Declined Sartorial Standards. Have we gone too informal?

This post dates back to the first January 6 hearing, which was broadcast in the evening.  

That's quite awhile back, I'll admit.  This has been a lingering thread. But, given some recent observations, it's expanded out.  

Indeed, this is sort of a collision of three influencing items coming together; one the January 6 hearings, one an advertising item, and one being an older (2016?) First Things podcast episode, which I only recently discovered.

In the overall scheme of things, clothing worn in a hearing don't matter much, we think.  We actually had a quote about this just recently from an old work, The Velveteen Rabbit:

When you’re real, shabbiness doesn’t matter.

The Velveteen Rabbit

That's probably the way things ought to be, but . . . well maybe they do.

For some gravitas, let's be blunt.  We're in the midst of a crisis which involves slipped standards.  That slippage includes one group of people who seem to take their oath to the Constitution lightly (which ironically involves a group of people styling themselves "Oath Keepers" who are, in fact, Oath Breakers), and a general decline in civility that reaches up to the highest levels of our society.

It's sad.

The January 6 crisis, that is.

It's disgusting.

And it sort of involves poor dress.

Okay, that's a stretch, but bear with me.

On the first day of the hearings in the audience was a police officer, off duty (or perhaps now retired) who was at the event.  He was there, in the Congressional committee room, wearing a t-shirt.  Another testifying retired policeman was wearing a sports coat and dress shirt, but was there sans tie, a massive tattoo that ran up to his neck clearly visible.  Since then, in these hearings, such dress has been common.  A documentary filmmaker, for example, appeared in a rumpled shirt that looked like it had been slept in the night before.  A former spokesman for the Oath Breakers, who take their name from their massively misconstrued oath to uphold the Constitution which is taken when a person joins the military or a police force, appeared in a jean jacket.

There were exceptions, to be sure, particularly with former members of the government and lawyers, but beyond casual dress was in evidence.  Frankly, not even a decade ago, appearing in Congress dressed like that would have been unthinkable.

And it's not just there.

At one time, if I entered a law office thirty years ago, when I first was practicing, every man in the office would have been dressed appropriately for the season and at least in semiformal clothing.  It would have been impossible to enter a law office of any substantial size and not find at least one man wearing a tie.  Indeed, in a much earlier post on this blog, I noted a quote from The Wyoming Lawyer:

With fond remembrance of the mid- 1960s,Cheyenne attorneys had a helpful little booklet consisting of about 30 pages in a 5 ½” x 8 ½” format with the relatively shocking title “Minimum Fee Schedule.” In addition to the obvious, the last page of this helpful little booklet spelled out a proper dress code for working in the office on Saturday mornings.Only on Saturday, ties were not required but a sports jacket or suit coat was still mandated. Naturally, the good ol’ boys who created the “Minimum Fee Schedule” and dress code did not give any direction on appropriate office attire for women, even though in the mid-1960s Cheyenne enjoyed the services of two outstanding women attorneys, Brooke Wunnicke and Ellen Crowley

This is certainly no longer the case.  I can enter almost any law office now, any day of the week, and find quite a few male lawyers wearing extremely informal clothing.¹ Indeed, the change in standards is, as noted, one of the topics of one of the very early posts on this blog, going back to at least 2011, which is the first year that this blog became really active.  And as the related threads below show, it's come up a lot.

Anyhow, on slipping standards, as recently as about fifteen years ago or so, a person I worked with took enormous offense at a lawyer who appeared in his office wearing shorts and no socks.  It made a permanent impression with him (he was not a lawyer).   And in my own case, I can recall a client, more recently than that, objecting to my wearing boat shoes.

Note that I have distinguished this to male lawyers.  Female lawyers still dress fairly formally, interestingly enough.

The other day I went to a meeting wearing a tie, as it was a meeting between four lawyers and their staffs. Two were dressed informally, one very informally, the other in business casual.  One was dressed relatively formally, but sans tie.

Or, by example, up until recently I always wore a tie at a deposition.  I just started to suspend with them in some instances, as I was definitely the only one wearing one.

To give yet another example, in another context, I went to a funeral just recently.  It was very small.  I came right from work, and as I had the aforementioned meeting, I was wearing a tie, but I had no coat (it was about 100F outside).  At the funeral, there were a few people in rural semi dress, common for rural people, but other people were simply wearing very informal clothing.  I was, once again, the only one with a tie.

Clearly things have changed in the past thirty years.

