There are many, many lines of dress shirts and pants that don’t require ironing. Remove then the dryer promptly, and place them on hangers.
And the bonus is that these are among the least expensive of dress clothes. JC Penney, for one, has these items in abundance.
I agree. I just don’t think that there is a difference in this case.
Possibly. Could the pro-formal side line up in ‘you could wear jeans to a five star restaurant, but you shouldn’t’ and ‘you should not be admitted in casual wear’ camps?
I agree. But, I disagree on what that participation should entail.
I disagree with this as well.
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I guess my question to you is, why do you eat out? I mean at a nice restaurant, not McDonald’s or CSI: Fridays. It is possible in even medium-small metro areas to have a gourmet meal delivered to your home.
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I enjoy not having to dishes. I do enjoy the surroundings and ambience of a restaurant. But for me, that does not include other diners. They are background noise I screen out.
I don’t. The other diners are a radio playing in the middle distance, ribbons twirling in the wind. I do not go to a restaurant to experience them. The live music (a harpist, strolling violinists, chamber music) can be excellent. The food can be marvellous. I may enjoy the light fixtures, the wall paper, paintings and sculpture. Other diners do not enter into it. My experience would be the same regardless of what other patrons are wearing, and whether the restaurant is filled or I am the only customer.
How exactly does a suit or gown show respect?
I look quite spiffy in jeans and a t-shirt.
Most silverware serves a utilitarian function rather than being dictated by ettiquette. At first, we only had the knife. Then, somebody came up with the spoon and it made eating so much easier. Then, the somebody came up with the fork and it was just so convenient.
In this very thread, I clearly advocated the use of please and thank you.
Not everybody does need a wedding. Some people are fine with simply filling out the proper forms.
Judaism is clear that funerals provide closure. The person is really dead. Let’s do some things to really drive home the emotional truth that your loved one is dead. After that, let’s try to move on with your lives.
Jewish law also calls for the deceased to be bury naked, without embalming or an open casket funeral, and for the coffin to be as cheap as possible. Jewish sages through the years agree, throwing money into a hole in the ground is stupid.
Another drive-by on the way out of my door.
I’m more than a little annoyed that I need to dress up (more than jeans and a tee-shirt) to go to the mall today. I’ve already hit all of the other local malls and shopping areas though, and I’m still without a Christmas gift for my grandparents, so I’m off to the Short Hills Mall. F%&$ing snobs.
Doc Cathode – come on, now. Everything you do – everything – has to be logical?
It’s logical, for instance, to avoid foods that are bad for your health. Surely, you’re not living on protein pills, rice cakes, and kelp? Why succumb to the urges of your taste buds if they favor non-logical choices?
Oh, and I’m a little puzzled by the concept of the other diners being part of the decor of a restaurant. I notice them, sure, but thinking of them as part of the scenery? I might look a little oddly at someone who is conspiculously underdressed compared to everyone else, but I don’t make any personal judgements about it and it definitely won’t make me enjoy the meal any less. I go to a restuarant like that for the food - otherwise I’d be at Red Lobster.
Uh, not my grandparents. The salespeople and other shoppers at the mall. Just to clarify.
But if there is no stated dress code and DocCathode shows up in jeans and a tshirt and he is allowed to eat, he is following the restaurant’s expectations. And that’s all he has to follow. If a restaurant will not kick him out for wearing jeans and a tshirt then a patrons formal dress cannot, by pure logic, be a part of the decor because DocCathode is sitting there, in his tshirt and jeans with the full permissions and respect of the management.
This is what we tshirt and jeans folks understand. You formal clothes folks expect all these unwritten rules to be followed when they’re, you’re know, unwritten.
I guess we can be grateful that you refrain from urinating on the walls of the restaurant dining room, you know, like they did in Shakespeare’s day.
It’s the little victories that count.
Of the five senses, why is the sense of sight getting the short shrift here?
TOUCH: it’s not okay to tickle a strange diner’s neck with a feather.
HEARING: it’s not okay to have a heated argument in front of strange diners.
SMELL: it’s not okay to smell of paint thinner in front of strange diners.
TASTE: it’s not okay to spray Lysol in a resaurant to the point that strange diners can taste it.
Now, to each of the above (except, realistically, the last), one could logically argue that other people could just ignore the distraction. Why not?
For most people dining at a fancy place, coming in wearing jeans and a t-shirt is much like the above. Why would the fact that it’s a visual distraction somehow diminish the offending patron’s responsibility to his/her fellow diners?
And yes, Doc, I know – you just don’t understand why it’s a distraction. Well, too bad – just accept that it is, or be a pariah in this particular situation.
Would you accept an adjacent diner saying to you, “What’s wrong with the paint thinner soaked into my overalls? Get lost!” In the paint-thinner case, why should the laborer fresh off a job accomodate you? What if he doesn’t understand why you’re bothered, and refuses to accomodate you? A sight can be just as invasive as a smell or noise.
Risha:
I felt/feel your pain. At 5’10" & 334, I was absolutely limited as to wear I could shop. at 5’10" & 186, my choices are much wider, but still sometimes limited because of my height. I do want to say I’m impressed with (at least in the metro tri-state area) how many consignment stores offer plus sizes now. In years gone by, you would have thought that carrying plus sizes would somehow infect the store with the plague.
VCNJ~
Not everything. But rules do have to make sense.
This is both a strawman and a flawed analogy. I never claimed to live my life in pursuit of Kohl Innar (I may be off on the spelling. It’s the Vulcan word for a state of pure, emotinless, logic). I’ve said I enjoy walking sticks. I have a suit of techno-armor (the Tomorrow Knight mark 3) in my living room.
