Were you a sharp-dressed kid?

[Dixon Cannon]

Oh yeh? It's High Noon, pardner!

Born to be a steely-eyed gunslinger...

-'Deadeye' dixon cannon

 

[shayona_gs]

I had five!

Well, I personally didn't have a choice for myself when I was a kid.
But I do remember that for two consecutive years, my parents did buy me five suits, out of which i have preserved one (just a symbol of love from them).

My dad never had one for himself except the one on his wedding time. But they always wanted to have the best for me.

I love my parents!

 

[Jovan]

As a kid, I was the product of the casual age. That should come as no surprise to anyone since I'm still in my 20s. The dressiest I ever got was a short sleeved check shirt with chinos and suede "dress" shoes for my aunt's wedding. When there was a wedding in my stepfather's family that was suit and tie only, rather than spend any money on me at all they told me to wait at the hotel and take a swim in the pool if I was bored. At 12 years old the first seeds of my current style were planted when I wanted to wear a suit and tie. Considering they spent $500+ on my stepfather just for that event, I was understandably a bit teed off.

I sometimes wore polo shirts and chinos in middle school... which I was of course teased for even though the chinos were made by the God Almighty Himself, Tommy Hilfiger.

 

[Edward]

I'm sure I wore some ghaslty concoctions growing up. I ell remember my late 80s thing of jeans that you had to be installed in with some sort of vacuum pressure, and then walked around like John Wayne in (no stretch denim that I recall back then, at least not round our way), and a t shirt or top sufficiently baggy a small African nation could camp out under it. I was pretty damn cool with our set as I was one of the few at 15 to have my own real leather mc jacket. Casual aside.... In schools in the UK, uniform is the norm, so I spent my schooldays in trousrs, blazer, shirt and tie. Nowadays I feel naked if I go anywhere without a jacket, and I put this down in large part to habit learned in schooldays. I had my first suit at 14 - if memory serves, it was passed on from someone who had worn it once for a wedding and then grown out of it. Prior to that, we had always been dressed up for church (I remember a couple of little blazers - one brown corduroy, the other blue tweed - from when I was around 10-12), and from then on I wore a suit to Church every Sunday. I didn't much care for the shirt and tie to begin with - I confess it with shame: originally i wore that first suit (two button, notch lapel, navy pinstripe) with..... big white basketball boots. And a Hitler T shirt (the European Tour one - a clever historical gag, though in retrospect wearing it and sitting in Church in front of a BofB veteran probably wasn't the cleverest thing to do - not that anyone ever complained, but still!). Oh yes - back then I had all the sartorial elegance of a bad Rod Stewart impersonator. But hey ho, over time I eventually discovered the joys of a shirt, open neck at first, later a tie, and some classy shoes. A big turning point was my school formal in 1993 - my first lack tie experience and I think something that introduced me to the joys of looking sharp. I already had my first fedora by that time..... further suits followed, cufflinks, and on. By University my look was very studied, even if it often appeared thrown togwther in its day to day casuality. My love of the sharp suit was (don't laugh) cemented in equal parts by Raul Julia's take on Gomez Addams and Reservoir Dogs. And here we are today....

Fortunately, I don't believe I have any photos of my worst sartorial excesses.... I don't personally have any photos of myself under the age of 18, though I'm sure my folks have plenty of potential blackmail material to hand.... lol

 

[CharlesB]

I was a child of the 1980s and all that entails. My formative years, the wretchedly akward teen experience was spent in the sartorial maelstrom called the mid 90s. Lots of flannel, long hair, bad acne etc.

SOmetime around when I was 18 or 19 I realized "Hold on...what are successful people doing, what do they wear, what do they enjoy, does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man?"

At that point I decided to scrap everything. If I could educate myself on pretty much everything else , why not do the same on things like fashion,music,art,wine,society etc. So I did and eventually the suit stopped making the man and the man made the suit. Illusion became reality. For all of my work I found myself more well rounded, cultured and articulate and all because I realized that those cutting figures and witty conversationalists in those Fellini and Michael Caine films of the 60s lived it up and looked damn good doing it.

