BTW, I looked for a previous thread, but couldn’t find one.
I was watching an old movie last night, if you must know it was “A Family Affair”, a US movie that was released in 1937, and I couldn’t help but notice that everyone was in formal dress all the time. I assume the movie was suppose to represent how people really lived in the late 30’s, but did men wear suits and ties, including jackets, all the time around the house? I know that Levis’ jeans weren’t popularized yet, but other than pajama’s I don’t think I saw them where anything else during the entire movie. Now the protaganist was a judge, so he was certainly upper middle class and educated if that matters.
So, did movies of the day reflect how people really acted and dressed… or was it more the case that the standards in the movies those days were much higher than what people normally did in the privacy of their own homes. Anybody know?
Yes, if it’s in the movies, it must be real–that’s why everybody here in Decatur is walking around in Jedi robes…
Assuming that my memories of my two sets of grandparents from the 1950s and 1960s are probably representative of their lives when they were young adults in the 1920s and 1930s, I’d say that yes, people tended to be a bit more formal in dress. None of them would have been caught dead slopping around the house in an old bathrobe. It was nice housedresses or pantsuits for the Grandmas, and nice shirts and slacks for the grandpas, but not a jacket and tie in the house, necessarily. (We’re talking “middle middle class” folks here.)
Also, it probably varied a lot more by social class. Your Trailer Park Trash probably always did have a lower standard of sartorial taste than your Fifth Avenue Rich People.
Also, bear in mind that many of the more informal items of clothing hadn’t been invented yet. Besides jeans, which you already mentioned, things like Bermuda shorts and t-shirts, alligator polo shirts, sweats, etc. So, back then, if you wanted to get sloppy around the house, it was undershirts and pants (possibly with no belt, or with suspenders only) for the guys, and cheap cotton wrappers (that’s a “housecoat”, for you younguns) with no girdle or brassiere, for the gals.
Dress was much more formal then. A middle class man could find himself in a tie from dawn to dusk, taking it off only when at home without company. Hell, men in this period often wore ties to play golf or go fishing.
I come from a family that, at this time, were laborers. They dressed during the day in trousers and long sleeved shirts. Going out in the evening or to church meant breaking out the suit and tie again.
What my grandfather wore to deliver beer would be more formal than what I wear today to my white collar job.
And I see that I missed including the point I really wanted to make, which is that nowadays we have clothes that are halfway in between “sloppy” and “nice”. Back then for Grandma it was either “a nice housedress” or “a cheap slutty-looking wrapper”. There wasn’t any middle ground, as embodied by something like sweats, or jeans.
I know this isn’t exactly “around the house” but pictures of people in the stands at baseball games in that era show men in shirts and ties, women in dresses (not party dresses, just regular daytime dresses).
In general casual wear was more formal at the time, but it was still probably exaggerated a bit for some movies. Come to think about it, I know very few women who dress like Rachel, Monica and Phoebe do around the house today.
In the early eighties, I worked for the Thermopolis, Wyoming Oil and Gas Office of the US Geological Survey, which was (I was told) the oldest continuously-operating USGS office west of the Mississippi. In 1983, our branch of the USGS (which had become the Minerals Management Service by then) was merged into the Bureau of Land Management. When we were cleaning out the basement in Thermop, we found a box of photographs taken in the thirties showing inspections of oil and gas sites. (One of them is posted here.)
The thing that immediately strikes you is how many of the men in the photos are wearing jackets and ties, even out on field work, standing in the mud on a pad next to an oil derrick. I would estimate it to be about 80%. All government men always wore ties, but also most of the company hands, including those actually performing physical labor. These weren’t posed shots, either, just pictures taken on normal inspection visits.
I love looking at those old pics. I wear a tie to work every office day (not in the field, though!) - I’m the only guy around here who does. I’m considered somewhat of an oddball.
Thanks for the great feedback dopers! BTW, I forgot to mention the hats… almost all of the men in those days seemed to wear hats, but that was a fashion thing that’s long gone I presume!
Remember documentaries and still images of baseball gamnes from the 1940s and 1950s? The crowd, even on hot summer days, consisted msotly of men and boys wearing suits (often three piece), ties and fedoras.
Back in the early 1980s, yhe family that lived across the street from me when I was gfrowing up were very traditional when it came to dress. They wore informal “casual Friday” clothes at home, but whenever they went out they were formally dressed, even if it was a trip down the street to the grocery or McDonalds.
