Also, these are what were considered “sport shoes” in 1936. Ouch.
When I was a kid, in the '50s, I remember accompanying my mother on shopping trips downtown. We lived in the 'burbs, but if you wanted to go to a department store you had to go downtown. This was a few years before mom learned to drive, so we had to take a streetcar. I don’t remember what I wore, but mom always wore a dress and a hat (sometimes with a veil) and gloves. For some reason the gloves were very important. I also remember her wearing a girdle and stockings.
Believe it. My grandfather, uncles & great-grandfather were all fly fishermen, and they wore 3-piece suits almost exclusively when they fished. This continued well into the 70s.
Ward, Wally and the Beav wore their good suits to basketball and football games, IIRC.
Well, that explains Nixon wearing wingtips to the beach.
I hear you. I remember that from the late 60’s. That always pissed me off, I’m coughing up a lung and I gotta get dressed up to visit a guy who just gonna tell me to take it off anyway? :rolleyes: Awwww, ma, do I gotta? 
[aside]I miss men wearing hats. My dad, when he would come home from work, would go and put his hat on the hatrack in the hall closet - that’s when we’d get our hugs and kisses. :([/aside]
I was born in '66 - my mom dressed up to go grocery shopping, to the doctor, pretty much anywhere. Not pearls and heels dressed up, but she NEVER EVER wore jeans. I don’t even think she owned a pair of jeans until she moved to Arizona 13 years ago. And we always got dressed up when we’d be on an airplane - always.
People did dress less casually before the 1960s. However it varied with circumstance and location. E.g, farm hands dressed about the same way as today. They didn’t wear suits and ties to round up cattle.
School children generally dressed more formally, but this varied by region. In a rural school house they might dress more casually than in a city public school.
Street life photos from the 1940s and 1950s show generally more formal dress, but this also varies with location. An upscale shopping or business district in 1940s New York City shows most people wearing suits. However a blue collar residential district shows more casual dress. Here are some images:
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/00di0833.htm
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/00di0951.htm
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/00di0836.htm
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/00di0866.htm
When my mom was little, she’d cry when her father put his hat on, because that meant he was going out. He’d have to throw his hat out the door, go out, pick it up, and put it on so she wouldn’t have a fit. If he left the house without a hat, he was just going around the yard or whatever - mowing the grass, poking at the car, etc. If he put his hat on, he was leaving.
I recall seeing photos of Henry ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edision, all together on a camping trip. they all wore suits-out in the woods. My question: most suits were wool, and dry cleaning was very expensive back then-didn’t they dirty up a lot of expensive clothes back then? And, wool is HOT in the summer-i can’t imagine what watching a summer baseball game was like.
As spectators. Most teenage boys would freak if they had to were old-style basketball uniforms in public (I’ve seen boxers more modest than those shorts). Of course just imagine if they had to were the old style “bathing suits” 
.
My high-school track coach(in the mid 1990’s) always laughed when girls didn’t want to wear the track shorts our school gave us just because they are so short. He used to point out that many of these same girls have no problem wearing bikinis to the pool/beach.
He was so right!
You are mistaken. He wore a top hat all through his inauguration.
ALL WOOL FLANNEL SUITS: Smart and Comfortable for Summer
I’d hate to see what winter clothing was like back then.
Now you give a girl a pair of gym shorts and she rolls the waistband so that they ride up her ass, show as much leg as possible and completely bare the midriff.
Who said progress is bad?
I was similarly amused to see Billy Kekeiya (the President’s aide) on the new Battlestar Galactica get himself fancied up in a nice suit to go tramping around on Kobol to find the President. Everybody else is in camo and slickers and he’s in wingtips sporting a four-in-hand. 
You seem to have missed Spartydog’s Snopes link as well as my comment on it (“The important point is that Kennedy took off his top hat for his inauguration speech. That’s the only part of the ceremony most people cared about and it’s the part that became famous. The image that people took away from the inauguration is of a hatless Kennedy, even though he wore his hat for the rest of the day. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.”) and then the further exchange between RealityChuck and me on presidents not wearing hats for their inauguration speeches.
You missied quite a lot, really. Perhaps a record.
Presumably this was in the 1920’s or so? My clothing / home ec manuals from the era suggest that wool was considered cheaper to keep clean than any other material since it didn’t have to be laundered and was almost never dry cleaned (maybe once a year, right before putting it into storage for the summer / winter).
The books recommend that a wool garment should be thoroughly brushed and aired after every wearing, and sponged and pressed as necessary; this was considered quite sufficient even for a garment that was worn daily. Spots and heavy soil might require treatment with kerosine or gasoline. I have magazine articles on keeping house on a tight budget which recommend wool serge suits rather than cotton for little boys since wool is longer-lasting and saves on laundry bills, thus making up for the additional expense of the fabric!
JRB
------WARNING GRAPHIC PICTURES OF HANGINGS, ETC. samclem
It’s frightening to consider that people used to get dressed up for
events like this.
Ouch.