55 Vintage Photos Of Your Parents Being Cooler Than You Will Ever Be

Published October 19, 2017
Updated June 22, 2020

Our parents used up all the cool and left us with none, as evidenced by these ridiculously cool vintage photos.

Cool Vintage Photos Beers
Girl In Rush Hat
Vintage Photos Flowers For Sale
Couple Drinking And Smoking
55 Vintage Photos Of Your Parents Being Cooler Than You Will Ever Be
View Gallery

If you've ever looked through your parents' vintage photos from when they were younger, you might have stumbled across some jarring images — proof that, in a different decade, some of them were kind of... hip, perhaps even edgy or downright cool.

Nowadays, so many of us covet all things vintage. We wish we could live in the 1980s punk scene or the 1970s disco era or the free love 1960s. And, for many of us, these are precisely the decades in which our parents got to be young and hip.

While our parents didn't have the internet back then, they did have cameras — and the fashion sense and attitude to look good in front of the lens. Of course, what our parents also didn't have was smartphones, cyberbullying, and YouTube celebrities. Our parents lived their lives in the real world and in the moment -- and were all the cooler for it.

That's not to say that any generation, even theirs, is without worry and woe. But the pressures then weren't quite the same — your parents only had to keep up with the Joneses, not the Kardashians.

Without Facebook and Netflix, our parent's generation had time to learn to ride unicycles and go to mermaid tryouts at Disneyland. They grew epic beards and wore stylishly chic outfits without an Instagram profile to show it off. They lived for their friends and their cars, and they swore to never, ever be as un-cool as their parents.

Even if your parents weren't as "hip" as those pictured in the vintage photos from the 1960s-1980s above, they probably didn't even care. And that right there puts them in the upper echelon of cool.


For even more cool vintage photos that reveal just how hip life could be in the 1970s and 1980s, check out these raw photos from Internet K-Hole. Then, check out these vintage hippie photos that capture flower power in full bloom.

author
Erin Kelly
author
An All That's Interesting writer since 2013, Erin Kelly focuses on historic places, natural wonders, environmental issues, and the world of science. Her work has also been featured in Smithsonian and she's designed several book covers in her career as a graphic artist.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.