Emily Fleenor’s Found Artifact

    My group is doing juxtapositions of the fashions from the 1970s, the 1910s, and the 2010s. The artifact I will be focusing on personally is the 1973 Schoolmarm, or yearbook. My contribution will be finding pictures that capture the essence of the 1970s to compare to the style of the other decades we are examining. My artifact, the 1973 Schoolmarm, is digital. The Schoolmarms, years 1910-2015, are available on the internet, provided by the JMU Scholarly Commons. The 1973 Schoolmarm is 468 pages long and is divided into twelve sections: student body, achievements, special recognitions, honoraries, interest, experiences, athletics, competitions, Greek life, brotherhood, administration and faculty, and guidance.

   What stood out to me was that the 1973 Schoolmarm seems to be picture-oriented rather than text-oriented. The first thirty pages are the only ones with color, so they are important because color schemes are distinguishable. The black and white and monochromatic pages are also valuable because they give additional insight into the cuts, styles, and patterns of clothing.

  Fashion, which may seem superficial on the surface, is actually a font of information. One does not need to be an expert to know that fashion has escalated from an essential to keep one alive to a social cue. Fashion denotes what social class/group one belongs to, their personality traits, interests, economic status, and tastes. The pages of the Schoolmarm that are devoted to different clubs and sports provide evidence that people of similar interests tend to dress alike: athletes wear letterman jackets, Greek-life members sport their letters, protesters wear political images. Most of the time it is easy to discern the essence of a person by their clothes, but sometimes not; appearances can be deceiving, which is important to remember to avoid stereotyping.

    In 1973, Nixon was president, Roe v. Wade was overturned, Secretariat won the Triple Crown, the Vietnam War ended, and American Graffiti premiered. The average cost of a new house was thirty-two thousand dollars, a dozen eggs were forty-five cents, a new AMC Javelin was three-thousand dollars, and gas was forty cents a gallon. These events and prices probably seem like a virtual reality to current JMU students and yet the clothing, at least to me, seems almost representative of student styles making a comeback today, although the hemlines and accessories are a little dated. So why has society changed so much while the styles seem timeless?

   Our project will have five different categories of juxtapositions: how politics of the era influences fashion, how popular culture of the era influences fashion, timeless styles, styles that have died out, and how hemlines have changed. Under each juxtaposition, we will write detailed analyses of how each category influences/is influenced style.