I find it quite interesting, because global trade and labor helps to give us some wildly inexpensive products, including clothing. Quality wise though, most 50 dollar sweaters you would buy now would probably not make it through 30 years of heavy rotation, much less make it past a few decades in order to be resold (in a vintage boutique or something).

I think that cheap retailers change our perception of what clothing can withstand and how we take care of our stuff. We don’t fix things anymore because it is just as easy to throw away something and buy another. Retailers don’t have to pay attention to quality if people shop by price point. Target gets top notch designers to design the surface of my umbrella but the umbrella broke in 3 different places after 20 uses.

I don’t exclusively buy top notch stuff, but I try to seek out better stuff because it makes my life easier because I can shop for something once. I tend to be a picky shopper, so buying more expensive shoes means I spend less time shopping around for a replacement as each cheaper pairs quickly degrades. I feel ok investing in a shoe repair bill and I tend to buy a few things that I love instead of needing a complicated storage solution for a bunch of things I am ok with. I appreciate the idea of having less, but of better quality.

Don’t give in and spend your money on books.

With the way that book costs are increasing, it will increasingly become the case that a student might not have the opportunity to choose whether to give in to the temptation to buy clothes. :P

Ultimately, non-residents were merely required to sign in and out (ostensibly for the purposes of security, even though it was the only residence hall that maintained such a log).

Rules and traditions, eh?

But – to summarize what I said to SuedeHat – I imagine that the relative price of the “acceptable wardrobe of an undergraduate female” of 1941 is far more expensive (in constant dollars) than that of today.

I don’t see too many “street-length dresses” on university campuses, but I do see a lot undergrads in the attire of “sweatshirt with leggings/jeans/sweatpants”. And I’m going to hazard the guess that the modern ensemble is cheaper than that of their (great) grandmothers.

Looking at photos of what male students wore during the 1940s and 1950s, I’m always surprised at how many students wore a suit and tie (and how many also wore hats), even in candid photos. Having to buy a new suit each year (so that it can replace one in the rotation) is far more expensive than purchasing a new pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and I’d imagine that it’s a similar case for female students: the “street-length dress” (a presumably more expensive item than the other ones listed, even though it was the most common dress item) has been replaced (apparently, at least where I did my graduate work) with leggings and a sweatshirt (which I’d guess are far less expensive in constant dollars than the street-length dress).

As an aside, my favorite rule was that “at least one foot must be on the ground at all times when entertaining gentlemen in the common area”

I was at Newnham, Cambridge and the “jokes” (haha very funny, not) were mostly about how we must all be lesbians to go to a women-only college.

Reading about the restrictions that used to exist for women is… scary.