As vintage sellers, we love everything vintage including vintage fads. But just like summer, fads come and go. Summer is over and kids are headed back to school. As a parent or child, there are always mixed feelings. Relief, anticipation, hesitation, and excitement, all rolled up in one. Counting down the days until the first day of a new school year.
While new outfits, backpacks, and school supplies go along with the start of a new school year, the accessories we entertained ourselves with throughout the summer tell more of a story of the time. Let’s look back at some of the fads that punctuated our formative years.
Part of our academic arsenal are notebooks, folders, pencils, pens, and erasers. If you’ve ever had a Pee Chee folder you’re in good company. They were originally created in 1943 and haven’t changed much since. Beyond adding colors outside of the original peach for which they were named, they still retain similar line drawings of teens participating in sports along with multiplication tables and English to Metric conversions.
If you were a child of the 1950s and 60s as many of us are, you probably owned a transistor radio. This portable invention allowed teens to take our music with us giving us the ability to listen on the long bus ride home. Because there was also a single earbud, our parents no longer had to listen to our music and could happily hear the evening’s news broadcast in privacy.
Along came the 1960s and the invention of the Princess phone in 1959. When not at school every teen girl wanted to gossip with her pals on one of these sleek beauties. The question of the day, what are you going to wear, is still top of mind for many a teen.
In the early 70s, the Taiwanese company Bensia created the Pop-A-Point pencil. These fun colorful pencils eliminated the need for a sharpener. When the lead ran out you simply popped in a new one.
1979 brought us a new way to listen to music. Sony created the Walkman. All those mix tapes we had been making suddenly became portable. Not only could we listen to the radio, but we could listen to anything we could record on tape. Scores of teens were sharing music and listening on the go.
The 90s brought us home computing and there was nothing cooler than the original iMac with its bright colors and fun shape. If you were a cool kid in the late 90s, you may not have been able to do your homework online yet, but you could play some of the earliest video games and create your own site on GeoCities.
Skater culture was all the rage in the 90s, leading Roger Adams to create a cross between shoes and roller skates known as Heely’s. It was an idea that changed his life and started a whole new fad in schools around the country. Kids could now zoom from class to class without the use of a skateboard or skates.
What new-fangled contraption will be the hot item when school resumes this year? And what vintage fad will adults of tomorrow be remembering when their kids head back to school?
