August 2024

Your Kids' Back-To-School Doesn't Meet The Mark

It’s August again, and for most of us, that means it’s back-to-school season. In recent years, this means a lot of checking Instagram to see what items are trending, shopping on Amazon, pressing “place order” and boom, you’re done! All the best school clothes and supplies are secured within a few minutes. Back in the day though, going back to school was a way more dramatic experience. Then, it required battles through the mall, fighting against paper bags to cover books, and of course, just tons of hairspray (apologies to the ozone layer). With that in mind, let’s take a look back at what back-to-school looked like in the decades past!

Back-to-school shopping in the 80s and 90s may likely have started with store flyers or catalogs. Once we got those mailers from Sears, Penney’s, and the like, we knew it was time to hit the malls! The only problem was, this was everyone else’s cue as well, meaning parking in the way-back of the mall lot, getting yelled at by your mom to make a decision, or running into your crush in the underwear department. If your trip didn’t include at least one family member in tears, you weren’t doing it right. But hey, at least we all looked great for the first day of school! Anyone else remember the chorus of hundreds of brand new sneakers squeaking and chirping their way up and down the freshly waxed school hallways?

Once you had the back-to-school fit secured, it was time to hit the hair and makeup. For the guys, this usually just meant lots of extra-hold gel (L.A. Looks, Dep, anyone?), especially in the 80s & 90s. For the girls, it meant lots of makeup and LOTS of hairspray. While the styles may have changed over the decades, asking our parents for more hair care and makeup products than any middle or high schooler could ever possibly need didn’t change much.

When the fun stuff was out of the way, it was time to move on to actual school supplies (bor-ing). These haven’t really changed over the years - notebooks, #2 pencils, etc. However, some things have changed, like kids these days no longer use trapper keepers by default, massive pencil cases, or jelly everything from erasers, pencil grips, stickers… anything to match the jelly shoes, really. Then, too, you totally had to guess what supplies you were actually going to need. We didn’t get emails saying how many subjects worth of a notebook we’d need, or if one class required a composition book all to itself. So, back-to-school shopping often involved some guesswork, followed by back-to-school exchanges the weekend after school started. 

Classes starting, of course, meant making a homemade cover for your textbooks. We used everything from paper bags, to left over wrapping paper. Someone on the LV team might even have had their books covered in the same wallpaper as their childhood bedroom walls, but we can’t confirm or deny this. I’m sure there’s many other back-to-school traditions that we’ve lost, like walking up to the front of the classroom to use the built-in wall sharpener after you forgot to sharpen your brand new pencils before coming to class, and getting stared at awkwardly for the next minute. But, while back-to-school was more of an adventure back then, some of these traditions and practices were left behind for a reason. Even if they were great for character building.

August and going back-to-school back in the day was an experience that most of us are unlikely to forget. It was a little stressful and a lot chaotic, but it was something we looked forward to every year. Even if you weren’t a big fan of school, the anticipation and the shopping made it fun, even if just for a little while. Nowadays, there just isn’t the same level of excitement. When you're building up to just another delivery to your mailbox, back-to-school doesn’t have the same luster as it did back when we were growing up. So yeah, in our opinion, we’d say your kids are missing out on the old school back-to-school. But we did just receive a back to school catalog from Amazon in the mail over here, so maybe we’re about to go full circle?!

- Maddy

 

 

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