Old and interesting #9: Beatle haircut, miniskirts, and working around the house in undershirts
Gallup polls about fashion choices from 1965 to 1970, and what they teach us about changing norms, signaling, and individual preferences.
Introduction
Norms govern social interactions in every society. One of their primary goals is to maintain social cohesion. Among other things, they regulate behaviors like what to wear, how to eat properly, and how to greet someone. Some of these norms prescribe behaviors that are genuinely good or useful. Not shouting obscenities at your neighbors (or people in general) is an example of this type of norm.
Other norms don’t encourage good or useful behaviors directly. Rather, the behaviors they promote are designed to signal group membership. They could be useful or good indirectly, insofar as they promote social cohesion. Even though some norms certainly fulfill this function, when I describe a behavior as “useful” or “good” in this post, I mean that it’s directly (as opposed to indirectly) useful.
Note that many behaviors don’t fit neatly into either of the two categories above. They express individual preferences, devoid of any usefulness or signaling value. For example, wearing a yellow T-shirt or eating apples with your left hand isn’t better than wearing a blue T-shirt or eating apples with your right hand. Nor do these behaviors signal group membership.
The category to which a behavior belongs can change across time periods and different societies. Today’s signaling behavior could become tomorrow’s individual preference.
Voluntary and involuntary signaling
In his book Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow mentions that some women had very long nails at some point in the country’s history. Very long nails not only serve no useful purpose, but they make their unlucky owner less able to grab and manipulate objects. This would be a big disadvantage if the goal were to manipulate objects—a must when working on a rice field. What these women lost in manual dexterity, however, they gained in signaling value. Everybody could see these women’s long nails and infer (correctly) that these women didn’t do any manual labor. In other words, long nails signaled that a woman was rich.
History is full of examples where signaling was not voluntary but imposed on people against their will. Famously, the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David during the Second World War, making them targets for discrimination, harassment, and ultimately, murder. Most signaling behavior, however, falls somewhere on the spectrum between fully voluntary and fully imposed.
In the mid-20th century, some Hungarian households wanted their children to eat with their arms close to their torso. To practice this rather unnatural position, children were supposed to eat while holding a dictionary under their arms. Devoid of any apparent health benefits, the goal of this behavior seems to have been pure signaling of class status. There was no 3 a.m. visit by the police if someone didn’t eat with their arms close to their torso. But the behavior wasn’t fully voluntary either. There may have been social consequences like acquaintances making nasty comments about the person behind his back or excluding him socially.
Gallup polls and fashion choices
In the rest of this post, I turn to Gallup opinion polls from 1965 to 1970 as a lens through which to explore the signaling value of some behaviors. The behavior I primarily focus on is the decision of what to wear in public. Discussing people’s attires is a common pastime across virtually all societies and time periods, and numerous poll questions from 1965 to 1970 deal with this topic as well. All the questions I used for this post are included in a PDF at the end.
The core issue underlying all these questions is whether the fashion choice signals group membership or whether it’s merely an expression of an individual preference. To use an example contemporary to the 1965–1970 polls, should a man be able to wear a sport shirt in church, or is this an act of disrespect that endangers social cohesion, and as such, should be prohibited?
In the 1960s in the US, a man considering wearing a sport shirt in church could have been unsure about the social consequences. Opinion polls eliminate some of this uncertainty by giving him information about people’s feelings about the topic at a given time. Ultimately, what people think about a specific behavior is only the first step. The second, and arguably more important, step is whether there will be social consequences to not engaging in the socially prescribed behavior.
Even though opinion polls cannot measure real-life consequences (the second step), people’s stated preferences in the first step tell us something about potential consequences. If most people like or at least accept a fashion choice, there are unlikely to be social consequences. If most people, however, dislike or criticize a fashion choice, we can’t know for sure whether negative social consequences will follow. For example, someone can heavily dislike wearing jeans himself yet defend others’ right to wear them. That said, as the number of people who heavily dislike a specific style increases, calls for bans and other restrictions typically become more likely.
