems like the kids daily reach some agreement with the parent who has often helped out with the ‘do’. As teens grow of course parents have less say about the hair.   I read once that a person wears all their life the hairdo they were taught was fashionable in their late teens and early twenties.  It’s not that people don’t notice styles changing. It’s just that, apparently, their idea of beauty itself was shaped at that age.  If at that age they believed that lips must be bright red, that is what they will feel best wearing most of their lives. If they were taught that a pale face with pale lipstick works better, that will be how they feel best even at 50 or 60.

It happens that in 2012 girls use nearly no rouge or powder on their faces, but a lot of eye makeup. For special occasions bright and big red lips are the in thing but we rarely see that in the schools.  A person might think that if you work with teens as I do, a  classroom of 30 teens would fairly reek of sweat. Actually that’s rarely true. The body odor smells are more common for  kids just entering puberty before they are at dating age. Once they hit dating age the room  wafts with perfume and cologne, body spray, hair spray and maybe even after shave. Kids are so aware of their presentation and worried about it, that most bases are pretty well covered.

What are fairly common nowadays among secondary students are tattoos and piercings. .  With actors and rock stars as role models, rappers and punk rockers sporting lots of body art, some teens imitate.  In the schools we only see something on the shoulder, leg or ankle for tattoos but I assume that some of them have other tattoos that don’t show.  Pierced ears are the norm for teenage girls and some wear several earrings not just two.  Nose rings, lip rings, studs in the nose or tongue are quite rare but you do see them.  What strikes  me is an irony.  There is a saying that it is normal to have rebellious ideas at twenty and then to be conservative at fifty.  For fashion,  it seems people are rebels in their teens but by 20 already  they have to be more conservative, just to get jobs.

The job climate still requires quite a dress code, even a hair and jewellery code.  Even if you want a fast food job, if you apply dressed up for it  in a suit, you raise your chances of getting the job, just because you look responsible.  Calgary restaurants have a dress code for their servers and often hire people under twenty. The men are usually in white shirts and dark pants. One spaghetti house has all female servers in white shirts and dark pants too. One high end restaurant has all the female servers in short black dresses.  Not all employers will even hire someone with a nose ring and even lawyers hide their tattoos to get a job.  It is society’s standardizing, and it happens quite young.  A few employers have casual dress Fridays or casual dress workplaces but it is still the norm for downtown office jobs to have women in pantsuits or dresses and men in suits with ties, still, in 2012.

Given all the casualness of clothes we see in the schools, this does seem a time to celebrate freedom and childhood for it will usually end.  Factory jobs still have standardized and practical dress codes.  Fast food outlets even make you wear uniforms with logos, sometimes even hats for the company.

It is quite amazing though to sit outside a fancy venue though before the grade 12 grad.  When Calgary high school students get ‘dressed up’ for grad, you see an amazing transformation. They were always clean but now they are really dressed up. Girls appear often in floor-length gowns, not unlike the red carpet walk for the Academy Awards. The young men are in suits, ties, sometimes even tuxedos. In some ways every couple looks like it is dressed for a wedding and some even arrive in limos.  I love it for it shows a kind of respect for  what they have accomplished in schooling and they all look stunning, every hair in place.

This grad tradition has worked its way down in some schools to the grade 9 level, leaving junior high, and to the grade 6  level, leaving elementary where there often also are grad ceremonies and even a dance.  Kids dress up for those too, but a little less elaborately.  Some preschools even do grads from kindergarten.  A few schools try to downplay the costs of such fashion requirements by having an informal event instead, but it seems most kids like to dress up for it.  As our schools change from K-6 , 7-9 and then 10-12, to K-3, 4-8, 9-12 in some districts I assume the levels from which you graduate will also shift, but not the party.

This idea of a double standard for clothing- having dress up clothes and day to day, is not new.  I notice when I look at photos of kids outside their pioneer schools too, that for Picture Day, many are dressed their best.

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Early Calgary seems to have been a blend of fashion contrasts. The traders dressed roughly but it is not as if they did not also know another life back where they were from.  Often early settlers from the east or south had already had a taste of culture, of singing around a real piano, cooking at a real stove, even of wealth.  To set up here was a shift down but for Sunday, for special, great efforts were made to recreate formality.  I see it in how they dressed for “Sunday best”. and for formal days at school.  It was about self-image and feeling that however rough life was right now, there was a big dream it would be better soon, and dressing up was part of that reassurance.

I see that same mood in how the sandstone schools were built, magnificent architectural designs, to last at least 75 years, with lofty ceilings, arched doorways and the kind of permanence you want to build in a world that around you may still be unstable. The schools offered visibly that dream even if at home surroundings were more modest.

When I look at the photos of kids outside their pioneer schools they are usually lined up at the front door.  Often there are only a few dozen of them, but for the bigger schools maybe nearly a hundred.  Still they fit just at the front of the building in one row or two.  In 2012 when we take a group picture at the elementary schools the photographer is often on the roof the school looking across at the field or playground where all the kids and teachers are standing, 500 or more of them.  Those pictures usually line the wall of schools in 2012, a voyage back in time year by year.

