There is a vast chasm between “no white before/after (date)” sticklers, and folk who take “come as you are” to extremes.
Heck - when I was young (and pretty fit), I used to go days at a time w/o donning a shirt. At some point in my 30s, my wife persuaded me that other people weren’t particularly interested in seeing my bare torso. Wearing at least a tank top isn’t too much to ask. Nor is it too much to ask to call ahead and ask if there are any dress expectations or what others are wearing.
Reasonably clean, reasonably well fitting jeans/Dockers and button down shirt/polo in reasonably good repair will pretty much any situation. And unless you are on the beach or at the pool, leave the flip flops at home.
IME, when people dress extremely sloppily/casually, and proclaim, “You should appreciate my personality/opinions, instead of being uptight about my appearance” - well, more often than not, their opinions/personality aren’t anything to write home about. Sure, you don’t entirely judge a book by its cover - but slovenly/inappropriate dress CAN be considered as 1 initial sign of an individual’s consideration/respect for others. Like starting off with 1 strike against you.
Oh sure… I’m just saying that if someone has died, and there’s a funeral being held, it’s nice to dress up for the sake of the family and your respect for the deceased. That ceremony isn’t about you, it’s about the family and friends of the deceased, and dressing up as much as you can manage shows your respect for them. The actual form of that dressing up isn’t the important part- if your “Sunday best” is a clean polo and dockers, then that’s perfectly fine by my lights for you to wear to something like a funeral or wedding.
But if you own a suit, and just can’t be arsed to wear it, that’s a different situation.
Only over the last couple of years have I begun to think otherwise. I used to feel a dark suit was always appropriate for a wedding/funeral. But the last few such events I went to (especially the weddings), I was WAY on the formal dress end of the equation.
I’m 61, and have attended a TON of weddings for kids/nieces/nephews over the past few years. My impression is that I can no longer rely on my memories from weddings of my generation as to what is appropriate. I’m not sure I’ve attended a wedding recently in which a nice open-collar shirt and dress slacks would have been at all unusual. To the contrary, a suit would be more unusual.
I don’t give a crap what people wear when they’re out in public. As long as they’re not pulling up YouTube to watch videos that everyone around them can hear, or playing music loud enough that everyone has to listen to it, or having a grand old time talking on the phone while everyone else is finding some quiet and courteous way to occupy their time, that’s what I care about.
On that note, a public formality that I absolutely can’t stand is the practice of playing a television loudly in any sort of waiting room. Say I’m getting my car serviced, or waiting to be called back into a doctor’s office. I like to read my Kindle while I’m waiting, and having to tune out some loud home improvement show or infomercial the whole time is irritating.
I think that the way a person behaves at a funeral is more important that they way they dress.
My father’s funeral turned out to be a rather large affair - we didn’t plan it that way and we didn’t particularly want a large event……but it was publicly announced.
It was followed by a light lunch in the reception room of the church, some family friends set it up and I was sort of surprised by it.
It was in the middle of the day. There were several men there that worked in the print shops my dad did business with that took time out of their day to pay their respects. They were clean and respectful, but they were also in their work clothes. This bothered me not one bit, in fact I thought it was rather heart-warming that they cared enough to take time out of their day to show up.
I would’ve felt bad if I had found out people skipped the funeral because they couldn’t get enough time off work to go home and dress up first. Respectful behavior is much more important.
That’s very much a YMMV situation - I’ve been to exactly two weddings in my life where an adult male not wearing a suit wouldn’t have been unusual. And they were not-coincidentally the only two backyard weddings I’ve attended. It’s not a generational thing in my case - the nieces/nephews/cousins kid’s weddings I’ve been to in the last five years have all been the suit-wearing kind except for the one backyard one. And I don’t mean the old folks were wearing suits - even the younger generation was. In fact, my 31 year old son recently bought a suit for a friend’s wedding.
That’s fine- special circumstances like that definitely fall under the “as much as you’re able” category. If they had to come from work in work clothes, then that’s the best they could do in the circumstances.
I’m talking more about people who basically ignore the dress code conventions out of selfishness than anything else.
Just let me know when and where to show up with my pitchfork!
The one that impresses me as the worst example is airports. Instead of placing a few TVs, such that there can be a TV section and a “quieter” section, they seem to place the damn things for the maximum possible coverage. I imagine there are some studies somewhere that purport to show that ubiquitous TVs make passengers more tractable.
Reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of in a long time - bus stations, where certain seats had coin operated TV sets mounted to them. Hmm - nostalgia!
Ohhhh. I hate that. The noise in a bar/restaurant is generally loud. Soooo… they turn up the TV’s/music and then everyone turns up their voices in response, sooo… here comes some more volume at you.
Here’s a picture from my brother’s wedding four years ago, of the bride and groom and their families. As you can see, the only one here with a suit on was my dad - and even he wasn’t wearing a tie. And yet, everyone was well dressed.
(And it wasn’t a backyard wedding, either - it was actually a fairly expensive venue with both indoor and outdoor spaces).
Yeah, your photo looks very much how I’d expect a wedding photo to look. I don’t think I’ve been to a wedding in decades where the majority of the men wore suits.
I think that how the immediate family dresses and behaves is outside of this issue. Of course they can do/behave however the need to get through the day. If you can’t attend a funeral for a friend or a not an immediate relative without drawing undue attention to yourself by your behavior, or your clothing, I would argue you are not paying respects as much as making yourself the center of attention at an inappropriate time.
That’s why I said YMMV- it’s going to depend on a lot of things including location. I’m in NYC and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the entire Northeastern US was way over on the formal side for weddings compared to most of the rest of the world.
Well, maybe. But in that case, if anything, I was drawing undue attention to myself by wearing a dress; since most others weren’t, and since it was unusual enough to see me in particular in a dress that people were commenting on it.
“World”, definitely not, AFAICT. “Most of the rest of the world” still treats weddings as an occasion deserving of “best clothes”, whatever that style may mean in the particular culture.
“Most of the rest of the US and possibly some other developed nations”, yeah, perhaps. Although I would be pretty surprised if the northeastern US actually outranks the southeastern US in the wedding-formality department.
