Modesty in young girls’ fashion?

[Mel15sa]

I’m honestly quite shocked at what I keep seeing lately. So many young girls from those walking with their mums to groups of older teens wearing these high-waisted, skin-tight gym shorts that are basically leggings chopped off mid-thigh. They leave nothing to the imagination.

When I was that age, yes, we wanted to look fashionable too. We wore jean shorts, maybe a crop top on a hot day, but there were still some boundaries. Now it feels like modesty has completely gone out the window.

I can’t help but think: is this really just “fashion”? Or are girls dressing like this for attention, because it certainly draws the eye? It makes me sad that such young girls feel they have to put their bodies on display like this.

I know people will say “times change” but is this really a change for the better?
Are we doing girls any favours by normalising clothes that show off absolutely everything?

For context, I’m not bitter or jealous. I get compliments, and I could wear the same if I wanted to. But I choose not to, because I believe in dressing modestly. Even in the gym, I don’t dress in skin tight clothing. What worries me is seeing younger and younger girls thinking this sort of exposure is the norm.

What on earth has happened to modesty? Am I the only one concerned about this?

I live in a large city and near a high school and I honestly have not seen anything like you describe. Leisure wear of various sorts and very short school skirts but young teenagers in basques and body suits? No, that’s not a thing here.

(and on the subject of well, we wore things like that back in the day, I have remembered that a body suit thing was called a cat suit and I had a couple of pairs of cycling shorts and cropped sweatshirts were a thing. Would I have worn them at 13? No, but probably only because I didn’t have a Saturday job until I was fifteen and there was no money in our house for multiple sets of clothes. I did have great fun and many missteps experimenting with clothes once I had a job, though - wish I had kept some of the pieces. My DD wore my tiered skirt, which I had kept, when they came back in fashion, what we would have called a ra-ra skirt - showing my age here).

Yes I absolutely was as were my friends. We copied Twiggy who was 15!!
At school we pushed the boundaries & wore makeup as subtle as we could get away with.
We also went out on school nights, went to clubs & were very independent.
I’m not a fallen woman & consider myself to have had a good life with lovely children & their families. Life was incredibly exciting then, not all doom & gloom like today.

It’s laughable the way some people moan & whinge about today’s so called standards.

You were literally wearing modern scrunch bum short shorts in modern gym fabrics, that pull right up to show the inside of your bum crack, @DemelzaandRoss ? Were you really?

I very much doubt it. Even Twiggy hadn’t yet obtained the power of time travel.

My image hasn’t even cleared image review yet. MN’s auto filter may well have designated it as porn, but it’s only of a shop selling current gym shorts 😆

14/15 year-olds are young girls; below that age they're children, and when they reach 18 they're young women, in my opinion.

They are grown women though in those pics. It 12/13 year olds.

@bumbaloo posted pics of teenagers from the same era.

Yes, micro- dresses from the 60s were so modest 😂

I can almost guarantee that some of the "adults" are 16

A 14 year old is a teenager
A young girl makes them sound under 10

No

A young girl is not a teenager

Calling teenagers "young girls" is infantalising

Young girls are children

Teenagers are not young girls

Calling them young girls is massively demeaning

No one actually call them "teenagers" when talking about them - it's "the girls" the "young girls"

"Young" girls are not teenagers

Well, there is a big difference between a thirteen year old and a nineteen year old. I doubt when the OP is talking about girls that she means nineteen year old women. (One might even call a nineteen year old a girl, quite routinely.) Whereas it really isn’t remotely demeaning (and that’s also the opinion of my rather strong willed DD!) to call a thirteen year old a young girl.

IMO if there’s anything that really does sound like internalised misogyny on this thread, it’s the insistence that young teenagers shouldn’t be considered children or young girls. It’s always been rather convenient for men to pretend that thirteen or fourteen or fifteen year olds are not actually young girls. It’s pretty weird to find women arguing the same. A thirteen or fourteen year old girl is a child. No matter how mature they might feel, legally and socially we recognise that they really aren’t adults, and not even sort-of-adults, either. They’re children.

Ah there we go

I thought this thread had gone on for surprisingly long without someone accusing other posters of being men 😒😒

Young girls makes them sound under 10. Teenagers aren't young girls. They are girls, teens, at the older end they are young women. But young girls are primary school

A thirteen or fourteen year old girl is a child.

Agreed. Now, when someone speaks of "young children", do you imagine teenagers?

Well yes I plead guilty to wearing hot pants when I was 19 in the 1970s.
I can quite categorically state that firstly no bum cheeks were displayed in those days. Or certainly not in the NE of England. Also that the age of the girls and young women wearing hot pants was not as young as the children who wear them now. And that there was not the prevelance and normalisation of pornography in general and the teen,and child, focused pornography that is widespread now.

In the 1970s the modern feminist movement was in it's infancy. We are 50 years down the line and I would have hoped the strides that women have made in being recognised as equal to men would have come on in leaps and bounds. And that this equality would mean that women no longer would feel the need to parade around virtually naked while men remain clothed. But sadly this is not the case.

”young children” is not the same phrase as “young girls” 😆 May I introduce you to the idea that different phrases mean different things?

the woman in the skin tight body suit was not a child or a teenager. She was in her mid twenties. I see loads of teens in basque or bra-let style tops though.

Young girls and young children are the same wavelength

Girls can = children which is why so many on MN are mortally offended by being called girls when they are 50

I agree the shorts in the pic are in fact modest.

Scrunch bum leggings or those shorts which basically expose most of the buttocks are much more tacky and seem to be designed to draw attention to erogenous zones, which the shorts in the photo don’t.

The OPs shorts were not bum scrunch, they were as she put it, like cut off leggings and whilst of course the clothes are not exactly the same, they are a clear indication that shorts even shorter than the cycle shorts the OP showed and crop tops (yes yes not exact) have been worn since the 1970s. So NOTHING new. One girl in the 80s in my pictures is wearing an actual bra top so I can’t see how you can look at these pictures and determine that girls are wearing way worse now and morality has plummeted.

my pictures clearly show that young teens and preteens wore very very short shorts and various types of crop tops from crop t-shirts to bikini style tops 50 years ago.

Really?? No bum cheeks? Really??

The pics I posted are younger teens or tweens.

So to be considered skimpy they gave to be exactly the same??? That’s ridiculous as those fabrics were not invented.

but shorts so short that the arse cheeks were no even covered properly let alone with tight Lycra and shirts so short you saw knickers were worn.

But for some reason these don’t count to you. Tight Lycra shorts that cover more skin are less appropriate to you