What did you wear when you were a child?

I used to hate the Sunday best and party outfits. Although I was chubby my mum put me in tight fitted suits or frilly girly dresses which looked ridiculous with my figure and were uncomfortable.I couldn't walk in the high heels and had to take them off in the street.

In 1952 we went to live in Hong Kong and I can remember that we went up to Oxford Street to one of the department stores there and my mother bought me two new summer dresses.

Up until then my mother had made all my dresses and skirts. Shop bought clothes meant school uniform. i can remember one of them to this day, standard fitted bodice with puff sleeves and gathered skirt. with a pattern of dancing ballerineas aall over it on a white background.

A fifties child here. In winter my sister and I wore liberty bodices, I remember the rubber buttons they had.

We had a new Whitsuntide outfit each year.

As a teenager I remember begging for an anorak - the type that had the woven band down the front.

And when I went off to teacher training college, my mum bought me a fabulous (at the time!) green and navy checked cashmere cloak, which I wore with a green corduroy cap.

I always kept the cloak, and now to my delight, my dear granddaughter has inherited it. As she is tall and slim, she looks much better in it than I ever did.

Every day I'd come home from school and change out of my school uniform into usually a hand knitted jumper and cotton skirt.

On the last day of term we were allowed to go to school non-uniform and I still remember going off in a 'new' dress that mum had brought for me at the weekend only to be confronted by a 'big girl' from a higher class telling me very loudly in front of a circle of others that it was the dress that her mum had put into a jumble sale at the weekend.

I still haven't lived the humiliation down.

School uniform blazer, shirt, tie, skirt, socks (later tights) and added V necked jumper during winter. Summer polo shirt/ school dress, ankle socks. Clarks shoes/sandals. Winter duffle coat. After age 8, and in the evenings/weekends and holidays, joddies and jodhpur boots, anoraks. For going out to visit/town etc mum made me many different dresses, but I was happier in joddies. I had my first 'bought' dress aged 15 from a boutique shop opposite Chelsea Girl in Glasgow. It was white with large blue spots, had a collared V neck (halter neck) and a large hole showing an expanse of bare back at the back. It cost £7.50!!!! A fortune.

Slightly OT, but my senior school uniform included a brown gabardine raincoat, of the bog standard school type. Not a very nice brown, either.

So we were all 😱 when someone else’s French exchange girl (who was exceedingly chic and smart) actually bought one exactly the same - and wore it!!

Virtually everything I ever had (until I was around 14 and started using birthday/🎄money to buy the odd thing) was a cast off either from my elder sister, or from much better off cousins who were fatter than us (we were all skinny) - I still remember hating having to wear a ‘fat’ but doubtless very expensive coat.
I had very, very few non-school clothes.

It still really stands out for me, that one summer when I was 8 or 9 my mother actually bought me a new dress from BHS.

Very not vertical and sorry for other typos.

Same here Magenta apart from the matching knickers…….and my dresses weren’t short enough to need them so ordinary knickers fit the outfit.
I recall my blue gabardine mac was taken home by someone else…..Mum was mortified and insisted it was sent straight to the dry cleaners once returned to school as the guilty child always had nits and a crusty snotty nose - I know, not her fault!

* Calendargirl*, I remember those stretchy trousers, we used to call them ski pants. I was a bit older when I wore mine., 15 probably. They were plain brown.
The earliest clothes I remember were two cotton summer dresses that my mum made. They were in a small print material and had Peter Pan collars and gathered waist. I had one with a contrasting yellow collar and one with a red collar.
Early teens I had one of those vertical wide circular skirts with a motif. They often had a poodle motif. Ooh and the tiered mesh petticoats that went under to make them stand out.

And when I was about 10, those trousers came out, ‘trews’, in a stretchy material with straps round your foot.

A sort of stripy pattern.

No idea what they were made of, not natural fabric certainly.

I pretty much lived in jodhpurs and t-shirts (or jumpers in the colder weather) when I wasn't in school clothes, as I'd spend most of my time at the stables.

Liberty bodies, yes. And siren suits, when very small, sometimes made out of a relative's old coat.
Those Clarkes sandals had a rim round them that tripped you up, until you got used to them again.

my mother was good on the sewing machine so we had a good choice of clothes but as the third girl a lot were hand-me-downs.

