See, but this alone distinguishies you from many others on this board who won’t wear slacks and a tie to a wedding. You know what is acceptable in certain situations and you do wear dressy clothes when the occasion merits it. Dressing up is not just about the style and the level of dressiness, it’s about fit as well. So many people wear ill-fitting dressy clothing it’s pathetic (in Pittsburgh, at least).
I dress in slacks and sweaters for work (always - winter it’s cold, summer it’s a/c’d to the max). It’s embarrassing to dress better than your boss in such a business casual get up, but it’s happened before. Footwear in particular people seem lax on.
For plays and the theater I take the time to put on a dress and heels. I always give dirty looks to people who are in dirty, worn-out thrift store shirts and stained, ill-fitting slacks at the theater. No, these people aren’t badly off since they snarf multiple glasses of wine; they just choose to look like bums and are general eyesores.
I’ll dress up when it’s appropriate, but I like to look nice in general. We have an extremely casual dress code at work, and our senior manager (female) comes in wearing sweatpants and a baseball cap on a regular basis, but the only time I’ll wear sweatpants in public is if I’m going to the shop around the corner. Makeup for me is an everyday thing. For work I’ll wear a comfortable skirt and top, or a casual dress.
I rarely wear heels though. Heels are for weddings and funerals. Maybe the occasional night out.
I enjoy dressing up occasionally. I don’t wear skirts a whole lot (though I wore a dress today), because the rules sort of change when I do. I like to sprawl when I sit down, with my legs crossed or otherwise spread apart and relaxed. I can’t do that in most skirts, which is a little irritating (though when I’m at home and there’s no one else around I often say “fuck it” and sit how I want anyway). But I do like looking pretty, and clean up pretty nicely, if I do say so myself.
As for shoes, I like heels, but again, only occasionally, and only if I’m not going to be walking a whole lot. They’re cute, but even the most comfortable heels just aren’t going to feel good at the end of the day.
My boyfriend LOVES dressing up. He wears a button-down with jeans, a suit jacket and dress shoes every day. He wears ties quite often. He’ll sometimes scold me for wearing hoodies and crappy jeans in public.
But yeah, whenever I look at photos from the past, particularly 19th century photos, I’ll see these men and women in hot, desert climates with full suits and long sleeves on and I’ll think “you people are out of your minds.” I’m fairly certain I’d have been miserable if I’d been forced to wear all that clothing in 90+ degree heat. (Or I’d have said “the hell with it” and stripped to my underwear…and gotten arrested for indecent exposure.)
I’ve had people say to me “Oo you’re all dressed up” and I go huh? I’d be wearing a basic black dress or just a skirt and top. I don’t think of this as “dressed up;” I call it “basic everyday looking decent.” For myself only. I not only don’t judge anyone else, I don’t care what anyone else wears as long as they’re happy with it. I just like to look nice every time I leave the house. It’s an Italian thing.
For me, “dressed up” would be something extra-fancy worn to a special evening event, something you’d never wear in everyday life. With special accessories, makeup, etc. that are too fancy for weekdays. Everybody has their own repertoire and favorite position somewhere along the casual to dressy scale. To understand mine, it has to be calibrated pretty far toward the soignée zone.
Also, I live in the Washington, DC area, and DC style also tends toward the spiffy, compared to much of the continent’s interior. My girlfriend is from Pittsburgh and tells me it’s considered normal there to go shopping in one’s pajamas. But she likes looking nice as much as I do, and here people don’t look at us like we’re weird for it. I’ve been on the other side. When I was in college in the 1970s, I wore blue jeans every single day year in, year out. All my friends did too. I had exactly one classmate who dressed fashionably, and we all thought she was a little weird for looking so nice when she was only a college sophomore. That spiff stuff was for old people.
Panty hose is the item that breaks the deal for me to dress better than the lower edge of business casual. I will wear it for a job interview, and that’s about the only time.
This is kind of a random tangent, but I recently had to do some work with our college yearbooks, creating a display of pictures across the decades going from 1911 to 2011. It was amazing to see how beautifully coiffed and put together the young ladies and gentlemen were back in the day (pretty much up until the late 1960s) compared to today. Starting around 1969, people started looking much looser and sloppier (there were loads of really gnarly goat-beards among the male students in the 1970s) and standards have never really recovered.
When my dad went to college (circa 1970) there were actual dress codes for students. Except for phys ed classes (which Dad was exempt from as a veteran) men were required to were a dress shirt, slacks, and tie (or a full suit) to all classes. Women had to wear a skirt or dress (again except for PE). There were also grooming requirements. He only went for 1 semester, but the dress code would’ve been gone by the time he would’ve graduated. Some of my classmates from high school went to bible colleges with similiar dress codes.
I do it, but I don’t like it, and I wish I could go to these events without having to dress up. One of the synagogue services I was most comfortable at was one I went to in Hawaii, where I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I wasn’t the only one doing that. I wish our synagogue was like that.
If I were ruler of the world, I would pass a law that it is appropriate to wear khakis and an untucked polo shirt to any event, with severe legal penalties (involving being sent to a dress-up colony in Siberia) for anyone who says otherwise.
That’s true – I had forgotten about that. This school had a dress code until sometime in the '70s (possibly 1970, which would correspond with the decline in grooming I saw).
Religious services in warm areas are the best. I wandered into a Latin mass while on vacation once and stayed just to hear the Latin - and I was dressed like everyone else.
I like the idea of a dress up colony though
My gripe is still mainly those who look slovenly. People can look slovenly in a suit even, it’s just less likely. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Well tailored jeans and a properly fitted tshirt may be ultra casual but they look tasteful and nice.
Part of the reason I got season tickets to the symphony was so I’d have a reason to wear gowns/an updo/a shawl/and so forth.
