elmwood. At the least you should have added a “TMI” warning.
samclem
Up until, oh, the second half of the twentieth century almost, boys didn’t start wearing long pants until they were teenagers, just as young girls wore shorter skirts until they turned about, oh, sixteen or seventeen, when they could start wearing long skirts and putting their hair up. Boys wore knee-breeches or knickers. (What we now think of as “pedal pushers”).
Once for a class project, a friend and I interviewed my grandfather about growing up during the Depression. He showed us some family pictures including one of his confirmation, taken when he was 13, which would have been, oh, 1937, I think. He said he got his first pair of long pants and he thought he was big shit.
And it’s true-if you look at the pictures of him and his younger brothers, my uncles, when they were little, they had on knickers rather than regular long pants.
I went to Australia & New Zealand with People-to-People in 2000. For our New Zealand homestay we got to visit schools (boys to one, girls to another). My host brother explained that only the 7th formers were allowed to were long pants, all the other boys’ uniforms had shorts. I also noticed that the teachers were dressed more formally than at my HS. Oh and I got the impression that boys in New Zealand are alot less modest than Americans.
Indeed. The aforementioned President Harding may have been mannerly and polite, but as regards his conduct in office was quite the scalawag.
Auntbeast, I love Desk Set because I’m always fascinated by old fashioned images of computer systems.
Regarding hats, I think one reason they’ve become so rare is that you have a lot more people living in warm sections of the country, where for all but two weeks of the year, a hat is little more than an affectation. People drive more and take public transit less, so there’s little more standing outside for 20 minutes in freezing weather while you wait for the bus. What use is a hat for walking from the parking lot to the restaurant, where you’ll usually find there is no place to put it unless you’re a party of two seated at a table for four. I berue this fact, but there it is. And, much as I despise ball caps (Paul Fussell calls them “prole caps”), they have brimmed hats beat a dozen times over for practicality as you can just shove it in a pocket when you don’t want to wear it.
Some of the books I’ve read on practical life during various periods of history…
which I highly recommend, btw
Restoration London: From Poverty to Pets, from Medicine to Magic, from Slang to Sex, from Wallpaper to Women’s Rights by Liza Picard (she’s got a whole series of these books)
and
Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Judith Flanders.
…these books talk about the importance of dress when it came to matters of social standing. In fact, several governments attempted to pass sumptuary laws in order to suppress the ever-increasing middle class’s desire to dress up. From what I understand, dress was very important in dertermining who belonged where on the social ladder. I always figured that the costuming described in this message thread were the final death throes of that particular custom or set of behaviors.
I’m not sure exactly what defines social status in today’s society. Your car? Your weight? It seems to be a combination of things.
We’ve got a picture of my husband’s dad riding a camel in Egypt in the late 50s, wearing a three-piece suit.
If you don’t need to see a photo of some dead horses in 1906, then the San Francisco post-earthquake attire is not quite as obvious to me in the other photos in this collection. http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906/photos.html has links to other photos.
It’s been dying for a very long time. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd went to Muncie, Indiana, in 1924 as sociologists to get a picture of what city life in mid-America was like. This produced the classic study, Middletown, in 1929.
One quote from the book that I remember in tone (but not in precise wording, so I can’t seem to hunt it down) is a businessman talking about applicants and saying that he used to be able to tell the class of a women by her dress but now everybody seemed to dress alike.
Sumptuary laws and the class-consciousness behind them were pretty much destroyed by World War I in all western nations. The upper class has been fighting a losing battle for authority ever since. The middle class, especially in America, is so large and so dominant that it’s hard to tell who isn’t part of it at the top (i.e. the scale rises to upper middle class, without a true upper class). And rather than a working class, we have an underclass, but their dress is more often copied than shunned by the middle class. That’s the part of our world that would have been unthinkable 75 years ago more than any other aspect of style.
As for the pictures posted by elmwood, they don’t show at all that people dressed up for such events, but just that coats and ties were absolutely standard all occasion dress at the time.
[Groucho] “How that camel got into a three-piece suit, I’ll never know.” [/Groucho]
Everybody phrases the joke that way, but the original, from Animal Crackers, is: I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know."
Now why the joke would end with a thud like that, I don’t know. It’s taken from the original play script, too. Everybody likes to adjust it to “I’ll never know,” which is not only a better line, but scans better as well. So why, why, why did Kaufman write it that way? Did it play better in the content of the whole paragraph? Did it make the laugh fit in better? I don’t know. I’ll never know.
It’s a mystery, to quote Shakespeare in Love.
I’m a hat wearin’ guy - and my daughter does the same thing!
mm
An old Dragnet episode (50s version) showed stock footage of winos wearing jackets and ties. Sure they probably found them in the trash, but it shows effort.
The older I get, the more annoyed I get when people don’t dress appropriately for the occasion. I don’t care how the other customers at Target are dressed, but formal occasions call for formal dress, wheather you like it or not. At my ten year high school reunion some jackass showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, and I mean a plain white undershirt, oblivious to how stupid he looked.
Don’t e*ven *get me started. I’ve been horrified at seeing people dressed in shorts and t-shirts at weddings and funerals.
Not so much. We also have a lot more skin cancer now. One of the preventions for skin cancer? Put on a broad brimmed hat.
http://www.cdc.gov/ChooseYourCover/qanda.htm#?a
*Q: Will a hat help protect my skin? Are there recommended styles for the best protection?
A: Hats can help shield your skin from the sun’s UV rays. Choose a hat that provides shade for all of your head and neck. For the most protection, wear a hat with a brim all the way around that shades your face, ears, and the back of your neck*.
Since dressing for a fishing trip has been raised as an example a couple of times, I offer this additional piece of evidence:
http://home.triad.rr.com/jmayes/grandad_1970_fishing.jpg
The photo was taken in the summer of 1970 during a “casual” fishing trip. The gentleman in the tie is my grandfather, who was a farmer in North Carolina and I’m standing with him. My dad (the photographer) was also wearing a tie.
Thinking back to those hot, summer days in North Carolina fishing several hours in long sleeves ignites desire for a tall glass of sweet tea! 
Jammer
Don’t know if you’re a fan of opera, but if so, don’t plan to attend here in Seattle. We’re lucky some of these people remember to put on pants.
Some random pics through the decades from the NE Ohio area:
Group photo at an orphanage, 1890’s
Crowd at the 1920 World Series game
Cleveland Indians game at League Park, 1935
Pedestrians in downtown Cleveland, 1948
Crowd outside of Euclid Ave. department stores, 1954
Heh. My work system blocked the corset picture but let me view the other one.
BTW, Lissa, email me when you get a chance. I might have some donations for your museum.
Wow, Dorjän, those are really interesting, in a watch-time-progress kind of way. It seems like the first 7 (spanning 60 years) are pretty interchangeable. I’m sure if I had close-ups, I could point out differences in cut and desgin - collar width, perhaps, or width of pant leg or style of trim. But a wide shot like that shows pretty much dark, long coats, hats, dresses. All pretty uniform for 60 years.
Then the eighth picture: 1960. And it’s suddenly all different. Men with no ties, wearing shorts and polos and tees. Women with bare arms and separates instead of dresses. Everyone with bare heads. Solid colors suddenly give way to plaids, stripes and checks.
It seems that something happened in those six years between 1954 and 1960 to radically change clothing that had been pretty stable for years, at least in NE Ohio.
Gosh, no wonder my grandparents thought the world was going to heck!
He WAS dressed down. If he were more formal he’d have–okay, his man would have–tied his tie in a Full Windsor.