Right - and that’s generally not a problem, assuming one’s nicest outfit isn’t a pair of cargo shorts and a tank top. There’s no reason your nicest outfit can’t be a dark pair of trousers with a plain shirt and tie, or a modest skirt and blouse.
Once again, there are few occasions anymore when your clothing makes a difference, but it just seems to me that since there ARE so few, it shouldn’t be so damn difficult to rise to the occasion.
It does seem as though standards have changed some, and I can accept that even if I don’t agree. I’ll probably stay a traditionalist until doing so draws attention to me rather than the deceased.
As an aside, has anyone else noticed that when people say, “standards have changed” they NEVER mean “they’ve gone up”?
When my ex was dying, he requested a very casual funeral. His mother was annoyed by it, but everyone honored his request. This is the only exception I would make to traditional dress. I think everyone should get the funeral they want if they specifically ask for something.
I am always kind of amazed by these funeral clothes discussions, because quite frankly, I just simply couldn’t imagine wearing anything but subdued dressy clothes to a funeral. I mean, it wouldn’t even cross my mind to do anything else. And, as I said earlier, I’m no fan of dressing up…if I never had to wear pantyhose again, I’d be thrilled.
The last visitation I went to was for a friend of my in-laws. Both my in-laws are no longer living, and my husband was out of town. He called me up when I was at work and said that this friend of the family had passed away, and would I stop by the wake that night on his behalf. I wear jeans to work, so my first thought was, “OMG, do I have time to get home and change before I run over to the funeral home?” To me, that’s just a normal reaction to hearing that you have to go to such an event, you don’t just pop by as though you were stopping to buy some milk on the way home.
I am not so quick to dismiss the dressing habits of the Victorian era re widows etc. I don’t think one needs to dress in black for life, but there is much to be said for the signals that an established dress code for mourning send. When my sister died, I longed for such a code–to be able to wear black, then gray, then lavender would have told people that I was mourning and allowances for some strange behavior (crying in the grocery store for one example) would have been made.
We are so quick to deny death and suffering in this world: grief is made sterile and therefore impotent when it is swept under the rug and not allowed expression. Everyone rallies around before the funeral and maybe the week after. After that, it’s all supposed to go away. No one can tell if you’ve suffered a loss recently: not by your clothes or any other symbol. But the feelings don’t go away after the funeral. The devastation that is endless and as arid and suffocating as a Saharan sandstorm howls away inside people for months, if not years. There is no way in modern society to tell people you are laboring under a burden of sorrow; those feelings are not to be expressed in public or alluded to in any way. People actively avoid mourners post funeral, sopping their consciences with “I don’t want to intrude.” Yeah, that’s noble.
Anyway, my point is that with a socially recognized ritual of clothing colors, as was popular in Victorian times, everyone knew and so room was made (and respect given for not just the dead, but for death). I don’t see us going back to it anytime soon, but I do wish something else had risen in its place.
Maundering on over here, but I can’t say I think that causal clothes or bright colors are the thing to do. Wakes and visitations are different–most times people are coming from work and so a variety of outfits is expected. An actual funeral or memorial service is different.
I was thinking similar with the celebrate life comment. You know what, I don’t want people celebrating my life. If you can actually be celebratory in the face of you will never hear my voice again, you will never hear me smile, you will never be able to call me up and say hi, we will never go out to lunch… then you either didn’t know me or didn’t care about me.
Expecting people to be happy at a funeral, except perhaps one that has been long coming, is frankly, expecting people to be lousy human beings. And even if the funeral has been a long time coming, relieved and grateful for the end is probably a better response that “let’s celebrate.”
Death is sad, sadness makes happiness richer and worth experiencing.
I believe this year marks the third anniversary of my grandfather’s passing, and thinking back on the funeral, I can’t remember exactly what everyone was wearing at the time. I know some people did in fact wear Aloha print, and Aloha print can look very nice, actually.
When it came to funeral attire, all I remember hearing was “we’re wearing black”.
Now, I don’t own a suit. And I don’t know who else in my family does. I’ve had no reason whatsoever for a suit.