I only said that rules should make sense.
Secondly, what I eat essentialy effects me and me alone. A dress code for the symphony, or a four star restaurant effects many people.
BMalion
I have repeated said that dress should conform to the law and health codes. Urinating in the dining room would be in violation of both. Your comparison is flawed for that reason.
I also stressed the difference between a learned behavior and an innate response. I’d say an aversion to the sight and smell of urine is an innate response. Your comparison is flawed for this reason as well.
Just because a restaurant bends over backwards to accommodate you doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is OK. The rule are unwritten, but you should have learned them by the time you reach adulthood. Again, there is a difference between what you shouldn’t do, and what you’ll get kicked out for.
Hardly. They are being gracious. It’s much the same ethic that prevents polite folks from giving honest opinions of someone else’s pictures of their infant. Of course, most babies are cute, but if a baby is somehow funny looking, few people are going to point it out to the parents’ faces.
What a concept! You know there are a lot of unwritten rules in the world, because we assume that people don’t grow up raised by wolves, and that they have been acclimated to the society in which they grew up. The idea is that you don’t NEED to be told what to do, because you know how to function in polite company.
But, this IS the SDMB, where such things don’t seem to be known. That’s what you have threads all over the place about “creepy guys” with many creepy guys chiming in, about a billion “nice guy” threads, threads where people talk about how they were ostracised as children or don’t have any friends now. The SDMB is made up of wonderful, friendly, smart, creative people, but when it comes to “fitting it” it is decidedly on the “does not” end of the spectrum. 
That’s why there’s so much crying why in this thread. “Give me a logical reason!” Well, Mr. Spock, it’s like this: If you have to ask, you’ll never understand. You do certain things because they’re expected, and while that rubs a lot of the nonconformists here the wrong way, it’s true.
So, Doc Cathode, it’s like this. Why don’t you wear jeans and a t-shirt to a nice restaurant? Because it is disrespectful to other diners, and creates anj unpleasant atmosphere. Why? Because It Does.
The effort required shows that you placed some value on this experience beyond that of your everyday routine. That there is, in fact, a difference between dinner at Le Bec Fin (you know, I actually preferred Circa, myself) and dinner at McDonald’s.
No, you don’t. And your only basis for your opinion is your own sensibilities, which just happen to favor the course of least effort on your part. Everyone else is arguing, not only from their own sensibilities, but from tradition and a shared cultural consciousness as well.
ps- yes, I know that Shakespeare was not always ‘high art.’ But it evolved, both in the trappings of the performance and the audiences. In the future, all restaurants may be Taco Bell, and you’ll have to dust off your good Kimono to attend dinner there. That’s just how life is. But we’ll always have special modes of dress for special occasions- even tribal societies where clothing is certainly optional much of then time ‘dress up’ with makeup, ornamentation, and clothing for their special occasions.
and, on preview, to address Justin_Bailey: most of society’s rules are unwritten, no matter what society we’re speaking of. But they are easy to read if you keep your eyes open, can see outside yourself, and are willing to make some effort. No one’s advocating throwing anyone in jail for their choices here, or even denying them entry. But I will defend the right of people to make judgments based on conscious choices on your part.
Because it’s so easy to ignore the clothing of people seated at other tables.
It’s not okay to tickle strangers period. But, I’m not proposing tickling strangers.
Turning your back or looking elsewhere does not make noise go away. But, I am not proposing being loud.
Turning your back or looking elsewhere will not make odors go away. But, I am not proposing introducing overwhelming odors into a restaurant.
You can’t make the taste of Lysol go away by turning your back or looking elsewhere. But, I am not proposing spraying Lysol.
Maybe they could, but that person is not me.
You want to build a strawman, that’s your business.
Because ignoring the appearance of people not in your party is easy.
I accept your inability to defend or explain your position beyond ‘Because I say so’.
As long as the symphony or restaurant in question admits and serves me, I don’t care whether I am viewed as a pariah.
Okay, then … everything you do makes perfect sense? You’ve eliminated arbitrariness from every aspect of your life?
And how do you reconcile situations where things that make perfect sense to you don’t make perfect sense to other people? Let me guess …* “Eff 'em”*.
Are you especially perturbed when an ad hoc authority figure (e.g. DMW clerk) forces you to conform to something you can’t make sense of? Do you have an authority-figure problem to begin with?
I say it’s not.
Why should I be concerned with showing other diners that I place value on this experience? Certainly, I should show the staff and the cooks that I place value on this experience, but why the other diners.
Further, how and why exactly does wearing a suit show this?
Further still, if the point is to not wear everyday clothes, then what should people whose everyday clothes are black tie wear? If the point is to show that you value this experience differently from your everyday experiences, should somebody who wears black tie all the time come in a jeans and t-shirt?
Ah, but I do look spiffy and your denying it doesn’t make it any less true.
I’ve said before, unless you can explain and defend those traditions, I will not follow them. If you cannot explain and defend them, then you are also saying ‘Because I say so.’.
And unless they can defend and explain those traditions, I won’t follow them either.
I can see what the unwritten rule is. I still haven’t been given a good reason to follow many of them.
At least two posters have said I should be denied entry. One simply said I should not be admitted. One said that if she (I think it was a she) saw me in jeans and a t-shirt, she would call the maitre 'd to remind him of the dress code. She clearly meant that she wanted to get me ejected from the premises.
They can judge me all they want. [Kevin Meaney] I don’t care. I don’t care. Zoom zooom zoooom[/Kevin Meaney]
Admitting and serving me is ‘bending over backwards’?
I have learned what the rules are. I have also decided that some are pointless or should not be followed.
Sometimes there is a difference. Not in this case.