I wore a uniform

Bennet Academy

St. Josephs School

1986-1997

So what did your uniform look like? In high school, we had a plaid, grey pleated skirt.  And we could wear button-down shirts.

Did you like wearing it? I liked it, I was indecisive. I could just wake up and I knew what to wear. I guess I was pretty preppy. I didn’t really express myself in school, so I was an accessories person—I always did my nails, loved rings and bracelets.

Do you think that’s why you’re into jewelry now? Yeah, probably. They told us what to wear, and the only way to be unique was to accessorize or wear jewelry, or change up our socks and shoes. 

Did you ever have days at school where you got to wear your own clothes? Well, we had mass. It was a fundraiser once a month. 

Like a church mass/fundraiser? Explain. It was an all school mass—$5 at the door.  You didn’t have to dress up if you didn’t want to, but most kids did. And we could wear Sunday best.

Sunday Best? Like fancy dresses and skirts. So basically once a month, everyone bought a new outfit to go to mass. 

That’s hilarious! It was VERY serious.  Most people would go out and buy new clothes for that day.

So did people really pay attention in mass? The best part of mass was Communion.  It was like a fashion show. People would sit next to their friends and stare at everybody and whisper, “where’d she get that, why does he think he can pull that off?”

Christian Brothers Academy (CBA)

1999-2005

What did your uniform look like? We didn’t have a uniform where you had to buy it from a catalog. We had a dress code—it didn’t sound as harsh.

Did you like your uniform, or dress code, rather? Not so much. I went to a public school for elementary school before going to CBA for high school, and a lot of the other kids had gone to Catholic school before, so they were used to it.

So how did you adjust - going from wearing whatever you wanted in public school to having a dress code in high school? It was a lot of trouble because I was a tomboy—I didn’t like the girls’ flared dress-code khakis.

Did the school have a few days were you could wear whatever you wanted? Yeah, you could pay like 1 or 2 bucks to wear anything and the money would go to a big cause, like the tsunami.

That’s nice. And you must have been super excited to wear whatever you wanted, right? It was nice, but it was more of a novelty for kids that had been wearing the dress code clothes since kindergarten and had like 20 chances in their entire life to wear jeans to school.

But what about finally getting to wear your tomboy clothes? Well, I wanted to wear gym shorts, but Abercrombie and American Eagle were the look. And some kids set the tone for what everyone else was wearing. So even on a dress-down day when we could wear whatever we wanted, everyone dressed really similarly.

So it was like your class was still in uniform?
Yeah—you’d think they’d want to change it up a little.