but also by similar threads I have seen on the boards.
Why do so many people seem to be against the idea of putting any effort into their appearance? I see this quite a bit, what with the seeming opinion of many young women that flip-flops are formal attire, people wandering around the grocery store in pajamas and slippers, etc.
I understand the desire to be comfortable, but I don’t understand the abhorrence of nice clothes, or the feeling that you have to be pefectly comfortable ALL THE TIME, no matter what. Do you have to feel as if you’re sitting around on your couch even when you’re at a upscale restaurant?
I like to dress up. I think it’s fun. I have a lot of nice clothes. I understand that not every does, or can afford them. But very rarely in these conversations do the price of clothes come up. Usually it is the surfacing of a seemingly very deep-rooted antipathy toward looking nice, and a resentment about societal expectiations.
I have my own theories about why this is (enlarged senses of entitlements, refusal to make any accommodations for our fellow humans, and a few other things). What’s yours? Why do many people loathe looking well-put-together?
Maybe I sound like a curmudgeon; I’m not. I’m 31. Dopers, what say you? Am I being silly to suppose that dressing nice is an OK thing to do?
However, I’m an obese male with a face that’s been described as “cute” even when I’m at my lowest weight. My skin is so fair that even just after a shave I’ve been told I need a shave - my beard seems to be visible under my skin. My hair (what there is that’s left of it) is so unruly that to get it to hold into any kind of position I have the option of keeping it too short to really be able to do anything, or shelacking it to make it hold like an effing helmet.
In short - my self image when I have made myself all prettied up in formal clothing is crap.
Some of this is purely psychological, but some of it is real. So, I can expend all this effort to looking “Nice,” fail miserably at it, and be terribly uncomfortable while doing it. Or I can dress casually.
I don’t understand it either. I feel more better when I’m wearing nice clothes. When I’m wearing sweat pants, exercise shorts, or other baggy, ill-fitting clothing, I just feel like a lazy slob.
That’s not say that I find dress clothes more “comfortable” than sweat pants, but to be honest I don’t really like being “comfortable”. When I’m awake and doing things, I like that little edge of mild discomfort. In general, things that are soft and mushy irritate me. Like sweat pants. God, I really can’t stand those things.
If other people around me are dressed up, I’m likely not to notice- I’m just not a people-watcher or someone who cares what the people around me look like. I don’t really think people look significantly better in formalwear than in jeans and a T-shirt, and I don’t really understand why some people think they do
I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be comfortable all the time. If you have a choice between feeling like you’re sitting on your couch and being less comfortable, why on earth would anyone choose the latter?
When I was visiting Mr. Neville’s aunt in Hawaii, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go to synagogue with her, because I didn’t bring any dressy clothes. She said I’d be fine in pants and a Hawaiian shirt, and indeed, I wasn’t the only one there wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I actually felt more comfortable there than I do in our synagogue at home, where I usually wear a dress- it was less formal, which I like.
I doubt I can answer your question, just like I doubt you could make me understand why some people like to dress up.
I think Scott Adams put it best in The Dilbert Principle (paraphrased)
"you are the only person you don’t have to look at (barring the short time spent looking in the mirror), <engineers> understand that their appearance only bothers other people and is therefore not worth optomizing…
clothing is the lowest priority for an <engineer>, as long as all genitalia is covered and there are no mammary glands flopping around in plain view, then the purpose of clothing is achieved, anything else is wasteful"
on a personal note, since i’m antisocial, why should i care what other people think about how i look, if they don’t like the way i look, it’s not my problem, i’d much rather be comfortable than “look good”
besides, if i was forced to wear a monkey/penguin suit, i’d simply look like an ape squeezed into a suit, i’d be uncomfortable, self-concious and miserable (even if it was a properly fit suit, i’d still be self-concious and miserable), why would i want to voluntarily subject myself to that torture, just to conform to what “the establishment” considers “acceptable”, screw the establishment, they don’t like the way i look, then don’t look…
First of all, there’s a big difference between flip-flops and a tux. I’m one of the anti-dressing up people, but I don’t walk around in sweatpants 24/7 either.
My reasons:
Dress clothes are EXPENSIVE. I don’t know if you’re a guy or a girl, or how much money you make, but a nice skirt and blouse combo usually costs around $50, which is more than a day of pay for me. Gowns usually run around $200-$1000, and often more depending on their level of fancyness. And unlike guys, who can theoretically buy one suit and wear it to formal occasions for the rest of their lives, women can’t repeat clothes for fear of being snarked on and called poor. So maybe you can see my resentment at paying what is to me a lot of money for an outfit I can’t wear again (well, I’LL wear it again because I don’t care what people think, but many women won’t).
It’s pointless. You say “what’s the harm in dressing up?,” I say “what’s the harm in not dressing up?” Is a family reunion any less special if people wear casual clothes far on the safe side of flip-flops? How is a cookie-cutter dinner sponsored by a corporate entity like Disney going to be any more meaningful because people wear expensive clothes? If anything, it would ruin the vacation for me, since I will be spending the whole time lamenting over having to spend $200 on a bunch of fabric. If you’re the kind of person for whom $200 is a few hours’ pay, maybe you can’t catch my drift.