I don’t necessarily remember what I wore, but it might have been black pants, a nice black shirt, clean white button-up shirt open over it with a nice tribal-weavy design in black down the front from shoulder, over the chest down to the hem, (white is also a mourning color in other cultures, so it worked well), and clean pure-black tennis shoes that were not exactly screaming fancy, but it was by no means bad-looking at all.
Did it look like I threw them all on at the last minute? Not at all, I did look quite nice I assure you.
I saw people dressed in nice polo shirts or Aloha print, too. Overall it was a very nice service, and I don’t remember much else when it comes to what others wore.
I agree a lot of it comes down to location, too. Maui isn’t really…suit-y, if that makes any sense.
Pants vs dresses is not what we’re talking about here. Women can wear pants and still dress nicely for a funeral. A woman’s dark suit is as attractive, respectful and dressed-up as a man’s. It’s the Dockers skorts and spaghetti-strap haltars I object to. And the blue jeans. Office casual belongs at the office on Fridays. Funerals call for being a little bit oppressed in the name of decorum and social propriety.
We had to get the word for office casual - nice blue jeans, not ripped ones. No, you couldn’t wear flip flops or halter tops. Shorts are ok if they are of the tailored type and come at least mid-thigh. All clothes need to be clean. And no pajamas.
Yes, people at my Fortune 500 sized company in the corporate offices had to be told they couldn’t come to work in their jammies.
As it happens, I attended a funeral yesterday (not a coincidence…it’s probably why I opened this thread in the first place).
There were about 100 mourners. I wore a suit – and I was the only one. (So we can answer the OP’s question in the affirmative). The male members of the immediate family, for the most part, wore ties, but mine was the only jacket.
The attire ranged from nice-but-casual (lots of jeans, and quite a few sneakers), to downright sloppy. One woman wore a bright blue mini-sundress. One man (a son-in-law of the deceased) wore an Oakland Raiders t-shirt with Mickey Mouse flipping the bird. But then he always was an idiot.
I won’t go too far down this road, because to do so would sound terribly elitist – but this was a very blue collar group. Make of that what you will.
I’m not really familiar with the distinction you’re making here. The funerals I’ve been to with one exception have been a viewing in one room of the church or funeral home, followed immediately by a memorial service in another room. The viewing room usually has pictures, videos, or other mementos of the deceased. People wander through and look at those things, stop by the open casket if they want to. When it’s time for the memorial everone goes in to the other room to site down and the coffin is closed and wheeled in to the front of the room for the memorial. If there is a graveside portion of things the pallbearers take the coffin out to the hearse and everyone follows the hearse to the cemetary. The one exception was a young man who killed himself in a particularly messy way so there was no open casket. But there was still a room with mementos for people to mill around in and chat with friends and family before the memorial service. I see one long continuous event where you apparently see multiple discrete events with different rules for each.
I think it depends on the culture and specific traditions. Generally around here, the visitation is in the evening and the funeral is the next morning. It is expected that more people will come for the visitation, and a subset of those people who are closer to the deceased will go to the actual funeral. It’s actually more of a social obligation to go to the visitation, as in my story where my husband asked me to go to a wake for someone I don’t even know, because he thought our family should.be represented there. But it would not be the norm for me to go to the funeral in that circumstance.
Since the wake is at night and often during the week, eleanorigby is right that people often just go in their work clothes. I wouldn’t because my work clothes are far too casual. But if I wore, say, decent pants (not jeans) and a button-down shirt, I probably would just go in that, unless they were really wild colors or sonething.
Religion plays a big deal in what happens as well. If you have a big Catholic mass for a funeral, you have all the “church overhead” of proper behavior. That’s different than a secular service in a room at the funeral home. And the extent to which you have “church overhead” is going to depend on the formality of the parish in which the service is held.
But if you are having a Catholic mass, you have the visitation at one place (the funeral home the night before) and the funeral takes place in the church, followed immediately by graveside, if people choose, and often that is followed by some sort of lunch. At least, I’ve never heard of a Catholic church letting you do the visitation at the church itself.
