Style, Fashion, and the decline of American Standards

There have recently been an entire series of posts on blogs about American standards of appearance, and what it means.  I'm proud to say that I've yapped about it myself, and did so early, so I was a pioneer in complaining, on blogs, about this.

Well, maybe that isn't really something I should complain about, but I have done it.

Anyhow, most recently this comes up in the context of Catholic bloggers noting how poorly some people appear at Mass.  Ms. Scalia has noted it on her blog The Anchoress.  Deacon Kandra got things rolling recently when he noted the same on The Deacon's Bench. These blog entries all noted that a lot of Catholics show up looking pretty darned bad, or even dressed in fairly suggestive clothing.  I've noted that myself, although in all honesty I think that this phenomenon was worse a few years ago, and this is less the case now.  I've also noted here and there that the standards of dress at Mass vary considerably by region, and for some good reasons.

Anyhow, I don't really think, as I've posed here before, that the decline in American sartorial standards is unique to Catholics at Mass. Rather, I feel that what people are noting is a general society wide decline is standards of dress that has become so ingrained in the American culture that we're now the sloppiest people on earth, and we don't know it.  Oddly, as I've also noted before, we still judge others by how they dress, which is interesting and says something, I guess, about the nature of symbols and appearance.

Is this phenomenon real?  If yes, why did the decline happen. And does it matter?

Well, it is real. Take a look at the last century and a half in terms of dress, and it becomes pretty evident.  Let's start with the 1860 to 1920 time frame.

If we do that, what we would find is that most people owned far fewer clothes than they do now. That's an irony of this situation that often fails to be appreciated.  Lots of clothing is a fairly recent phenomenon for a lot of reasons. For one, cheap easy clothing didn't really come about until the modern machine age, when clothing could be easily mass-produced.  For another, there was simply less wealth in the society until post WWII, so people couldn't buy a lot of changes in clothing. For yet another, clothing was washed by hand until the washing machine, and washing clothing by hand is really hard work.  People didn't change their clothing nearly as much as we do today.

For that matter, wool clothing was dominant up until the washing machine.  We think of blue jeans as cowboy wear today, but it wasn't until well into the 20th Century.  Wool trousers are what cowhands wore up until the washing machine became common.

Perhaps the connection with standards of dress isn't plain here, but there is a connection.  Most people had a good set of clothes for social functions.  They also had fewer clothes.  Men who worked indoors basically wore their good clothes all the time.  Those who had hard manual labor tended to have a set of good clothing for certain functions, such as church, and they didn't want to appear poor or disrespectful so they wore such clothing whenever the function suited it. For this reason, we're often surprised to see how well people are dressed just to be in town, in the 19th Century.

Additionally, clothing wasn't really used to send the same sort of personalized individual message that it is today.  Working men didn't need a set of clothing to send the message that they were working men. They had a set of clothing that suited work as they were working me.  Those who worked indoors likely did wish to send the message that they were not manual laborers, and wearing suits sent that message.  That was about all the more message their was.  Exceptions existed, in the United States, principally only for those who occupied specialized occupations, such as military men and the Protestant clergy (Catholic male clergy in the 19th Century largely dressed in suits).

Of course, as part of this, the standard was simply higher.  Caps, which so predominate now, were regarded as vulgar and vaguely obscene up until the automobile became common.  Why this is the case isn't really clear, but caps were something that were pretty much only worn by manual laborers whose jobs precluded them from wearing real hats.  That's probably the reason.

With modifications over time, this remained the general situation for pretty much the entire Western World up until the 1950s. Some things did change, but for real reasons.  Caps came in as acceptable men's ware in the 1910 to 1920 time frame, as they proved handy in connection with automobiles, and that converted them, at first, from being sort of a dirty working man's headgear into a sporty item.

Real change, however, came in the 1960s.  The "Cultural Revolution" not only brought about a challenge to every standard going, including clothing standards, or so it seemed.  In retrospect, it coincided with a change in material wealth and production in the US which was unprecedented.For the first time in our history, a generation was born with the expectation of higher education and the means largely existed to obtain it.  That generation was also born into an era when material goods were much easier to obtain than previously.    As a result of that, clothing that had been the domain of working men, t-shirts and Levis, became everyday wear for middle class children trying to affect the look of working men.  We've never gone back.

But does it really matter?

Well, yes and know.  It can't rationally be argued that people should return to the clothing standards of an earlier era.  But people should be aware that clothing sends a message.  Wearing clothing that looks disheveled or sloppy in some settings sends the message that we so value ourselves that we do not value anything else. We just can't be bothered.  The spread of clothing with fake messages, like fake schools or fake entities (very common amongst the young) sends the message that we have a fake life. Rude and suggest messages demean ourselves and cause us to lose respect, no matter what our intent is.

Stated another way, G. K. Chesterton once stated that:  The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.  Today, if a person really wants to dress like a radical, they'd have to dump the t-shirts with rude suggestions blazoned on them and dress a little decently. That doesn't mean wearing suit and tie, except where appropriate, but it also means dumping the "Hurley" cap on sideways and the t-shirt with skulls on it.  This is particularly true, I'd note, for the middle-aged, on whom these things look silly.

Still, at the end of the day, I find that when I go to Mass, which really matters to me, I am not dressing up a great deal.  I'm not dressed like a slob either, but I'm not in a tie.  I'm probably wearing Levis.  Most other people I see are similarly dressed.   Part of the regional culture, I suppose.  I'm better dressed at work.  I'm not sure what that says about me.