People who care what other people wear are… well, they need lives. There was an MPSIMS thread lately that made me kind of sick wherein the OP commented on women who drop their kids off at school in shitty clothes, even though said women never left their car. That, to me, is pathetic. I don’t notice what other people wear, and I don’t want other people to notice what I wear. So dressing up is pandering to these clothes horses who will nitpick and criticize to death whatever I wear anyway, so what’s the point? No point.
Why shouldn’t I be comfortable if it’s my dime, and my vacation? I don’t begrudge you your dressy night, but those vacationers who dislike formal clothes also paid to get on that cruise, and they deserve to eat too. Yeah, it’s entitlement–but I AM entitled to wear what I want if I’m on a cruise that I paid a lot of money for. I’ll dress up for weddings and formal parties and stuff since that’s on someone else’s debit card (though I might not buy new clothes, see #1), but sometimes people are justified to feel entitled to things… because they paid for them! Why does your right to see me dressed up trump my right not to dress up, when we are on a cruise that we both paid for?
I’ll probably have more to say as the thread progresses, but that’s four big things.
I think there’s a few reasons. First, a lot of posters here don’t touch on personal issues at all, so it’s hard to say anything about them.
Of those that do, many of them seem to be suffering from some form of mental illness, or are the type of people that were picked on in high school and/or were social outcasts in high school. On top of that, there is also a tendency towards being a member of lower economic classes.
All of that combined tends to result in a personality that doesn’t care much about personal appearance nor recognizes the value of being able to associate with others in higher social settings.
Anyways, I’m not claiming my observations are scientific. I don’t think we can have anything approaching scientific facts on issues like this. I’ve just observed that in a lot of the more “personal” threads the persons involved in this forum seem to be disproportionately 1) afflicted with some form of mental illness, 2) afflicted with some form of social ostracism (be it shyness, self-consciousness over physical appearance etc.) or 3) on the lower tiers of the economic ladder.
I’m not trying to generalize about the SDMB as a whole, but just the personal threads I’ve read (which I think is at least an appreciable percentage of the ones posted since I’ve been a member, I do read a lot of the posts here.) This is “In my Humble Opinon” so I figured I’d throw my completely unsubstantiated and unqualified opinion out there.
And also, there is a big difference between what I consider to be dressing up and what The Establishment considers to be dressing up. When I want to look nice, because I’m going to a concert or on a date or something, I wear a denim knee-length skirt, knee-highs or socks just above the knee, a form-fitting sweater or a tee shirt with a nice hooded sweatshirt, and boots. In that outfit, I’m comfortable, even though it’s not something I’d wear every day. But when I go somewhere like a family wedding, I have to wear my formal clothes, which are things I bought at Penney’s or Sears years ago that were uncomfortable and dorky-looking then, and which don’t even fit me now that I’ve lost fifty pounds. But my family expects me to wear those things, because if I wear the nice clothes that are also awesome, I’ll get talked about.
Sure, when I dress up in my nice clothes I feel and look awesome. But when I don weddingwear, I want to shoot myself in the head. A lot of people JUST DON’T LIKE formalish clothes; it has nothing to do with wanting to buck high society or low self esteem (or, on preview, mental illness–Jesus Christ, dude) and everything to do with one’s own personal aesthetic.
So would you say UrbanChic (the OP in that other thread I mentioned) has a mental illness since she can’t keep her eyes out of other people’s cars for five seconds? Sounds a lot more pathological than someone who (rightly or wrongly) feels they look like crap in formal clothes and so doesn’t wear them.
I’d rather not be a part of any society that would have you as a member.
What intrigues me is the view that “good dress up” clothing and “comfortable” clothing are somehow mutually exclusive. I’d generally say that the better the clothes, the more comfortable they are.
I hate formal, largely because of the Elitism aspects.
It is a purposeful display of money to burn. So and so can afford to spend 500 dollars on a gown to only be worn once and then forgotten.
I personally have a dream that one day people will will judged by the content of their character(or in a job setting the ability of their work) not how much they spend on their clothes or how well they fit into them. This is said without any irony, I believe strongly in it.
The appeals to ‘done in polite society’, are simply unidisguised way to diffentiate between the lower classes and people we are better than, from us.
I think the aversion to “looking nice” comes from a desire not to be judged based on one’s clothing–because that is a very foolish way to judge people. The contempt isn’t for looking nice, per se, but for a culture which judges people based on whether their handbag is from a well-known designer or is a knock-off.
One of the benefits of being comfortable and well versed in correct social behavior is the ability to turn my cheek at embarassing little comments like this.
This is a good example of what I’m talking about. Most people in my social crowd honestly don’t sweat 500 dollars for a piece of formal wear.
Society has established long-held and accepted ideas as to what is “nice dressing” and plainly speaking it’s oafish and crude to think dressing in sweats for all occasions is preferable to having accepted dress for certain social situations.
Most people that sit back and criticize “elitism” do so out of jealousy and dispair concerning their own situation, and it is born out of one being not quite in line with mainstream society.
There’s a certain subset of the population that seems to believe being intentionally contrarian to mainstream society is a virtue in and of itself.
