Did the clothes you had as a child influence what you have now?

[lipstickwoman]

I grew up in the 60s/70s with parents from the 'make do and mend' era. I had enough clothes to be warm and clean, but mum made them. I had the odd party dress, a new pair of winter shoes every year and a new pair of sandals in the summer. Very little else.

As a teenager I had a lot less than friends. Once I started work and could buy my own I went a bit mad and it's only recently I've deliberately cut back down again.

I'm sure my clothes buying habit stemmed from a childhood where is didn't have much. Just wondered if this is a common trait.

I was one of three and the only girl, l had to make do with sale stuff, and secondhand clothing plus an assortment of awful hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans.

What have you read?

I was at boarding school so had no access to proper shopping and fashions
A lot of worry about looking "tarty" when actually i had a figure to die for but covered up in sweatshirts and jeans

Have been frumpy my whole life tbh

And haircuts! Primary school pictures of me and my brother look as if mum has cut around a pudding bowl on our heads - except she obviously couldn't get the fringe straight so we have ended up with extremely short fringes . Ever since I've been responsible for getting my own hair cut I've been paranoid about my fringe never being above my eyebrows.

Oh yes , Mum made my clothes ! They were hideous .
I was really thin too as a child through my teens and twenties .
DSis managed to wrangle pocket money /clothes money
If I did buy anything it was spirited away to "alter" and never seen again . Even if something was mine she faffed about with it . I had a fake fur coat she brushed it to make it go fuzzy !

As an adult I promised myself No Sewing .
Except for Hallowe'en costumes (which I made and I have to say were bloody fabulous )

I don;t buy lots of clothes and even now I'll see something and wait a couple of days , might change my mind .

What have you read?
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus wrote and release podcasts on minimalism that talk on it.
Books that deal with the scarcity mindset also cover the role of past experiences on future decision making.

My parents both had no money but also had no interest in clothes - although they had a negative interest in that people who went to the hairdresser, liked clothes etc were judged as shallow and wasteful.

I therefore had terrible hair, only school shoes and about 5 individual items of clothing I can still remember as a young teen until I got a saturday job and could afford to buy my own clothes (for which sniffy comments were made about the cost).

I remember feeling jealous at my friend who got a whole new River Island outfit for non-uniform day. I, shit you not, wore a dress of my mum's. No wonder I never had a boyfriend .

Now I never feel like I look good, don't have a style, feel guilty if I buy new so stick to vinted, spend hours researching things to make sure they will last/change my life, and don't know where to start (despite having had my colours done, haha). DD has great clothes and enough of them - she has a great sense of her own style (or aesthetic as she says), and I hope clothes are just a normal thing to her forever rather than always hard work in my brain.

Yes I grew up in the 80s and had a very limited wardrobe. Any new clothes were given as birthday or Christmas presents. For example I’d get one small toy and then a jumper or top that I’d been allowed to choose.

Once I left home I spent a fair bit of money on clothes and accessories! However I realised mid twenties that this was a bit silly. Now in my forties I still only buy clothes a couple of times a year, and because I buy what I love without worrying about ‘fashion’ I wear them until they are no longer wearable which means I don’t need to buy more often.

My DC definitely have more clothes than I did, they get a lovely new wardrobe every time they outgrow a size, and they don’t have to wait till a celebration to get them!

I was also given a short hair cut to make things easier for my DM, it looked terrible with my thick curly hair (frizzy because they brushed it).

Lovely to read of these dressmakers in your families. I had a granny I loved who made me impractical things like party dresses if I asked her when I was a girl and I loved that. I wore them as everyday after a while and still have one as a stained tatty old museum piece.

When my DC were tiny I bought them hand knits off eBay. I wanted them to look like they too had a special granny who made stuff by hand for them. I’ve never thought about that before but It was my way of recreating that feeling and honoring her.

My parents had no interest in my clothes and no time, money or skills for dressing me so it was jumble sales and male sibling hand me downs. In some ways it’s liberating not to have big value put on your appearance or worries about getting dirty as a girl but obviously it was not great socially when I was a bit of a weird looking kid already. I felt free though and pretty much dressed myself without much adult interference unless it was weather-inappropriate.

I guess it helped me to not care too much about what other people think of my outfit choices as I got older. I value that freedom even though I am not personally using it by making any exciting style statements. To me, a big part of someone (else) being a genuinely stylish person, is them not just being a follower of trends.

I’m very far from being in any way stylish or from having the skill, time, budget or inclination myself to dress up well or even look decent every day. I wear second hand or low end of high street for myself. I’m not a great canvas and that’s fine with me.