 

[Matt Deckard]

I wouldn't say well dressed, I knew what I wanted to wear though it wasn't available to my price bracket and when I finally got some money I found they no longer made what I wanted. Clothes have always been a very frustrating thing to me. I think that's the primary reason why I hate going through stores to find things but i can see it in a big screen and want it.

I prefer wearing things that are made for me nowadays though it's too costly o really live a custom made lifestyle so I ind what i can by forcing myself to go to vintage shops and outlets.

In my younger days I wore ill fitting suit jackets and hats that looked all wrong though i slowly learned what looked better on me.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

Of course...

 

[Dixon Cannon]

Warbaby!....

Too slow on the draw!... who's next?

 

[Dr Doran]

1970s and early 80s: Catholic school uniforms. Ugly oversized short-sleeved shirts with tiny tiny blue and white stripes. Collar and two button. Then dark blue pants of any kind, usually hand-me-down corduroy. No jacket, since this was Los Angeles and it was 80 degrees almost every day. The horrid suede shoes were brown and called "GASS" which stood for Great American Shoe Store. When I was not in school uniform, I didn't really know what to wear. It was usually jeans and t-shirts. Nothing cool at all. Once I had (gag) a tan VELOUR short-sleeved shirt with burgundy and white trim. My parents never bought me clothes, as I had 3 older brothers. I didn't know the difference.

 

[Edward]

I just had a flashback to 1977, when I was sporting a particularly attractive pair of bright orange dungarees with a coffe and cream coloured cowboy embroidered on thed front panel. {i]My[/i] that must have looked good. I loved 'em at the time, too....

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Oh, I would have been jealous, jealous of all those cowboy outfits.

Come to think of it, I would still be jealous.... But now at least I have cowboy boots to die for.

karol

 

[DutchIndo]

Growing up in So Cal in the 70s the required dress (74-77 HS) was Levi's Cords and OP shirts or just plain T-shirts and 501s. I did slick my hair as a kid
Brylcream ("a little dab would ya") I can still hear that jingle !

 

[Jerekson]

I tried my best, but my mother wouldn't always let me out of the house wearing my cool clothes. In her eyes, the Gap was much more suitable.

 

[univibe88]

My dad got me a 3 piece suit in 1984. I remember wearing it to church and my kindergarden graduation. I'm sure I have a pic around here somewhere. I'll dig it up.

 

[imoldfashioned]

I grew up in the 70's/80's so I was dressed very, very badly as a child.

My mother dressed me like Heidi when I was young; puffy sleeves, rick rack, short gathered skirts, lots and lots of tiny floral prints. I also had a pair of bright purple bell bottomed pants and my mother sewed purple pom-poms along the hems. They are seared into my memory.

Then came the Gunne Sax years, made even worse because my mother bought Gunne Sax rip offs since the originals were too expensive. Oi! Pseudo-edwardian or "prairie" nightmares with fake lace, puffy sleeves and tiered skirts with rick rack and tiny floral prints (are you sensing a pattern here?).

For the first couple years of high school I wore jeans or an A-line skirt, often plaid, and a sweater or a button down shirt, often plaid (shudder).

The horror!

Around age 14 I discovered vintage and sewing. I'd go to school in 1930s/40s dresses or in Victorian petticoats and shirts made from 1830s patterns I dug out of library books and enlarged (dropped shoulder, tie around the neck--very Edgar Allen Poe).

 

[jgilbert]

Got my first pr of wing tips in the fourth grade. Then added my shirts to my dads, and had the sent to the dry cleaners' and yes we and a long talk when he got the bill for the first time! However I got to send them!

 

[KeyGrip]

Most decidedly no.

 

[ContinentalOp]

Do corduroys and Buster Browns count?

 

[the_imperialist]

Considering I am still 17, does it still count ?

 

[Mr. Rover]

This is when I first started getting into vintage menswear about 3 1/2 years ago when I was around 14 or 15...I still wear this suit from the 60s, made for the Harvard Co-Op Society.
The hat is an Akubra fedora that lost its shape and started to break at the pinch around a year after this photograph. I haven't worn that tie in about 2 years, either, and note that it is in a half-Windsor, which I haven't used on a regular basis since about that time when I was still developing my style.