The black and white pictures of early pioneers give us the impression they all stood stiffly and wore only black and white. In fact it took at least 20 minutes for a camera of that era to get exposure so they had to stay still. The colors they wore were not just black and white.

In 1887 in Calgary men wore bowler hats, vest and jackets while waiting outside a land titles office in Calgary.  Their sons at school wore long wool stockings, short pants, a shirt and coat.   Photos of early schools before 1890 sometimes show a mix of races of children attending, in what seems to be a quite informal and comfortable integration.

 However Father Lacombe in 1872 had recommended schools be set aside as residences for native children and one was established at the junction of the Bow and Highwood rivers in 1894. The Dunbow school had ten boys, taught Northwest Territories curriculum and was Roman Catholic by policy.    At its peak it had 130 students, two thirds of them boys.  Where the Deerfoot Trail is today, a major freeway, was a residential school too, which in 1896 had 50 boys aged 12-18.  The four storey sandstone building also had 300 acres of land.

Native children had been wearing buckskin but now were made to dress in long pants and shirts from the white culture. They were told to cut and comb their hair.   The residential schools set up then have been much criticized for deprivation of culture of native peoples, loss of their language and traditions.  It is true looking back that some did get a formal education in reading and writing, however, and that for the first time they had access to western medicine, and our type of medical and dental care.  Canada formally apologized to survivors of residential schools but not till decades after they closed.

The other option for native children was to stay on the reserve. Once a treaty was signed in 1877,  government provided schooling for native children right where they lived but eventually in 1924 enrolment at Dunbow school was so low it closed.  In 1913 native adults had to get a pass from an Indian agent to leave the reservation, to run an errand such as selling grain or hay or cattle or to get logs.

Many white settlers had learned a lot from natives already here, not just survival skills for the weather, or herbal treatments of some illness but also some fashion tips for what was easy to create and practical. By 1900 classrooms had a common smell of wood, of cedar polish for the wood and of wet moccasins.  Some children arrived with home knit stockings and inside their shoes, hay insoles in winter.

Girls’ clothing had to be very modest with little skin showing even on a hot day.  The style for adult women in swimsuits was even to have a skirt on them, and sometimes pantaloons. Girls had to wear dresses and long leggings but not pants like boys wore. If the weather was cold the girls could wear overpants to school but had to change out of them to the more formal attire for class.  By 1913 some girls were wearing button shoes. In  that year down east, the new invention – the zipper – was becoming popular  and news of it spread.  Boys wore kneepants or knickerbockers with a button below the knee so they could be tightened once the long socks were put on. Socks were brown or black, and ribbed. Girls wore wool dresses in winter, cotton dresses in summer, often gingham or a print.  In 1914 the style was a tight bodice, long flowing skirt and sometimes an empire waistline.  Girls at phys ed were allowed to wear bloomers.  If parents or the teacher attended a lawn party though, it was fashionable to wear a hat in 1912, even one with feathers.

In 1918 women wore hobble skirts and little girls might wear bloomers under their  dresses.

By 1920 the fashion had changed a bit and women’s dresses, i.e what the teacher wore, might be knee length skirts. Some women had their hair cut short and wore makeup.  Girls in one grade 7 class in 1924 were wearing blouses with navy blue collars, white and blue skirts and oxfords.  One teacher on a 1926 winter day had to wear tweed breeches to get to school but changed to a skirt before class. The skirt and dress requirement added dignity and formality.

In 1930 the fur collar coat was ‘in’, as were, for men spats and zoot suits, not that many could afford them.

In cold winters, children were very bundled if they rode a horse or buggy a long ways to school. Wool socks and overshoes were common in 1926 and kids had to line the overshoes up in the cloakroom once they arrived. One teacher in 1930  who came at least as far as the children to school  was bundled up in 3 pairs wool socks, men’s moccasins, two pairs of wool mittens, a beaver hat, muskrat coat, wool scarf, with a wool blanket over her legs as she rode the horse to school.

In the  fall wool stockings attracted burrs as kids walked through fields and they had to pull the burrs off while at school.

During the Depression, when money was scarce, you could  see poverty and improvisation in the clothing.   Tanned horse hair served as blanket as the kids rode to school and some kids wore makeshift shoes of canvas.  The girls wore stockings that had been darned and redarned several times. Others patched old clothes and on occasion siblings took turns wearing the good dress to school. Kids appeared in shoes sized too large but stuffed with rags to make them fit.  They had woollen socks for mittens and old clothes for scarves and toques.

During the war, there was also a lot of making- do.  It took two days to wash clothes, usually Monday for the heating of water, the washing using bleech, the scrubbing by hand using a washboard. Then Tuesday was for the drying, using an outdoor line in warm weather or indoor rack in cold. It was not uncommon for the seasonal transition times to be difficult with some clothes freezing stiff on the line outside. Ironing was done by heating up irons on the stove.

There was still great poverty during the war years. . In 1944 some children came to school in a rural area in bare feet, dresses may be made from flour sacks and girls sometimes wore their brothers’ overalls to get there.

It was not till the 1970s that female teachers in Calgary lobbied successfully  to be able to wear dress pants, not dresses and they got the right after their students did.  It was not until the 1980s that students led protests around the city to be allowed to wear shorts on a hot summer day, and they won the right.