Our gym uniforms looked like this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c3/36/cc/c336cc2a10276fed49eb9e568e0bcad1.jpg
I kind of liked them because they looked just like the uniforms in all the British boarding school books I had read.
Wow, I didn’t know you went to school in the 19th century! 
Luckily, my boys grew out of using Axe after middle school. The smell was overwhelmingly bad.
I cannot believe someone thinks those gym uniforms are retro cute. My mom also embroidered my name on the shirt and shorts (ours were 2 piece). Wish I had a photo of them!
gymsuits…i had blocked this memory! navy blue polyester shorts attached to a blue and white striped top. with a zipper and our gym teacher wrote our last name on the back in permanent marker. sort of like prison!! followed by a group shower where approximately 40 girls had to share 5 showerheads. the teachers stood by to make sure each of us got completely naked. good times…thank you public school for scarring us forever!
I had the same uniform as mathmom. Ours were royal blue and our blouses were short-sleeved. We wore matching bloomers underneath…big puffy things with snaps up the side…and white Keds.
Yea, in middle school, it had to be a sleeveless, button down blouse and you had to have your name on the top and shorts, in thick black pen or embroidered. In HS, I think a PE thirst and shorts.
Our kids wore shorts and tshirts. My D still wears the basketball shorts she had for PE to sleep and for lounging around the house.
Ours were a hideous peagreen and looked more or less like the one in the link.
When actually did go to a British boarding school we had two different PE uniforms, depending on the season. One was a white Aertex shirt – more or less a polo shirt – and white shorts. The other, mostly for field hockey, was grey wool knee socks (we didn’t wear shinguards!), a short grey wool sort of pleated divided skirt, the aertex shirt, and if it was cold a cream colored sweater that was probably wool.
In the early 1980s we had the one piece romper gym uniform with a zipper up the front and elastic waist described above but it was solid red on the bottom and the top half was very narrow horizontal red and white stripes, and solid red short sleeves. No forced showers because I don’t think they worked. We left the gym uniforms in our gym lockers all semester. Smelly!
Can I just say that this could be the best thread title in all of CC’s history?
It’s a well known chain, and the spa is located in the hotel…in no way was it a seedy massage parlor…zobroward needs to get out more, lol.
I was at the hotel for over a week and used the spa myself several times and never saw any men…either clients or staff, so my primary reason for going to the front desk earlier that day was to ask if they accommodated males at all, especially a teenager. The surroundings/products/services seemed very female focused, so I wondered if they took males at all. It never occurred to me that deep in the bowels of the place, men liked to congregate in the nude. Now I know!
In hindsight, it is clear that the staff knew perfectly well that the men liked to hang out in the nude. The female attendant told him emphatically, " I’m not going in there," and sent him in alone. She was very young and lacked in either her own common sense or in direction from management. A better trained/more experienced staff (as in a “grown up”) would have told him and offered him the choice to go directly to the treatment room. The spa owner’s reaction afterward was strictly CYA because he thought S was much younger…someone may have told him S was a preteen and he was concerned about liability.
In the US, as opposed to Europe, the customer facing staff at nicer hotels are usually quite young. I never saw anyone (other than housekeeping and kitchen staff) at this hotel over thirty, and most looked early twenties. Maybe I’m getting old, but I think the level of service suffers when experienced people aren’t in charge. In the nicer European hotels, most of the management are career professionals…they’ve seen everything, and are much more able to anticipate problems.
My sisters and I love Japanese and Korean spas. Yup, lots of naked old people lounging. And young ones and kids. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love the nonjudgmental atmosphere. I think I wouldn’t like it so much if everyone looked like a pert model. Though you do see beautiful celebrities at NY/LA spas sometimes – I saw Zosia Mamet, and my sister ran into Julianne Moore and her daughter.
After reading this thread, I know that if I ever visit a ryokan, I want to go with @MotherOfDragons and @HImom! 
Funny, we stayed in a ryokan this summer for 2 nights. My DS#2 went into the communal bath momentarily and announced that it was occupied by … Naked old men!
Interesting discussion.
One of the things I was surprised to learn as my kids grew up was that the boys on the hs teams don’t use the showers anymore. Not football, not basketball, not lacrosse, not track…no one. You could reconfigure every boys hs locker room to remove the showers and no one would miss them because they’re unused. They put on their street clothes and drive home, showering (sometimes) later. And that’s in a case where there would be just peers. And I think this is national, not just our area.
Decades ago I was working on something with a guy who was a NYAC member, and he proposed that we take a break for a swim at the pool, since the club was nearby. I didn’t realize that, apparently at that time, there was a no swimsuit tradition. Can’t say that I felt all that comfortable, and I was decades past 17. Don’t know if that’s the same today or not. I rather doubt it.
Re The fancy city athletic clubs and the nude swimming – That was the argument for not accepting women as members for years. Now that women are (presumably) admitted as full-fledged members of the New York Athletic Club and granted full access to the facilities, I doubt the tradition of nude swimming has continued!
@Dadx – was your nude swim at the NYAC between the years of 1984 and '89? I just looked up when the legal challenge to all-male membership at the NYAC was going on and that’s when it was (similar to the time frame of other city clubs around the country). Those years were the height of male nude swimming at men’s clubs because there was a concerted effort to prove that admitting women would fundamentally change the nature of the organization.
It was earlier than that, I think, but not by a lot. Maybe five or six years.