And not only have they changed, COVID-19, accelerated a change that was already ongoing.  People stayed home, stayed in their jammies, and they haven't dressed back up.  But the change itself was already going on.

Why?

I'm not really sure.  I've seen some written commentary on it, but that commentary tends to fall flat.  One person, for example, related the formality of prior eras to the cost of clothing, but that makes no sense whatsoever, as quite frankly up until the 1950s, clothing was really expensive.

Or, actually, maybe it does.

This is where the second influences for this thread comes in, which was a First Things podcast episode that amounted to simply reading an article for the podcast, with the voice provided by a woman who, if not upper class, certainly had that upper class accent we all used to know, before our Presidents tried to start sounding like extras from Goodfellas.²

Clothing has always served to make distinctions between people, as well as to serve practical functions.  Romans who worse purple did it not simply because they liked the color, but because the dye was expensive, and it showed they were in the elite. 

When clothing was more expensive, middle class Americans, and the middle class everywhere in the Western World, tried to have at least one set of formal clothes that roughly emulated that of the wealthy, as well as those who approached being wealthy and worked indoors.  This showed that they weren't poor.

John Hancock.

And if you couldn't do that, that was probably because you were in fact poor.

And this essentially set the standards for what was worn in certain places.

Now, this doesn't mean that everyone would be dressed as fancifully as John Hancock, in the photograph above.  Indeed, clothing varied quite a bit by status, occupation and region.  But you can take this to mean that a farmer who lived in Maine, let's say, who did well enough, would also have a coat, vest and breeches.

But probably only one set.

And that gets us part of the way to the explanation.  Up until the 1950s, with clothing being expensive, people tended not to have a lot of clothing.  This too set the standard.  Clothing has become so cheap that people now have lots of clothing, and can dispense with concern over what it means to have hardly any at all.

The added part of this is that up until the second half of the 20th Century, most people in the Western world worked in some sort of manual labor.  That didn't mean that they weren't middle class.  Particularly in North America, a person could work in an industrial job as a skilled laborer, or in agriculture, and be solidly middle class.  But people were conscious of their standard.  They wanted to appear as part of the mainstream of society, if they could afford to do so, and most could.

That trend really began to amplify in the early 20th Century, that period in which we recently saw a post regarding whether a young woman would be willing to be escorted by a young man if he omitted tie and vest.

First Things did a nice job of picking this all up, and indeed going back just as far as I did.  What it noted is that seemingly average people, but which we mean in this context people living on the edge of poverty, didn't begrudge the more wealthy wearing finer clothes on formal and even informal occasions, and even sort of expected it.  Be that as it may, at some point, let's say loosely the late 18th Century, the clothing style of the rich and at least middle class began to merge with less distinction between them, at least in so far as daily clothing was concerned.³  Nonetheless, distinctions between the clothing of those who worked with their hands, and those who did not, and based on occasion, remained.  

So, put another way, if you showed up at Church dressed like you had just plowed a field in 1890, it's probably because; 1) you had in fact just plowed a field and 2) you were too poor to get another set of clothes, or 3) if you were Catholic, it was your last chance not to miss Mass.

This same basic set of rules applied to everything. Consider this photograph of Tom Horn's 1902 jury in Wyoming.

Now, there are two things you ought to notice about this photograph of these twelve men.

Everyone is dressed as well as he could be, and better than the average juror today.

And one, in 1902, is black.

Who were they and what did they do:

H. W. Yoder, Ranchman, Goshen Hole

O.V. Seeburn, Ranchman, Goshen Hole

Charles Stamm, Ranchman, Wheatland Flats

T. R. Babbit, Ranchman, LaGrange

H. W. Thomas, Ranchman, LaGrange

G. W. Whiteman, Ranchman, Uva

Amos Sarbaugh, Foreman, Swan Land and Cattle Company

Homer Payne, Cowboy, Swan Land and Cattle Company

Frank F. Sinon, Foreman, White Ranch, Little Horse Creek

E. C. Metcalf, Blacksmith, Wheatland

Charles H. Tolson, Porter, Cheyenne

J. E. Barnes, Butcher, Cheyenne

Mr. Tolson was probably the black juror⁴ 

Now, the last jury I drew, I drew in Denver, Colorado.  More specifically, Denver County, Denver, Colorado. This jury in 1902 makes that jury look. . . well. . . .slovenly.

More on that to follow.

What happened?

