As was stated earlier, that started with Queen Victoria, and no virginal symbolism was intended. No one would have questioned her!
I’ve also heard it was a way to show you had money. Many brides just wore their best Sunday dresse for their weddings, but wearing a white gown shows you had enough money to buy a new, impractical gown for the day. Unlike a nice church-type dress, you weren’t going to wear this one again.
The scene: A stone tower by the shore in Narragansett, Rhode Island.
The players: The bride and groom’s family, all of WASP and Irish-Catholic extraction.
The atmosphere: About as “New England” as it gets.
The bride’s cousin wore a fancy sari and the cousin’s husband wore one of those tunic outfits that Indian men wear to formal occasions.
As maid of honor, my main duty turned out to be answering questions about these two.
“Are they Indian? They don’t look Indian.” “They’re not.”
“Have they been to India recently or something.” “Nope.”
“Are they, like, Hindu converts?” Nope.
“Do they have any connection at all to India or Indian things?” “Not that anyone knows of.”
“Then why the hell are they wearing that?”
That was 12 years ago, and it still remains a mystery.
The outfits were appropriate in terms of level of dressiness for the occasion, but inappropriate anyway. They looked like ridiculous attention seekers. If they were Indian, they would have been fine. Everyone would have just thought “hey, nice sari!” and thought no more about it.
No, we just expect guests to dress as requested on the invitation. The guests in the cases I described weren’t offending Catholicism; they were offending the bride and groom and their families. And good taste too, of course.
I once wore a suit to a friend’s wedding - I had some business thing beforehand, and hadn’t bothered to change. Boy, did everyone laugh. Said I was trying to upstage the groom.
My mother attended a funeral at her church. The daughter of one of the ministers had been murdered. She knew the parents well, they were devastated of course.
Thank goodness for funeral home assistants. Apparently some of the deceased friends showed up in ratty attire, although nothing could be done about it at that point. But the guys left their backwards facing ball caps on, and the director could lean over and whisper to “Take off your hats!” And they did.
I have a friend who is a professional violinist. He plays in a quartet, as well as taking solo gigs. He has a full array of formal and semi-formal wear for day and evening. He once get an invitation to a wedding that said “formal attire,” on it. He decided against wearing white tie and tails, because he didn’t think most people actually meant that when they said “formal,” because he didn’t see guests dressed like that very often at occasion where he played, even when he was specifically asked to wear tails. So he wore a tux and black tie, with a striped vest for a little whimsy.
He got accosted by the bride when he got there, and accused also of essentially trying to upstage the groom. He didn’t even bother to try to explain that a tux wasn’t even the most formal of attire. He went back to his car, drove to the nearest store-- a Walmart, or something, bought a straight tie, and returned. Nothing more was said.
He told me it was one of those weddings where the groom was in black tie and vest, while the groomsmen were in colored ties and cummerbunds that matched the dresses of the bridesmaids they escorted-- whose dresses were identical, except for being different colors.
I asked what the other men were wearing, and he said mostly business suits, except for a couple of clods in dockers and sports coats, and the groom’s father, who was in a military dress uniform. He learned something about what some people consider “formal.”
Me, I once got lectured for wearing regular work clothes on “casual Friday.” All the jeans I owned (and this is still true), are the loose-fitting type with cargo pockets, and at the time were all pretty worn. Also, the dress code in this place wasn’t very strict, so everyday work clothes could be dockers and a Polo shirt, or a broomstick skirt and a very casual sweater. It wasn’t called “denim Friday”; it was called “casual Friday.” But, I went out and bought a pair of nice Levis, that weren’t loose-fit, carpenter, or cargo. Wore them to work every goddam Friday. Never any other time. They weren’t as comfortable as most of my other work clothes.
I’m far from dapper, but even I know that ain’t formal wear; that’s a high school prom. :smack: 
To be fair, it wasn’t so much criticism as “Dude, what’s with the suit? You’re already married!”
Israeli weddings are very informal. I wore a suit at mine, but at my sister’s wedding, the only people in jacket and ties were guests from abroad. Showing up in jeans and a nice shirt isn’t considered disrespectful or low-class - it just means that you’ve come to have fun.
No, it was criticism. From the way he told it, the bride was mad. She considered a tux some kind of wedding uniform (probably would have had the groom wear one even if they’d gotten married at 11am), and he was sort of an audience member who showed up in the costume of one of the actors. “This is a serious show, not The Rocky Horror Picture, dude!” was what it came down to, I think.
I was talking about my story, not yours.
Forgive me for thinking you were; the comment came after you quoted my post.
Most embarrassing for me was wearing a 3-piece business suit to an out-of-town job interview. Both the regional sales manager and the branch manager that interviewed me were dressed in cowboy boots, jeans and work shirts. I was hired but they insisted I wear blue jeans to work.
Yep, if there’s a group of people that definitely should not be in church it’s the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the punk rockers. Jesus surely did not preach to those people, he told us that the only people who needed saving were the ones who dressed up on Sundays. 