Beatle haircut, things “in bad taste,” and miniskirts
A 1965 poll elicited people’s views about the Beatle haircut. “As you know, many boys today wear their hair very long,” read the introduction to the question. Definitional issues of “very long” aside, 80% of respondents agreed that schools should require boys to keep their haircuts short. In other words, many people seemed to have seen boys with long hair as signaling membership in an undesirable group (e.g., non-conformist boys, unclean boys, or whatever negative traits the respondents associated with boys with long hair).
A year later, people were asked about things they considered to be “in bad taste.” Both men and women were criticized for certain behaviors or fashion choices. For example, according to many, it was in bad taste for women to wear shorts in public (60%), for women to smoke while driving or walking (51%), for men to fail to stand up when women enter the room (44%), and for men to wear sport shirts in church (47%). Luckily for the men engaging in the socially very dangerous act of working around the house in undershirts, only 19% of people considered this behavior to be in bad taste.
If men in undershirts drew condemnation from some corners, women in miniskirts drew even more. In a 1967 poll, 63% of people disliked “this new style.” Furthermore, 70% said they would object to their daughter wearing a miniskirt.
There are several possible interpretations behind the high number of people with miniskirt objections. One candidate is people’s unfortunate tendency to police others’ clothing choices. Another candidate is well-intentioned concerns about social consequences. Parents may have considered it perfectly fine for their daughter to wear whatever she wanted. They may have thought, however, that she would suffer negative consequences for wearing a miniskirt in public.
As a personal example of this, my well-meaning grandmother routinely pointed out or adjusted my misaligned shirt collars as I was about to leave for school. An almost daily occurrence, she said she was worried about my classmates criticizing my looks. (For the record, I don’t recall any classmates ever having made a comment about my shirt collars.)
In 1970, the miniskirt topic came up again. When asked to pick the skirt length they liked best, 18% of women and 33% of men chose the miniskirt. For those who, like me, are fashion-illiterate, a brief explanation of skirt terminology is in order. The contenders were mini (skirt above the knee), skirt at the knee, midi (skirt below the knee), and maxi (skirt at floor length). Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest gap in preferences was between young men and older women. 64% of men in their twenties liked miniskirts best. Only 5% of women over 50 liked miniskirts best.
Note that people were asked to pick the skirt length they liked best, not the one they found most objectionable. The poll numbers suggest that most young men saw the miniskirt as a legitimate expression of a woman’s individual preference. For women over 50, the poll data is compatible with various interpretations. One possibility is that they saw the miniskirt as a legitimate preference, even if it wasn't their own personal choice. The other possibility is that they found it unacceptable. In this view, wearing a miniskirt might signal membership in a disliked group, and they might have considered it desirable to subject the wearer to negative social consequences.
Conclusion
Reading these poll questions today is a good reminder that the expressive value of fashion choices and other behaviors changes over time. Fortunately, it’s perfectly unobjectionable today for boys to wear long (even “very long”) hair, for women to wear miniskirts or shorts in public, and for men to wear a sport shirt in church. In short, these behaviors and fashion choices are (rightly) seen as squarely within the domain of individual preferences, even if some of them may have signaled something about the wearer 50 years ago.
Intellectually, we all know that things have changed in the last 50 years and will also change in the next 50. Knowing this, however, is not the same as internalizing its implications. It might be difficult to guess which fashion choices or other behaviors will make the transition from signaling something to merely expressing individual preferences. But some of them surely will. We should bear this in mind the next time we roll our eyes at a new fashion choice. Clothes that were once considered rather bizarre or unacceptable helped pave the way for more acceptance of all types of clothes—including that good old shirt with misaligned collars.
Super interesting! We should indeed bear in mind that norms change the next time we roll our eyes at clothes... and many more things