According to First Things, the clothing distinction carried on right into the 1960s, but then crashed into 1967's Summer of Love.

Mounted Policeman in San Francisco at an anti-war demonstration in 1967.⁵   By BeenAroundAWhile at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47396940

Pinning a huge clothing shift on a single year is probably a bit much, but there's some evidence to suggest it's at least true in a larger sense.  Maybe not 1967, but maybe 1966 to 1980, with steady erosion the entire time.

So why?

Let's talk about the GI Bill again.

But before we do that, let's talk about the mid 20th Century standard of dress a bit more carefully.  And in doing that, let's look at a current attempted commercial revival of that standard, but none other than Ralph Lauren.

We see that here.

Now, what exactly are we seeing here? 

These are uploaded and linked in photographs from the Ralph Lauren collection recalling Morehouse and Spillman colleges in the mid 20th Century. They still exist, and donations from the sale of this clothing goes to those traditionally black colleges.

And not just that, here's another Lauren collegic collection.

This no doubt takes us all back to those heady youthful college days, right?

Ummm. . . well probably not if you graduated any time in the last several decades.

But Lauren actually isn't that far off in how college students of the mid 20th Century actually dressed.

And those Morehouse and Spillman students of that era, they weren't merely complying with the standard of dress of the era, they were engaged in a radical act by dressing that way.  I.e, by dressing to the Middle Class standard, they were proclaiming that they were not, and had no intention of being, somebody's second class hired hand.

Okay, let's deep dive on this a little deeper.

The First Things article points out that while, over a long stretch of time, dress became more informal, it still retained formal elements in an unchallenged fashion up until the 1960s, when this really began to erode.  Indeed, just recently, and coincidentally, this was illustrated in something I happened to watch on television, that being an older documentary, narrated by a very young Jeff Bridges, regarding a Creedance Clearwater Revival tour of Europe.  The documentary went into the history of the band, which was at that time fairly short.  The group originated in El Cerrito California, a Bay Area city, and performed under the name The Blue Velvets, Vision, and then the Golliwogs, before changing its name to the final variant. As early as 1964 they had a record contract.

The band basically had a mid 1960s hiatus due to the military service of three of its members. The remarkable thing about this is that in 1964 photos of the members show them all turned out with short hair, sports jackets, and ties. They look like, well. . . a collection of young college men of that era.  By the late 1960s, however, they had their familiar appearance.

Creedance Clearwater Revival in 1968.

The clothing standards had changed.

But why?

They'd actually begun to change in the 1950s, but that didn't create a switch overnight. And in fairness, the change of the 1960s didn't change everything overnight, either.

In the 50s, the challenge to the existing clothing standards started with certain sections of "rebellious" youth sporting leather jackets and Levis.  At the time, that identified them, intentionally, with the working class, the only class that had worn blue jeans routinely, and also with the post Second World War motorcycle gangs.  It caused a spike in popularity of blue jeans, however, which rapidly entered general wear among teenagers and younger adults.  This carried over into the late 1960s, when widespread youth protests movements broke out everywhere. But that time, as a symbol of uniform rejection of their parents' generation, a section of the Boomers adopted really outlandish styles, while others simply adopted styles that, once again, reflected working men's clothing to some extent.  The rebellion became wide enough that the dress code was basically cracked, and formal clothing attempted to mimic it, modifying the style of suits and semiformal clothing of the era.

While the fashion industry did attempt to retain the suit, and successfully for a while, the reaction was with designs so hideous that they would ultimately be self-defeating. And by that time, the damage had been done.  It had particularly been done among the younger demographic, which would basically grow up suitless.

I'm an example of that.  From photographs, I know that my father frequently wore suits in the 1950s. although annual photos from the 40s show that not occuring at all in high school.  No ties either.  I recall him having a pretty nice suit in the 1960s and early 1970s, although I don't recall him wearing it often.  In the 1970s, when he left for his office, he normally wore a sports coat and tie, and I very much remember that.  Indeed, he worse wingtip shoes nearly every day.  But as a kid in school, at no time did I ever have clothing that required a tie or even a dress shirt.  I recall a blue button down shirt being bought for me when I was in grade school for some reason, and a double-breasted blue blazer.  It was probably for a wedding, but I can barely remember ever wearing it.

