I’m going to suggest that the audience here, being older than average, will have some skewed ideas vs society at large. As a trivial example, notions of attractiveness or fitting in matter less to retirees than they do to teens. At whatever SES, fewer 70yo own formal clothes that still fit than those same people did when age 40ish.
I’ll also suggest that the epidemic of obesity has a large influence. The definition of what’s “comfortable enough” changes a lot if you’re 50 or 100 or 150 lbs heavier than your underlying body might prefer. As well, despite the progress against “body shaming” and all the rest, I suspect a greater percentage of the significantly obese vs not will come to a conclusion like “Oh, hell, they don’t make good-looking stuff in my size anyhow, so why bother?”
Lastly COVID has really altered the cultural attitudes to looks and dress. As several folks have said upthread, after WFH for a couple years even getting dressed at all feels like excess unnecessary work.
This thread reminds me of a comedian who was joking about how he was in his 30s and did not dress sharply. “I think it’s time I stop wearing superhero clothes around the house. I was admonishing my twelve year old son… but then I noticed we were both wearing the same Superman pajamas. I said he had to go to his room, so he turned around and gave his cape a sarcastic flip. So I turned around and gave my cape a sarcastic flip…”
I don’t mind if people wear athletic wear and think yoga pants look really good on women. What is bad is not joggers as such, but mismatching these in a slovenly way that sometimes suggests “I’ve given up”. When I dress up a little I usually get a lot of positive comments; it has become rarer. When I wore a tie at work I sometimes got criticized by co-workers who dressed more slovenly than I did (but I did not judge them for this, actually say or suggest that, or care what they wore). Essentially they wanted to say they dressed in a laid back way because they were laid back people who cared not for fashion. Except they were not remotely laid back, and they certainly cared when people dressed even slightly differently or perhaps a little better than they did.
I’m not quite retired, but close, and, anecdata, i care more about attractive and fitting in now than i did as a teen. I am more aware of the benefits of both, i think.
Also, as a teen, looking attractive within the range that was easy for me meant attracting unwanted and uncomfortable male attention. Now it mostly just garners me more respect.
I wear all black because I like it. Neither dressy nor sloppy. Though someone yelling, Aren’t those the same pants you wore yesterday? Is rude. I have many black pants!
Everything we do sends a message. It’s the not caring part that matters, for this thread.
You’re talking about people who dress specifically in some sort of oppositional defiant manner, but that doesn’t include me, or, I think, the people wearing shorts and t-shirts everywhere they go. They wear that because it’s what they wear, AFAICT. Them and most of their tribe.
You’re confusing self-centred with selfish. I’m the former, not the latter. It’s only if my clothing actually had an impact on others, and I continued anyway, that it would slide into selfishness.
I have that luxury because none of my adopted aesthetics are in any way an imposition on anyone else, or in any way anyone else’s business.
Not that I dress for ease and comfort, mind you. I dress for looks.
Only the same legal limits that exist for anyone. And so, they don’t matter to me, specifically. Other than that, there’s nothing to concern me in “transgressing”.
If I transgress anything, it’s usually by being slightly more formal or otherwise more fashionably dressed than the people around me.
I don’t know how it works where you are, but here, that doesn’t earn me more than occasionally a little friendly ribbing, or a compliment. Neither of which motivate me in my clothing choices afterwards.
Or a lot of denial by those who want others to think that they don’t.
Seriously to me it is a simple acknowledgement of what it means to be a human social creature. We do not well exist in isolation; we exist in relation to, in context with, others including strangers in situational dependent manners.
At some level every normal human past an early developmental stage is aware of those relations and contexts and chooses accordingly.
I agree with this. Yes, when i wear shorts and t-shirts, i think I’ll be in a venue where that’s not a serious problem. But I’m not making a statement (unless the image on the t-shirt makes a statement, which it sometimes does.) I’m wearing something that’s easy to wear and not uncomfortably warm.
Recently, I’ve discovered that i really enjoy a chest pocket, and i often upgrade the t shirt to a Hawaiian shirt or similar. But that’s definitely for me, not for you.
I think most people are extremely sensitive to more subtle class distinctions in clothing than “suit/no suit,” and those distinctions are still around. Also, more importantly, class is still around and camouflaging it, however poorly, helps nothing.
I’m well aware of these relations and contexts. But they don’t place any restrictions on my clothing choices - I don’t work in an industry or locale with dress codes. So in what way are my clothing choices not driven purely by my aesthetics?
Being male I didn’t have to deal with the unwanted attention as a teen, but overall my own experience as a near-retiree echoes your own. I both recognize and value the benefits, whereas I did not do much of either as a youth.
I live in a very casual zip code. But casual is not sloppy; people are very style- and snob-conscious. How I’m dressed affects how I’m treated. And to some small extent affects how I behave.
I’ve told this story before, but I was in the IT biz from about age 40-50. I lived then in a different city than I do now. My work outfit was shiny dress shoes, nice dress slacks, and a dress shirt no tie. My weekend outfit was cargo shorts & a polo in sweltering summer versus heavy duty pants, flannel shirt, sweater, and leather jacket in the freezing winter.
Going into the same stores or restaurants on M-F I was treated very differently vs on the weekend. I showered and shaved each day. I’m the same person of the same age regardless of weekday / weekend. Just the clothes changed. The difference was palpable.
Class distinctions are definitely still around. But the most common clothing styles around at the moment are not broad class indicators, the way they have been in the past. Jeans, khaki shorts and yoga pants aren’t class-bound.
You are projecting something about who you are to others that you are comfortable projecting. It is your aesthetic and it is your public image that declares to the world who you are.
Curious, do wear the same sets of clothes when the plan for the day is a definite to be inside all day being seen by no one, maybe organizing for taxes?
FWIW I personally struggle with my own self-contradiction - realizing that I am vain enough to not want to be seen as vain. My wife’s line is that she spends all our vanity dollars. I realize that I am on some level choosing to send a message about myself and who I want to think I am by being this way, about what I do and do not care about.
It has I think become a status symbol to eschew obvious status symbols. Better the subtle ones that peacock only to a smaller target audience. Grossly advertising your class is gross.
But that’s not why I do it. And that was the question in the OP. I do it because I like how I look in my clothes, and how my hair looks, etc… That is all.
Question for you (for everyone, really) - how long does it take you to get dressed? And how long do you look at yourself in the mirror when you do so? I could get dressed in 2 minutes, but the looking at myself in the mirror makes that at least 10, most days.
Yes.
I’m married with kids, I’m never seen by no-one all day.
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Because one subtext of the debate here is about whether individuals are more important than communities, or vice versa. And secondly, is there a level at which individual choices have no effect at all upon the world they live in?
I would argue that there is a balance to the first which we no longer even have any way of discussing, the weight is so skewed to the side of individualism. I would also, even more strongly, re the second, that there is no such level on this plane of reality.