But I love seeing other people’s looks and if someone is stylish I love seeing it on them out on the street. I can see that actually my parents’ DGAF out of necessity was freeing. So I really admire people who are now style rebels against their own family or upbringing style background or who rebel against conventional mainstream fashion in general, because I can appreciate how deep seated and psychologically embedded ‘clothes’ ie how you present yourself can be.

It’s not just their creativity to have put a look together it’s giving themselves permission to create themselves and to be brave about wearing that specific look in public that I admire. Obviously I’ll only notice it if the outfit is striking, but a lot of us are out doing that every day in the wild, by the sounds of this thread.

Not particularly, I don't think. I didn't have tons of clothes like some kids do now, but don't feel I had very limited clothes either. DM made me the odd dress when I was little, but otherwise clothes were bought new. I have a pretty uncomplicated attitude to clothes now. I'm not especially bothered by being fashionable, I buy stuff when I need it (sometimes secondhand) and I keep clothes for a loooong time unless they get damaged or don't fit any more.

Oh me too - I had hand me downs from my brother and I was never allowed any girls clothes. Once I could buy my own I went a bit mad. Am much better now but it definitely lingers!

Yes, similar story with childhood clothing. Very few things, hand me downs, slightly embarrassing at times etc even so I have a fairly normal attitude to my own clothes. However, when if comes to my daughters' clothes I can't bear for them not to have choice and clothes and shoes they love. I keep them well stocked and I am always happy to take them shopping. They are not greedy or label lovers so not an overly expensive parental anxiety issue.

Grew up poor, with a mum who at all costs wanted me to look ‘smart’ because looking scruffy or impoverished had been shaming when she was a child. Trouble is all my classmates tended towards the scruffy and what my mum sent me to school in (perfectly normal clothes, actually, just neater and tidier than average) went down pretty badly with peers. It was classed as being ‘stuck up’. Uniform ought to have levelled this off but didn’t as in my teens my classmates seemed weirdly obsessed with things looking a particular way, down to how many buttons done up and whether you wore the hood up on your coat or not. When I got interested in clothes, my influences were basically charity shops and jumble sales. My look was, and still is, eclectic. People do comment on my ‘individual’ look and just how many clothes I have (too many, far too many). I suspect that not being generally accepted by others and finding their ‘rules’ weird has enabled me to go my own way.

My parents were classic “working class to middle middle class via 1960s grammar schools and university” boomers. So my mum had a lot of childhood baggage around clothes (and still does). We didn’t have many clothes, but she insisted on buying those we did have from M&S and John Lewis (and fitted shoes from Clarks).

They were nice clothes and good quality (and always got passed down to siblings), but they were not always very “fashionable” — and so I ended up with the opposite problem of being the kid with the sensible quality St Michael tracksuit and dresses, whilst the richer kids had Dash and Benetton, and the poorer kids had cheap but more “street fashion” market stall stuff, but of course that just meant that everyone made fun of my slightly nerdy outfits.

Obviously I found this a great issue as a 10-14 year old, but in retrospect it wasn’t exactly the worst problem to have in life 😂 I mean, everyone’s got teenage angst, but the “my mum is so middle class I get bought serviceable nice but not very cool clothes” is on the better side of teenage problems to have, looking back. I can see that it was rooted in my mum’s 50s/60s childhood when she never had anything nice because my grandmother was not interested in how she looked. So she made sure we had few but nice good quality things, even if the more “street” kids laughed at me. Despite the terrible angst about it as a young teen, I can’t say it’s had a lasting psychological impact - probably I think of it as character forming tbh, in the wider picture of things it’s such a middle class problem really. I now think of myself as lucky to have had the childhood I did! And honestly, we all looked much better in photos in our sensible slightly nerdy M&S outfits than we would have done in the most up to date shell suit from Tammy Girl 😂🤣

I didn’t really know how to dress myself well or how to choose clothes until I was in my early twenties, but as soon as I had some money I got really good at it, and people always talked about how I was so well dressed and had such good taste. Nowadays I am overweight and not so well dressed as I hardly bother, so I mainly channel my sartorial talents into DD, who generally isn’t that bothered about clothes as long as she looks vaguely like her friends. At 10 I ask her if she wants to choose her clothes, and she still says to me “No, I like anything you buy, mummy” 😂 — which is flattering but I’m sure she will get pickier soon as teenage years approach!

I dress DD in nice good quality clothes, but make them a bit more fashionable than my mum would have done, so that I’m keeping an eye on what her friends are wearing — brands are usually a mixture of H&M, Boden, and of course the dreaded M&S and John Lewis 🤣 (Maybe I’m not so different to my mum after all!)

