My mother tells me about how when she and her mother went to The Plaza, they would always get dressed up. The Plaza is (was) an outdoor shopping area (which the name implies, but…) where one of a kind shops were located. They would dress up in their finest dresses, even going so far as to wear those little white gloves that served no useful purpose other than to make you look pretentious.
Nowadays, wearing a T-shirt to The Plaza is common practice and the stores have converted into FAO schwartz, Baskin & Robbins, and Barnes & Noble.
Today in our pristine modern world, we have our washer-dryer sets, natural gas furnaces and water heaters, no-wax floors, dishwashers, etc. We don’t have to scrub floors, chop wood, carry in coal and water, or have to wash clothes in a tub.
Our gardens are hobbies, not necessities. We have grass lawns and concrete sidewalks, paved streets with no horse droppings. We have cars to drive everywhere. We don’t get dusty and dirty outside, unless we’re having fun.
Our clothes don’t get that grubby, and when they do we just toss them in the Maytag. Or go buy some more. Our closets are stuffed and overstuffed with assorted clothes.
See where I’m going with this? I bet that for most of the “dressed up” people we’re talking about here, they owned only a few dressy clothes and some everyday “grubbies,” with nothing in between. No such thing as “casual.” If that’s all you have to choose from, naturally you’d put on the better stuff to be seen in public.
Not to mention styles and rules of dress. T-shirt? That’s underwear. Blue jeans? Work pants. And so on.
My grandma, who tends to repeat herself a lot lately, has mentioned several times that when she was younger, she’d never even think of going grocery shopping without a pair of gloves.
Yep, lil fella. I remember way back in '68 (that’s 1968, of course) when I began to teach school. I wore a tie and jacket everyday, and often a vest. I also called the students Mr and Miss. Course, I was fresh out of graduate school and was used to being addressed that way, myself. All the male teachers wore jackets and ties. I even remember the day that the student council declared “casual day,” and everyone wore what we then called gym shoes. Whooee. This year, on the other hand, a male colleague of mine came to school in shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. Yeah, we looked pretty spiffy back then. The old days - harrumph!
I believe that if you were blue collar, you could dress less formally. Then again, it may have been a Southern thing. My father, a WWII vet, only wore a tie for formal occasions. For errands, movies, family outings and the like, he usually wore a short sleeve shirt (or occasionally a clean work uniform without a nametag) and never seemed underdressed.
I was born in '69 and clearly remember getting dressed to go downtown. My mother would sometimes let my sister and me wear slacks for that, but never jeans. Jeans were “play clothes”. The teenagers and young 20-somethings wore jeans downtown to be rebellious. Otherwise kids sometimes wore them to play in and adults wore them for grubby work, period. My mother always wore knit slacks and a matching top to do her housework. Some of the neighbor women still wore skirts for that.
My kindergarten clothes were almost all dresses. I could only wear slacks if it was snowing. And even in a blizzard I had to wear a skirt to church.
I have a photo of my husband on his first day of school - in a sport coat and tie!
Ooh, yes, forgot to mention - I still love skirts too, especially long flowing skirts, as long as I don’t have to wear nylons underneath. Nylons are “dressing up” to me, and I can deal with them as long as I don’t have to wear them too often.