I miss the days when NFL coaches wore suits when they were on the sidelines on Sunday.
Wow, that article is either extremely ignorant or extremely sarcastic. The slashes in wealthy person’s clothing in the middle ages had finished edges. They weren’t just tears in the clothes.
An IMO non-silly version of that, which would have occured in the early 1970’s when I was in my late teens or early 20’s:
We went to visit my maternal grandfather. My parents asked me to put on clothes that weren’t patched, because, they said, while they understood that wearing patched jeans was the style (we patched our own, though, after we’d worn holes in them ourselves; paying money at the store for already-torn clothes would have been the exact opposite of the point), my grandfather wouldn’t understand about the style, and would instead think that my parents didn’t have enough money to buy me new jeans.
I wore new jeans to visit my grandfather. In my world, patched jeans meant anti-consumerism and bare feet meant freedom. In his world, patched clothes and bare feet both meant desperate poverty.
I became adult in a time, place, and subculture which had the luxury of being able to assume that of course we could all afford shoes and new blue jeans, and could therefore dress otherwise as a matter of choice. And that was/is a luxury; one many of our parents and/or grandparents didn’t grow up with.
– Your mother may have grown up in situations in which only severely neglected or desperately poor children wore play clothes to more formal events. If you’re young enough not to have lived through that cultural shift, yes it can look silly from the other side.
I was reading recently about the men in the London gun trade, who wore their best clothes to travel to work, changed into their working clothes at the factory, and did the reverse at the end of the day.
Clothes were relatively expensive, and also sent signals about the social class you inhabited, and the degree of deference that people expected to be treated with. Almost all clothing, no matter how worn, had at least some second-hand value and could pass down through multiple owners before it was converted to rags - and even then it had value.
I came up with a theory about why people have taken to wearing pyjamas in public without embarrassment.
It all comes back to cars. When parents take children on visits and are going to get home around or after the children’s bedtime it is sensible to change them into their sleepwear for the journey so they don’t have to wake them up to put them to bed. If they stop at a shop or other kind of rest stop on the way home they may well take the kids into the shop in their nightwear. So younger people have gotten used to being out in public in pyjamas. They don’t have a sense of taboo or embarrassment about it.
Feel free to shoot this down 
I’m a desk jockey. Computers. Small Government. I wear the same thing to work that I do for just about anything else. Jeans, tee-shirt with a fleece pullover, vest and boots in the winter. I lose the vest and sometimes fleece in summer. May wear shorts on a warm day.
I’m so used to that as my comfortable acceptable outfit that ‘dress’ clothes are very, very weird and uncomfortable.
Today, at home I’m recovering from a hip replacement. Because of the swelling, and bandage, I’m in sweatpants. It’s odd. I’d rather be in my jeans. I don’t feel like me.
It seems to me (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that British writers in general pay more attention to how people are dressed than American ones do. Even modern-day ones. I think British culture puts more weight on how people dress than America does. Dress seems to have been important to British musicians, from the 60s (Mods and Rockers) going forward. While American punk rockers tended to a disheveled look, Britain had stylishly dressed punks like Paul Weller, et. al.
I think you could say that for Western Europe in general.
A lot of the European soccer coaches dress up immaculately still. Some wear tracksuits but the elite coaches tend to wear suits. There’s actually a funny meme about it comparing to NFL.
Or maybe it’s just because what you wear doesn’t indicate social status anymore. You can go to men’s wear house today and get a suit for <$200. Billionaires today wear t shirts and jeans. Nobody cares what you’re wearing within reason.
One of my grandfathers was born in 1876 and died in the early 1950s not too long before I was born, so I never met him. But he was dressed in a suit in every photo I saw of him. I was told he would even wash dishes and help around the house in his formal clothes, maybe taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
Since it’s been bumped, here’s a similar video to the OP’s, from San Francisco in 1906:
As it happens, this was just four days before the Great Earthquake. The film was apparently partially staged, with the automobiles circling around to give the appearance of more traffic, but I imagine most of the people shown are just the ordinary public.
Ding ding ding!
I think this is likely the best answer. In developed countries, nowadays most people can afford most clothing. So it doesn’t work so well as a status card (suits still have a degree of power, but it’s more that you are making the effort to wear something like that, than it being a big deal you can afford it).
So then it comes down to other functions of clothing, yes, like comfort, but also e.g. showing something of our personality, flaunting a nice body etc.
Great video Dr.Strangelove !
Even today, there are still big differences in what is considered acceptable attire for business, leisure, etc., even between developed countries. It is not solely about money, even though nobody is going to mistake a $200 suit for a $5000 suit. The billionaire who wears t-shirts and jeans in the boardroom still isn’t getting into a Moscow nightclub dressed like that.
NFL does not allow suits for coaches now. A coach asked to do it and he was turned down. They are required to wear clothes with the NFL team logo. I don’t think college coaches wear suits now as well but I guess they could .
That was the case later on, certainly, but I’m not sure about the beginning. In the 1150s, Eleanor of Aquitaine was admonished by the bishop for inappropriate behavior, together with her young set at court. One item in the admonishment(s) was slashing their clothes. It’s been decades since I read the admonishment and her reply, but at the time I had the feeling that what was seen through the slashing was their shifts.
Just to say that I don’t think school uniform is the reason - a few people have been saying they wore uniform in the 60s, presumably as a sign that people were more formal then.
In the UK school uniform has actually got more formal since the 60s. If you look at girls’ school uniforms from then, they rarely included ties, whereas now they do. Blazers as part of the uniform have become more common, not less. And these days it’s extremely unusual to find a primary school (to age 11) that doesn’t have a uniform, whereas in the 80s it happened often enough that it wasn’t unusual.
But in their downtimes the kids still wear tracksuits, jeans, etc.
True, but that’s not the entire story.
Mike Nolan is probably who you’re thinking of; in 2005, when he was head coach for the 49ers, he wanted to wear a suit on the sidelines (as a tribute to his father, who was also a head coach, and who wore a suit), but was initially turned down, as the rules stated that coaches have to wear clothing made by the league’s licensee (at that point, Reebok). In 2006, a compromise was reached, and Reebok made a suit for Nolan (IIRC, Jack Del Rio, who was the coach of the Jaguars at the time, also wore a Reebok-made suit).
Nolan wore the Reebok suits in 2006 and 2007, but I don’t think that a coach has done so since then.
https://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Mike-Nolan-scores-one-for-the-suit-2522877.php
In the 50s, my mother wouldn’t be caught dead shopping in her house-dress. She put on a dressy dress, hat and heels to run two blocks down the street for a loaf of bread. My dad put a hat on to take the trash out.
In college, I wore a coat and tie to take a girl to the movies. To not do so would be highly insulting.
In the 1960s, it you went to a hockey game in Toronto, men without coat and tie were not admitted to the arena.
People dressed up because not doing so “wasn’t done”
The sound guy doesn’t seem to have fully worked out what automobiles and trolleys sounded like.
Regarding 3 piece suits: I think they weren’t stupid – everything I’ve seen and read suggests that they hung up their coat on a coat rack if it got too hot to wear in the office/shop/factory/warehouse/construction site. And it’s amusing watching English post-war period dramas – they all wear their coats inside, and it’s a reminder that in that period, the English did wear their coats inside, because the buildings were cold! I was reading about climate control recently: the first climate controlled buildings in London were capable of maintaining a temperature of 55F, but that was for theatres. Homes and offices didn’t have that. Other stuff I’ve seen suggests that standard laboratory temperature was 50F.