Oh I should say though that DD has far too many clothes. She hardly ever wears them all tbh. I am trying to cut back, but I buy things in sales and from eBay normally, so it’s difficult to resist the impulse. I’d never normally buy Boden, say, full price - only second hand or on sale/clearance. And often eBay is so cheap that I over-buy pretty things and DD ends up with three party dresses and four summer dresses when really she only needs one or two, but I’ve seen them for a couple of quid on eBay and they’re so pretty I can’t resist!

And I’m a bit prey to the notion that DD must have things for every eventuality. So it’s sometimes as bit over the top compared to my 80s childhood — but then I resell them afterwards, pass on or donate (out local community has a free family clothes exchange so they never go to waste).

I only read the first few posts and I could of as c&p as my own.

My DP's didn't place much importance on clothes and yes my Mum made a lot. So when friends were getting the latest things my Mum would eventually 'make my own as its just as good'. I can remember being mortified as my friends floated around in tiered gypsy skirts with separate underskirts showing from the bottom. My Mum sewed a frill onto an straight bit of fabric with elasticated waist and sewed some lace round the hem

It didnt help as we had no school uniform so it was very obvious what everyone was wearing and i have had a nasty comment about only having one skirt. I used to have the odd (fashionable) things given to me by an Aunt but I also spent years wearing clothes from a dead Great Aunts house

I know I now over buy for myself and DS

I very fondly remember a pair of 'ski' pants from M&S when I was young. Sort of leggings with stirrups. Would I wear them again.....Probably!

Growing up in the 60s my Mum made and knitted most of my clothes and she was very good at it. I was dressed beautifully in lots of photos. However we didn't have masses of stuff as people just couldn't afford it and there wasn't the cheap availability there is today. I do have a photo of me as a baby and I have a gold bangle on so blame my Mum for love of jewellery 😂 I have bought loads of clothes over the years. The things I lusted after which I wasn't allowed was the tight white lacy shirts and the flimsy bomber jackets and the pink princess plastic shoes.

We didn’t have multiple pairs of shoes. It was school shoes (sandals for school in summer) and plimsolls. Occasionally we had a pair of party shoes but not all the time.

Out of school, we just wore our school shoes. A few people had other shoes, but most were in their school shoes. These days when you see girls in a pretty dress with their school shoes instead of party shoes, or boys in a tracksuit with school shoes instead if trainers, it looks unusual. It wasn’t then.

Likewise we would have 1 coat. Possibly a cagoule for summer.

Today, many little girls have school shoes, trainers, party shoes, boots, beach shoes and sometimes more than one version of each. They often have multiple coats too. Some of it is good quality and can be handed down, but often it’s throw away fashion and people often throw away quality items too. Many people don’t like second hand and wouldn’t consider it, even if it’s better quality than new cheap clothes. It’s all about quantity.

LesserBohemians I had hand me downs from cousins who were about twelve years older than me. They were Brora style clothes (from Dublin's Brown Thomas's) and had lasted very well. Mum couldn't get over the quality... But obv the clothes were at least twelve years out of date. I showed up to an open day in the secondary school I attended wearing a nice blue and brown wool kilt, brown knee-length socks, sturdy brogues that were too big for me, and a v-neck blue wool jumper, with a blouse underneath buttoned all the way up. I looked as if I had escaped from a photo of the Royal Family striding around Balmoral in 1958. Everyone else was wearing jeans or stuff from Dunnes.

There was always the fear of having grown - it wasn't about money as much as it was rage that I wasn't teeny tiny like my half sister or her. If I'd grown too much, she'd rage for weeks about it, tell me I was eating too much as I was going to be a giant the height of a man with 'great, fat feet like a monster' and that 'no woman should be above a size 4'.

I have a lot of shoes and clothes that actually fit me and suit my shape and colouring.

@NeverDropYourMooncup that sounds really hard and im sorry you had this. I felt rather hard done by at time; I had nothing like this to deal with and it must have been horrible

Yes definitely. Growing up we got one/two new outfits a year and these were usually for Xmas, they were always homemade and quite frankly not to my liking. I had to beg my mum to buy me my first bra. I don't think she's a bad person I think she just didn't care and she hated spending money.
Me on the other hand I now absolutely hate miserly ppl. Avoid them! And she still enrages me with her cheap ways. But looking back I hated it so much and was v aware of what she did. But was too scared to question her at the time. Now I buy alot of clothes. I'm n my twenties when I got my first proper job I spent way too much on clothes and shoes. And I've noticed this in all of my siblings. We all spend alot now. So she did us no favours.

My mum had me in flowery dresses until I was 10 (the year 2000, not the 1960s!). I felt like such a miserable outcast among my friends. I won't look at a dress now, and despise floral patterns. Jeans all the way here!