The 70's look

"What is youth except a man or a woman before it is fit to be seen?"- Evelyn Waugh

IT IS with a great sigh of relief to know that I only have a few pictures of my high school life otherwise if I probably would die of shame and weird fashion. I guess it is God's way of getting even that when we are teenagers, we dress strange. And the 70's was one of the best times to dress abnormal. But at the time we wore those bizarre contraptions, we did not think of us as out there, but rather we felt so cool. To put us in the proper mood and era, I was fourth year high school in 1975. And let is begin at the top, meaning the hair.

The hair

Well the accepted hairstyle at that time was the Jesus look. You know it, shoulder length hair, which was split right across the head. Of course we could not do that because at the old Ateneo high school we had a strict and I really mean strict haircut rule. We only got to wear the Jesus look during summer. A lot of us tried the Jesus look but it was useless because we all ended up like Judas or the Pharisees.

Somehow high school kids like me just could not get the right look with the Jesus look. I was thin during high school so instead of looking like Jesus, I looked like a mop. Of course there was the afro look. You know the hair made into a ball or like some darkened sugar candy. Some of us actually had the nerve to wear that kind of hair and it was strange to say the least.

So you could imagine us, the Judas look, the afro and the mop. Frustrated that we could not get the effect we turned our eyes on the fashion of the 70's.

The shirt

I have enough more than enough proof that kids in the 70's were dumb. At least I was because I insisted in wearing a woolen turtleneck shirt. Yup, that thing that strangles your neck. Why in the world would I wear something that was obviously hot is beyond me now. I think the "in" brand at that time was Vonnel, I am not sure about the smelling. But apparently I was not the only idiot because when I would step out in the sweltering heat there would be more than dozen people who would sport turtleneck shirts. We looked hip all right but we were sweating buckets but we did not mind. We looked good.

Of course if we were not wearing those sauna shirts we were donning those that had huge and I really mean huge collars. I mean they were so wide and huge that the tips--which doubled as weapons because they were sharp--reached our shoulders. They looked so crisp and fatal and they came in different colors, the brighter the better. And so we had bright green, blinding orange, flaming red, burning yellow and even fiery tangerine. God did we look stupid, but we were cool.

The belt

I have a confession to make. When we were at the old Ateneo high school one of our favorite pastimes was watching our school's basketball team play. Classeswould be suspended and all four hundred or more of us (yes we were just few because not everyone could enter the Ateneo at that time) would troop to the old CYO Gym at Holy Cross and watch the games. That was fun. But the real fun came after the game because sometimes we would have the traditional rumbles, which we were so common at that time. And this was where the belt came in handy.

At that time our belts, like our collars were also weapons. The 70's belt was not your ordinary belt. For one thing it was wide, and I mean wide, it sometimes had two locks and if you were really into it, it even had studs. Not only did you look good, but you were also armed. Those belts too worked if you were part of a gang like the Axis and the Allies. (Were you one of them?) Ah the good old days! Let us pause for a moment of sanity.

If you look carefully now we now had the spiritual hair, the deadly collars, the blazing shirts and the extended belt. Now we needed pants..