Yeah, I’m in the celebrate life boat. I hope that my funeral is full of kids running amok, family singing my favorite songs, and guests wearing clothes that make them feel happy, no matter what that might be.
This too appears to be changing, and I don’t think it’s bad at all. I’ve been to two grandparent funerals that had viewing and Mass in the same church. In the first instance it was a modern church, with some meeting rooms attached. In one of these larger rooms the viewing was held. Outside the room and spilling into the vestibule of the church was where the memorial pictures were displayed. Then we flowed right into the church where Mass was held. Afterward, lunch was served in a larger room which had a catering kitchen.
In the second instance, it was a more traditional gothic-like church, but it had an enormous vestibule. There was no viewing, the deceased having been cremated prior to the Mass. The photos were in this area, and again we just moved into church for Mass. It was an evening service, and a dinner was held in the adjacent parish hall afterward.
Both services were very nice and frankly being one of the family, it was a lot nicer in that everything happened at one time. The whole exhausting public mourning business wasn’t spread out over several days; it was all taken care of in one seamless event.
And … thank you, Guin.
And … ** silenus**: please. No Nazis here. Just pleas for people to be respectful.
That is cool. The three day events for a great aunt you hadn’t seen in years but need to attend for the sake of your own grandmother get wearing. For both the family and for the “support mourners” who generally have busy lives of their own. It was different when you had cousins driving in from out of state and there wasn’t the easy contact between spread out families - when funerals and weddings were mini family reunions.
I don’t think you’re being elitist at all. Many years ago, when my grandmother died, one of the people attending her funeral was the husband of one of my cousins. The guy was a cement finisher – blue collar all the way. He owned only one suit, the one he graduated high school in. It was a brown sharkskin with a white shirt and brown-and-blue striped tie. It was about 10 years out of date, but it was a suit and it fit and he wore it because it showed respect for the deceased and her loved ones. What irks me is the “reverse snobbery” of the redneck set. It’s as if they are saying, “I’m an ignorant peasant and I like it that way, so fuck you and your uppity neckties.” I have 'em in my extended family, too, and my response is, “No, Abner, fuck you and your fake cowboy way.” But at least they have an excuse. As for city folk who actually have suits and refuse to wear them, well, there’s just no excuse for bad manners.
The flip side of that being, it’s not about me, and that being the case, why would my clothes matter that much. I’m sorry you would rather people stay home than be there to support someone and pay their respects.
The problem is that you are “paying your respects” and to a lot of people, dressing in “traditional funeral appropriate wear” is a big part of the “respect” part. Not to everyone, obviously - and if you know that this is a “jeans and sneakers at a funeral crowd” you don’t need to dress up. But if you don’t, why would you want to pay your respects with dress that someone may see as disrespectful?
You aren’t being very supportive of me if you make my grandmother irate. Now I have to deal with my grandmother’s grief and her “I can’t believe you have such trashy friends” comments.
There’s a word for people who don’t give a shit about social standards. We call them “boors”. There have always been plenty of them around.
The U.S. is a very large country, and social standards have always varied from region to region. However, as a whole, the country (I’m speaking of the U.S., but suspect the same is true of most of Western society) has also been getting more and more disdainful of formality in general over the past few decades. Acceptable attire, language, and behavior for things like funerals and weddings (and job interviews, court appearances, jury duty, dinner parties, nightclubbing, attending church or school, whatever) has definitely been trending toward less formality and more “Who gives a shit?” for a long time. And when “Who gives a shit?” becomes more and more the “standard” (so to speak) and any attire is considered appropriate for any occasion, then “boor” becomes a word without a referent. (Which is probably why it’s a word very rarely heard anymore.) It’s what happens when social standards disintegrate without being replaced by new ones; ultimately, some bozo shows up at his grandmother’s funeral wearing flip-flops and a “Bite Me” T-shirt, and if dear old Aunt Sadie says anything to him he says “I can wear whatever I want! You’re not the boss a me!” or something equally pithy.
It’s not the end of civilization. Not by itself, anyway. But civilization does begin with civility, and civility is merely another social standard, so the cumulative effect becomes unpleasant to watch as the trend continues. When manners decline, civil society follows.