By Robin Eileen Bernstein

I took my 15-year-old daughter shopping for spring clothes the other day at an upscale boutique in suburban New Jersey, near my parents’ home.

“Ma, look!” she said. She held up this….this….THING. It was a mustard-colored, one-piece contraption with something that resembled bloomers at the bottom.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “That’s my high school gym uniform!” At the very least, it was some sort of revamped version, more suitable for a night of club dancing than a morning of push-ups. 

For women of a certain age, let’s say middle age, school gym uniforms were de rigueur, a fact of pubescent life as traumatizing as SATs, chin zits and first crushes. So when my fashion-forward daughter told me, with an obligatory roll of her eyes, that the item in question was called a “romper” and was “in style now,” I had to laugh. If there was ever a fashion trend that deserved to rot in obsolescence or, at the very least, had earned a display case at the Smithsonian, it was the girls’ gym uniform.

Cinched with elastic at the waist and adorned with a series of cold metal snaps running from neck to crotch, the uniform was designed to make everyone look, well, uniformly bad. It was essentially an infant’s onesie reconfigured for an adolescent female. No matter if you were a willowy five-eight and 120 pounds like my genetically fortunate daughter, or short and curvaceous, or a big-boned athlete, the gym uniform would cut you down to size. It was the great leveler, which maybe was its purpose. When I was 15, I was five-four, flat-chested and skinny to the point of embarrassment. “She looks like an upside-down mop,” my dad would say of my stick figure and frizzy hair. “She has a fast metabolism,” my mom would counter, ever the peacemaker. All I wanted was to look like Laura, the reigning high school beauty who reminded me of a raven-haired Marcia Brady. The last thing I needed was a pasty yellow onesie that made me look like an ironing board.

Unlike me, my daughter loves to shop, hence, her knowledge of things like rompers. I hear “romper” and all that comes to mind is Romper Room, a popular TV show from the 1960s that took place in a nursery school. Those innocent five-year-olds didn’t yet know about gym uniforms, or about sitting at the wrong table at lunchtime, or about having a crush on a cool guy named Tom whose straight brown hair swept fetchingly across his forehead like a rock star but who was so aloof he didn’t even know you existed even though you sat one row away from him in tenth-grade social studies class. Oh, and he was smart, too. Give those adorable Romper Room girls another decade and they, too, would suffer the indignities of the Toms of the world, and the misery of gym uniforms.

My daughter doesn’t know of gym uniforms. Perhaps they’ve been banned, along with dunce caps and corporal punishment. She gets to wear the t-shirt and shorts of her choosing to gym. She tried on the romper. It was softer and more feminine than my old gym uniform, without the hard snaps and military angles. It was trendy and chic. Yet at its core, there was no hiding where it took its inspiration. It looked awful on her, despite her model-like frame, and she knew it. Thirty-five years ago, it would have looked awful on gorgeous Laura, too. I smiled. Call it a gym uniform or a romper or what you will, apparently every generation has its own great leveler.