Remembering Blue Jean Shorts of the 1970s

I don’t know why I started thinking about it today, but we used to wear cut-offs in the summer. I think I’ve even blogged about this in a video somewhere, but anyway, here’s how it worked, at least in my family and for a few other kids I knew: In late summer, my mom would go through the Sears and JCPenney catalogs and pick out my school clothes for the year. Usually, that consisted of about four pairs of jeans, six shirts, new underwear, socks, and tennis shoes if I needed them.

After school let out and summer was approaching, the jeans that had been bought for school—and usually the shirts too, but definitely the jeans—would be cut off by my mom pretty much the day after the last day of school. They’d become my shorts for the summer. Now, I don’t know if this was a rural thing with my parents growing up, or if other kids’ parents did it too, but I grew up like that all the way up until around the age of 15. Of course, the method of buying jeans and cutting them off slowed down as I grew older, but I still cut off my own jeans.

As the 1980s approached, I started wearing things other than jeans to school, particularly corduroy pants. But these cut-offs were very much a grassroots product you’d wear in the ’70s. It was usually just tennis shoes, but as the ’80s approached, kids started making fun of other kids’ shoes; they’d use the term “Kmart specials.” Other than that, nobody really cared. The jeans were usually Wranglers or JCPenney jeans, which is what I would wear. A lot of times, the JCPenney jeans would be a thin denim, and then the Wranglers were a medium thickness. Levi’s, which were like gold back then, were thicker and sturdier.

The reason I’m mentioning all the thread counts, I guess, of the jeans, is because as the summer went on, the bottoms of the jean shorts would start to fray. Depending on what brand of jeans you were wearing, you’d get a different kind of fray. And the fray was something that was like a badge of honor or something. The fray, for some odd reason, was important to the wearer, to the kid. It was like, “I need to trim my fray.”

And of course, as times approached the 1980s, you started seeing things like Daisy Dukes and stuff that girls would wear. A lot of teenage girls would wear their boyfriends’ cut-off shorts, especially if they were swimming, and they’d wear them over their swimsuit and cinch them up with a belt. It was hilarious, but they were good times. When I think back to myself as a kid, it’s always me wearing these cut-off shorts.

The thing about that is, we used to manipulate our clothing like you wouldn’t believe. We would cut t-shirts in half across the bottom and have a half-shirt. This was long before any fashion industry would pre-cut things, pre-wash, or stone-wash. The fashion and clothing industry tried to make original products out of what we kids in the ’70s made for ourselves.

So that’s it, y’all have a good one, man. Be good to each other. Peace be with you all, and I’ll talk to you next time.

Love, 

Mark.