Old School Identity: When Tells a Story

By Oladunni Olisa

Recently, I watched a group of college students celebrate an Old School Day, and for a moment, the present seemed to borrow clothes from the past. There were full Afro hairstyles, colourful fabrics and bell-bottom trousers — fitted around the thighs before spreading widely from the knees. Some of the young women wore short iro wrappers with short-sleeved buba, while oversized hoop earrings, simple sandals and low-heeled shoes completed the look.

Some of the young men wore short trousers and shirts with large, pointed collars that became such a recognisable feature of 1970s fashion. It was playful, colourful and creative. But for me, it was also familiar. As I watched them, I remembered old photographs of my parents from the 1970s. Long before anyone explained the decade written on the back of a photograph, the clothes often told part of the story.

The hairstyle could tell you something. The cut of a trouser could tell you something. The shape of a collar, the wrapper, the jewellery and even the shoes could quietly announce that this belonged to another time. That is one of the fascinating things about clothing. Fashion is not simply what people put on their bodies. It can become part of a generation’s visual memory.

When Clothes Become Memory

To recreate an “old school” appearance, students had to search for recognisable details from the past. A modern outfit would not have created the same effect. The Afro mattered. The bell-bottoms mattered. The iro and buba mattered. The pointed collars mattered. On their own, they were clothes and accessories. Together, they recreated an era, bringing the distinctive style and details of an earlier generation back to life.

Across cultures, clothing has long carried stories about where people come from, what was considered beautiful, how generations expressed themselves and even how communities understood belonging. Years later, a style can disappear from everyday life and still survive in photographs, family stories, wardrobes and memory. Sometimes it returns.

A young person wears bell-bottoms and calls them fashionable again. An old photograph appears, and someone laughs, “Look at Daddy’s collar!” A mother sees a hairstyle her daughter recreated and remembers wearing something similar many years earlier. That is how culture travels — sometimes through language, food and music, and sometimes through something as ordinary as a piece of clothing.

More Than Looking Back

What I enjoyed most about watching the students was not simply that they looked different for one day. They were engaging, perhaps without even realising it, with a generation that came before them. Someone had worn those styles before they became costumes for an Old School Day. Those clothes had once been new. Those hairstyles had once been fashionable.

People attended weddings, went to work, visited friends, took family photographs, and lived ordinary lives dressed in the very styles young people now recreate for fun. That thought makes old photographs especially powerful. They do more than show us what our parents or grandparents looked like. They preserve small pieces of social history.

What Do We Carry Forward?

Culture, however, is more than clothing. The students could recreate the outward appearance of another generation in one afternoon, but every generation also inherits things that cannot be photographed so easily: Ways of greeting. Respect for elders, Hospitality, family stories, Language, Community, Responsibility, Values. Not every practice from the past needs to remain unchanged, and every generation will create something of its own. But looking backwards can still make us ask an important question:

What from the generations before us is worth carrying forward?

Perhaps that is why an Old School Day can be more than a fashion event. It can become a small doorway into memory. The bell-bottom trousers will eventually be taken off. The Afro may be combed into another style. The iro and buba may return to the wardrobe. But the stories behind them remain. And perhaps the most meaningful way to honour the past is not simply to dress like those who came before us, but to understand something about the lives, culture and values they carried. Fashion can help us recognise an era.

Culture helps us remember where the story came from.

Oladunni Olisa; Author, Creative Writer & Educator; Author of Super Child and Values & Healthy Relationships; Creator of “Then with Dunni” on Instagram