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This paper questions whether school uniform was integral to the creation of collective identity or individual identity in adolescent schoolgirls in the 1950s. In a recent study of uniform and the fashioning of identity amongst primary school children. Jon Swain (2002) focused his argument on the construction of masculinity and argued that pupils who tried to dress according to school rules were in danger of being stigmatized and subordinated. I draw on Swain's theoretical framework which considers the symbolic value of the items of clothing which departed from the school norm. Women interviewed about their school experience in the 1950s inevitably spent a great deal of time describing their school uniform at a time when the grammar school uniform was a marker of 11+ success. Colours worn at school were frequently shunned in later life and the hated hats and gloves of many of the independent schools abandoned as soon as possible in favour of a more 'up to date' style of dressing. For teenage girls in the 1950s this presented a problem. Whilst a grammar school uniform worn into the sixth form up to the age of 18 was a marker of academic success, it was also a barrier to the representation of the same 18 year old as an adult woman. Far from being the equalizer that it is claimed to be, as the majority of those attending grammar school were middle class uniform swiftly became a marker of social class during this decade. Contemporaries who left school at the minimum age of 15 were able to dress daily in fashionable clothes which allied them with the world of the adult. The efforts that girls went to in order to customize their uniforms might be read as a rebellion against the school and likely to lead to punishment but it can also be read as part of their aspiration to be seen as part of a group identity only partly belonging to the school. I argue that the alteration of the school uniform cannot be read as an assertion of an individual identity but as an assertion of a group identity which was 'teenage' not 'schoolgirl'. Variations to the uniform were in themselves uniform. Skirts, usually a regulation two inches above the knee when kneeling were either rolled up or let down, or worn with voluminous petticoats according to prevailing fashion. Panama and Velour hats were altered with a tuck so that they sat on the back of the head or perched on a beehive hairstyle. In doing this I suggest girls learnt the significance of conforming to a group identity as female which demanded regular attention to the changing fashion shown in magazines and the emergent teenzines and undermined the authority of the school. Bill Osgerby (1998) argues that the significance of young women in the emergent youth culture of the 1950s has been overlooked. In examining how girls 'customised' their uniforms, using photographs and magazines and evidence from oral history interviews we can recognize the place that the representation of young femininity had in the decade immediately following the second world war.
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