In winter I had more layers than an onion. Meant to trap the heat, of which there was very little. Ice on the insdie of the windows.
Vest, liberty bodice with those tricky rubber buttons, warm blouse (Viyella?), skirt with a bib or gymslip for school topped with a chunky cardigan or jumper made by my Mum. Long socks held in place by an elastic garter which made an itchy groove around my leg. Fleecy knickers with a pocket for some reason. Pixie hoods, scarves and gloves, all homemade.
Roll on the summer when it was a cotton dress, short socks and sandals. Of course the summer also meant the dreaded knitted bathers.

I actually had a pair of blue denim jeans when I was about ten. I was so skinny (those were the days) that I had to wear braces and a snake belt to keep them up.

I wore mostly dresses and skirts with blouse and cardigan. My aunt had a knitting machine and she knitted me twin sets to wear with my skirts.
When I was about seven I remember wearing a pair of dark green or perhaps brown corduroy trousers to play in. Very unusual for a little girl in the 50s.

Oh yes! I also have a photo of me in Torquay wearing a twinset with kilt.

I must dig out some photos!

Summer - cotton vests and knickers, white ankle socks, Clark’s sandals
Winter, wooden vests and liberty bodice, knee length woollen sock with garter that cut in. Lace up shoes.
Summer cotton dresses for play, voile smocked dresses for best.
Winter - gabardine with hood for every day. Woollen coat with velvet collar and matching hat for best.

School -summer - blue summer dress with blur cardigan, winter - sort of I think Viyella blouse with gym slip and navy cardigan.

Remember satchels! And those wooden pencil cases with slid tops and space for rubber?

Dresses in summer and winter, and pleated skirts and hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans in winter, mostly home- made by my mother. Knee length socks in winter, with lace -ups and ankle strap shoes; white ankle socks in summer with sandals.
Fitted coats and felt hats, and always gloves and scarves, worn inside the coat.. No such thing as leisure wear; we wore old clothes or shorts with aertex shirts, and old plimsolls. I did possess a wind-cheater, precursor to the anorak and as I was an only child, no hand me downs.
Chilprufe vests and scratchy starched petticoats in summer,

Another 50’s child here.

My clothes sounded very similar to yours.

As a younger sister, I had hand-me-downs from older sibling.

Vest and liberty bodice (aagh!) in the winter. Little suede boots with zip, the sort old grannies wore. Robert Hirst macs, with hood and ‘penny safe’ purse and belt. Woollen hats, that tied under the chin, and had long dangly bobbles on the end.

Hand knitted cardigans, proper wool, that didn’t get laundered very often as they had to be hand washed.

In summer, cotton frocks, ankle socks, school sandals.

We had a few ‘best’ clothes, school clothes, and then the old school clothes became ‘play’ clothes.

Certainly not many, not given choices what to wear like they are nowadays, and none the worse for it.

You see children in thin little dresses and bare legs in winter, then thick clothes in summer, as they have ‘chosen’ what they want to wear. 🤷‍♀️

When I went to grammar school when I was 11, black stockings had just come out, I wore them with a suspender belt, and felt so grown up.

Probably similar here - though my memories are very sparse indeed until I got to teenage.

But I remember I only had 2-3 choices of clothing and that was it. I was very envious when I got to teenage and my friends opened their wardrobe door to a wardrobe full of clothes. Young adulthood saw me getting a noticeable number of clothes as pass-ons from my mother. It took me a long while to realise that part of her reasoning was to ensure I dressed in a way she approved of and didnt put on weight either - I used to wonder why she seemed to buy her jumpers in a size bigger than I thought appropriate and so could have been her being one size smaller than me. I had to accept it too - as I was single and poorly-paid and it was a struggle to manage financially anyway for ages.

I still remember though when she sent me out with my father to have him buy me a camel outdoor jacket in threequarter length. Cue for me discovering I could have a trouser suit (very much the thing at the time) that I was lusting after in C & A's for the same sort of price - cue jacket and a pair of trousers too. So I'd get more clothing for the money and would be my taste. My father saw the logic of that - but I do remember her being very upset we'd not bought what she'd decided on - for me! It was certainly perfectly decent and I got a lot of wear out of both bits of that.

Pretty much the same here. I had a pair of school shoes, a pair of best shoes (usually bought by my Grandparents) and my school plimsolls - which we wore to play during the school holidays before getting a new pair for the start of term. Wellies of course - black Dunlop. I remember getting a pair of rubber flip flops from Woolworths and thinking how exotic I felt .

My Grandmother knitted my vests - I can recall they had pink satin ribbon threader through eyelets around the neckline.

There were no designer clothes available to the masses and as I remember it, we all pretty much wore the same type of things so there was no jealousy or "vying" for the trendiest clothes.