Each generation of kids have their own way of dressing, to either be “cool” or to rebel against the established way of doing things. Like kids today who wear their pants down so their underwear shows, or kids who wore jeans with holes all over them or the bell bottoms of the 60’s. Anything to be different.
My dad grew up as a kid in Arizona in the late 20’s and early 30’s, living, what was then rural desert outside of a much smaller Phoenix, on a horse ranch. He told me that when he was a teenager, the thing for kids to do was to buy a new pair of Levi’s, put them on and sit in a bathtub full of the hottest water they could stand. Then they walked the jeans dry and never, ever washed them. Ever. They’d get stiff and shiny with dirt and that made them all the more cool. They wore them with the bottoms folded up into cuffs that were 6-8” high. That was their “style”, he said, and he still wore cuffs rolled up on his jeans as he got older, though he did wash them. He said the style irritated his parents but that was part of being cool back then.
Levis ...and other jeans came so stiff and uncomfortable till late 70s
The per washed hit
Thank God
New jeans in the 60s were like scratchy cardboard