Heh. That’s what I wore from 1980 to 2017. Plenty of my colleagues before I retired wore less fancy clothes, even shorts, but I wasn’t even slightly out of place. I would have been if I had worn a suit.
The only time I wear a suit is when I’m conducting interviews, attending job fairs, or for specific business events. One of the side effects of COVID is that my company switched from business casual to dress for your day. So for me that means jeans and hideously ugly button down shirts but if I have to interview employees for employee relations issues I’ll switch it up to business casual.
I am just happy that I can buy high-waisted jeans! (I suffered for so many years because I just cannot wear low-waisted jeans without them falling off, but back when I shopped for clothes in-person those were also the only jeans on offer.)
But yeah, I feel like people my age (40’s) tend to dress in a wide variety of ways. Possibly we’ve all just gotten old enough now that we don’t care what other people think?
So today’s trend is for there to be fewer dominant fashions that may not have a definite lifespan. Ten years from now, people may identify 2020’s fashion as free-wheeling and more diverse than whatever the 2030’s fashions will be.
This has been going on for a lot longer than the past 10 years: One of the more dominant social trends of the post-1950s has been what I call the “Great Casualization” of society fashions, in which a country of almost 200 million people in crew cuts, suits, dresses and girdles become, in half a century, a country of 300 million in jeans, tattoos, miniskirts, and halter tops. This is one of those few social phenomenon where you can apply a date (or two) to its beginning. Some choose the introduction of the bikini, I think February, 1964, when the Beatles landed at JFK was the true kick-off of this trend, one which is continuing today.
Others might pinpoint it to the moment sexual intercourse began.
I can’t speak for women’s fashion, but a lot of the mens stuff in magazines often looks pretty slapdash. There will always be judgmental people and the webs has normalized oversharing opinions. While the newer diversity is welcome dressing nicely has its place.
Oh, no, what you’re calling “the Great Casualization” - the casual dress of one generation become the formal dress of the next - predates the Beatles by at least 200 years.
Alison Lurie puts its genesis in the Enlightenment, when writers such as Rousseau began to spread the idea that childhood was a distinct stage, that children were not miniature adults: “Childhood has it’s own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.” Previously, children were dressed in smaller versions of adult wear, as in this 1637 portrait of the future King Charles II and his siblings. But as the idea of childhood as a special phase of development spread, children began to be dressed in more comfortable, relaxed clothes. Still wearing adult styles, but looser, less fitted, more suitable for play: The Sackville Children, 1796. Note the boy’s loose lace collar, the loose frocks (and lack of stays) on the girls, and the low pumps worn by all.
As those children grew up, they often continued to wear styles influenced by their childhood, as in this portrait of Lord Byron, with his scandalous open collar (“No stock! No cravat! Why, he might as well be nude!”)
This is how the frock coat replaced the tailcoat, and black tie replaced white. Even the modern three-piece suit* began life as casual country wear, suitable for lounging or sports, as in this 1898 photo of golfers in Somerset; wearing tweed suits with plus-fours and flat caps. This is Victorian sportswear, as is this, for women. See also this 1898 ad for men’s sportswear - can you imagine donning tweed jodhpurs and a blazer to ride a bike? In one of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories, Bertie Wooster is shocked when a friend tells him he often comes to dinner in a sweater and soft collar.
I’m simplifying like crazy, of course, and mainly talking about men’s fashion, and I’ve probably got somethings wrong - I’m not an expert in costume history, just a dabbler who’s read a few books - but the trend of yesterday’s leisurewear becoming tomorrow’s formalwear has a fairly long pedigree. The Beatles and JFK were just midcentury exemplars of the phenomenon.
*Okay, yes, the fundamentals of the three-piece suit - shirt, waistcoat, coat - goes back to the 16th century. But the modern outfit really began in late 18th/early 19th century Europe, as a reaction to the elaborate silks, velvets, and lace of pre-Revolutionary French fashion.