Anyway, I have a couple of inappropriately dresses stories, the first was the summer where I worked at my friend’s dad’s billboard business off and on. The one fulltime guy there had a court appearance in the morning for his divorcee proceedings and bragged in the afternoon that he wore some kind of inappropriate T-shirt and his green army pants and was lippy to the judge. He was one of those crazy “Libertarian” types who said that he wanted the government to stay out of his trailer, but mostly he just didn’t want the cops raiding his crops.
The second was when I got out of college and was looking to get my first job. I was looking to do PR and I had an interview with this small Northshore firm. I had a suit but my thoughts were that I wanted to save that suit for a second interview should that occur. So I had brown slacks and a jacket that matched it and a green tie. I thought it looked really good and I went into the interview, talked to the owner of the firm who was dressed casually but had the makeup caked on and the bright red lipstick. The only other person in the office was a high school kid who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans so when I did the interview and I thought I did well. She then had me write a couple of press releases and I thought that I did well there also – I consider myself a good writer (even though it doesn’t always show here) and crafting press releases was something I liked to do. This whole process took a big chunk of my afternoon and then she called me back into her office for feedback and critiqued my writing. I remember that I made one mistake, possibly writing the date or something, and she pointed that out and I tired to make a joke out of it but that seemed to fly right over her head. Everything seemed OK to me until the tone of the conversation shifted when she said “You don’t want to work here.”
Huh-what?
“You don’t want to work here,” she repeated (she said this several times, in fact). “Just look at the way you’re dressed. Don’t ever wear khakis to an interview.”
She went on and on about the khakis and yeah, I guess she had a point there, but she kept talking about them and then finally said “I don’t think I can pay what you’re looking for anyway. You should interview at a firm downtown.”
Ah OK, it’s a one woman show and she’s cheap. I got it. I did explain that I just got out of school and I’m looking to get my foot in the door anywhere I could but that didn’t fly. Obviously, if she didn’t want me working there then I wouldn’t want to be there but it really was an odd situation.
I did have one takeaway though and I wore my suit to interviews after that.
This seems to be SOP in this college town. Any Saturday night you can sit downtown and watch the girls teeter by in their high heels and skimpy dresses, accompanied by their boyfriends in T-shirts and cargo shorts.
I hate that I even know this, but apparently Jaden Smith (son of actor Will Smith) attended the wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West dressed in a white Batman suit. Talk about attention-whoring.
Brand new one at church, just this past Sunday. A lady came in wearing pink stretchy pants. Stretchy pants are not unusual these days, even in church. However, this lady was, ahem, of considerable circumfrence around the hips, and she apparently got some of those LuluLemon pants that were recalled because they become see-through when worn. You could easily see her underwear showing through the pants. It was black (or some dark color, at least), and it appeared to be bikini cut. I hope she was blissfully unaware of her status as a walking wardrobe malfunction, because the alternative is that she just didn’t care that strangers could describe her panties in exacting detail.
I’ve worn stuff at various times in my life I would at least think twice about now. For most of college I wore a SS tunic/uniform coat every day and never thought twice about it. It was the 70s at a state university and the look was more like an escapee from Clockwork Orange than racist. I never wore it at the YMHA or any place like that; I wasn’t totally insensative. But it fit great, looked kick ass cool on the bike, and was comfortable year round.
Don’t know if I would wear it today (luckily its way too small for me today so its a moot point) - and I’m not so sure I’m happy about that. But that gets into more a GD than an opinion.
(I do wear my current colors to and from worship. But I iincluded a patch saying “These ARE my church clothes” so I figure congregations can consider themselves warned.)
My old boss used to be part of the interview committees for various high-level positions at our institution. I would always ask what kind of shoes the women wore because that says a lot about someone; he would always say he’s a guy and didn’t notice such a thing. Come to find out one of the female applicants for a CFO-level position wore four-inch red stilettos. In the winter. In New Hampshire. I don’t know that that’s why she didn’t get the job, but snow boots would have been more forgivable than that.
Matt, you would be very disappointed in some of the people I represent at court. Heck, sometimes, I am.
I occasionally act as “duty counsel,” or in other words, the lawyer of the day for anybody who wants one. Simply put, I am hired by Legal Aid to represent those criminally-accused who show up to court without a lawyer. And some of my clients dress … interestingly, shall we say. Ripped jeans, T-shirts with various inappropriate slogans (yep, the F-word has appeared a few times), women wearing sweat pants with things like “Juicy” embroidered on the butt. Regardless of what they are wearing, however, I do my best to represent them all.
Still, I had to give props to one client, whom I spotted arriving from the courthouse lobby. He arrived at court on his bike, in a plain T-shirt, bike shorts, and sandals. He also had a backpack. He parked and locked his bike, and his first stop inside the courthouse was the men’s room. He emerged in grey trousers, white collared dress shirt and tie, and shoes and socks. After his matter was dealt with (and I could tell that the judge and the Crown looked favourably upon him–I like to think it was because of because of my arguments, but I have to realize that it was also because of the effort he made to look good for court), he went back into the men’s room, changed back into his biking gear, and went on his way. A lesson for other accuseds, perhaps.
Never. If I recall my Bosworth correctly, one is to stay seated, while shouting “Whore of Babylon!”