Overall, though, I think people tend to be a bit more formal with their dress now than in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Then, outside of work, jeans were the rule. In a blue-collar city with a huge hesher/groder population like where I grew up, pictures from my high school yearbook – and this was a very selective school, where only 30% of all applicants got in – wore black concert or radio station t-shirts. Now … yeah, there’s the underwear-showing fad, but I see far more kids wearing khakis, polp shirts, and so on than during the wonder years.
Most definitely the 30s and 40s were a tie around the house type of situation. As a journalist I come across many old photos in the newspaper morgue from that period, and even the candids have women in dresses and men in suits and ties (although around the house, a man might have put on a cardigan).
One of the best sources for clothing information, I have found is popular fiction of the time. Take a quick read of an author like Rex Stout and he will discribe exactly what the characters are wearing down to the design on the silk tie.
Everyone wore hats back then. In fact, hats were common on men until the '60s (it’s often said that John F. Kennedy’s conspicuous hat-lack is what led to the downfall of the hat as a male fashion statement, although I don’t vouch for the truth of that “fact”).
To add to the chorus, my grandfather wore suit and tie all of the time (and hats, when outdoors), unless engaged in an activity requiring specialized wear. My father wore suits most of the time, but gave up hats ~1960.
But I really meant to add just a note from a transitional era (aren’t they all?); in the corporate business world of twenty or so years ago, we all wore suits and ties to the office, but ditched the jacket once there. The well established etiquette was that if you were going down to the little store in the lobby to purchase gum, cigarettes, whatever, you needn’t don your jacket, but if you were going to the bank lobby for even as simple an act as handing a teller your paycheck to deposit, the jacket went on.
I’d love to see hats and dresses come back in style. More clothes=fun!
At any rate, I have pictures of my relatives from that time-most of the women were wearing cotton dresses and the men had on button down shirts, pants and vests. (Not ties-since most of them were farmers). On my mom’s side, they raised chickens and worked in the coke plants in Greensburg. The ladies wore dowdy but clean housedresses and babushkas.
Kind of a hijack. While in high school in the early 70’s, my creative writing class was given an assignment to write an episode of a then cancelled television show. I chose Leave It To Beaver. In the final scene, Wally and Beaver are holding cups to the bedroom wall listening to Ward and June. They hear June say “Ward, Ward, Oh Ward, you don’t have to wear a tie when you take your boxers off”. Wally then tells Beaver “The last time dad took off his tie Mom got fat then a stork brought you.” Beaver looks at Wally, goes and pulls a magazine from under his mattress and sits on his bed. “Wally you really are a goof. I got this from Gus the fireman, its called Horny Teen Babes, come here, I need to show you something”. Wally sits next to Beaver. looks in the magazine, and has a sudden look of shock and surprise. Cue music, fade to black.
Yes, in the 30s all white collar men wore ties whenever in public. Lower-class laborers didn’t always (and wore cloth hats instead of fedoras and the like). There are even pictures of people selling apples during the depression wearing coats, hats, and ties. Even teenagers wore suits all the time.
One nice indication of the mindset was in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” Gary Cooper is wearing just a shirt when some people come to call (looking much like someone would dress nowadays). One of his aides says, “You can’t meet people like that” and has him put on a dressing gown and scarf.
I was born in 1959 in West Virginia. My memories suggest that men wore suits to work if their job permitted, and away from work as much as possible. My short-order-cook dad used to put on a suit to back the car out of the garage, circa 1965, before mom drove to work in the morning. He’d of course put on on apron at work.
Admittedly, this is all local – a colleague of mine (about ten years older) from Detroit once claimed his auto-plant-foreman dad almost never wore suits, except to church and the like.
I suspect an implicit community code (based on station) competing with an individual desire to overcome same? (Seasoned with a simple desire to look good?) I dunno – I’m rambling.
My maternal grandfather would not leave his house without wearing a suit, vest, tie and hat, even if all he was going to do was sit on the front porch. He would remove the jacket to work in his garden or to mow the lawn, but the hat, vest and tie stayed in place. He died in 1953, so all my memories of him date from the mid 1940s to his death. His mode of dress was common back then. This was in a small Texas town, just south of Dallas.