By junior high, I lacked any such formal clothing at all, and that's significant.  I went into high school the same way.  The only time you ever saw any kid wearing a tie, for anything, in high school, was when the JrROTC cadets had to wear their uniforms, which was once a week.  I got all the way through high school without ever wearing a tie to anything, including by my recollection my high school graduation, at which point my parents tried to by me some dress pants. Those pants were horrible powder blue polyester pants, the only thing readily available, and I only wore them once.

Dancing Zoot Suiters. Apparently the photographer was so fascinated he forgot to include the heads of the dancers in the photograph.

The first time I can recall wearing a tie, post high school, was in basic training. The Army dress uniform at that time was the Green Pickle Suit, and it had a black regular tie you had to learn how to tie.  The current Army dress uniform still does.  As a college undergrad, I took the position that I was "never going to have a job that required wearing a tie", which means that there were still those who did that every day.  Indeed, college professors often did at that time, and that was common, I'll note, all the way through to my law school graduation in 1990.

Still, I didn't wear ties very often.  Probably the only time in my undergrad years that I did was when I was attending weddings or funerals.  The first suit I owned was one that I bought, I think, in 1986 for a friend's wedding.  

All of this is somewhat significant, by way of an illustration, as during this time I would have done things that only twenty years prior would have required coat and tie, although I never thought of it in that fashion.  Simply going to university would have.  Going out on dates would have.  When I was an undergrad, however, the only thing that really did were attending weddings and funerals.

For some of that time, the reason for this was that I was a geology major, and as a geology major I hung out mostly with other geology majors.  Everyone I knew was outdoorsy, and the clothing we had was outdoorsy.  But by the late 1980s the expectation that a young man (it was less true for young women) would have any sort of "dress up" clothing had simply evaporated.

When I was first practicing law it remained, however, ad we were expected to wear ties most days, unless we were only going to be in the office, or it was summer during which summertime office rules allowed for polo shirts, although they were tolerated only with the greatest expressed reluctance by the office manager.  In court, in the summer, we could dispense with the jacket, but never the tie.  But this was the office.  When I started dating my wife, I never wore formal clothes, and as far as I can tell, she never expected me to.

Newspaper vendor, circa 1920s. This photo is a bit unusual as the vendor is an adult, at at time at which this occupation was typically occupied by rough and tumble children.  He's turned out in suit and tie, and the suit is correctly buttoned leaving the bottom button unbuttoned, a sign that he knows the standard for wearing it (the bottom button on a man's suit is never supposed to be buttoned).

Now, due to this evolution, a lot of people don't even have formal clothing. And it's eroded enormously even in the law.  People go to depositions, for example, dressed in jeans and button down shirts, and by people, I mean the lawyers.  At an administrative hearing I was at the other day, at least a couple of lawyers were there without ties, something that up until very recently would never have occurred.

During the January 6 hearings, mentioned way above, some of the witnesses were in t-shirts, disheveled button downs, and very few of the men wore ties.  Up until very recently, it's simply impossible to imagine somebody appearing in front of Congress in a t-shirt, let alone without a tie.  It would have been regarded as rude and disrespectful, which is frankly just how it struck me.

I mentioned the Denver County jury above, and this provides an interesting example.  Denver County is downtown Denver, and it's the heart of the city's financial and business district.  If a jury had been drawn from there as late as the 1960s, the men would have largely showed up in at least coat and tie and the women in something relatively formal.  By the 70s, this wouldn't have been true, but their dress would have still been fairly clean and not extraordinarily casual. ^[1]. 

In the 2020s, however, jurors show up in shots and t-shirts, to a large degree.

So the question becomes, does all of this matter?

I think that it does.  Here's why.

We've gone over it before, but something deep inside of human beings causes there to be an instinct in regard to dress and message.  All peoples, everywhere, exhibit this behavior.  Even societies that have a large scale lack of clothing do this, even it comes down to wearing something ornamental.  Men dress differently than women, everywhere, and everywhere people dress differently based on their status and occupation in life.

Some societies have attempted to purposely destroy this from time to time, the Red Chinese following the Revolution providing a particularly notable example.  Everyone dressed in a suit like Mao, men and women, assuming that they weren't working in a field.  The idea was to wipe out class distinction.

It didn't work, and ultimately the Chinese gave up on it.  Now, the Chinese elite wear suits.

As part of the distinctions that this brings, it also singles out those of particularly special distinction.  And beyond that, it signals when certain events are particularly significant.

We've really lost that.

And in losing it, oddly enough, we've separated society at large all the more from people whom still retain the standard for some distinct reason.  Clerics, for example, continue to wear black suits and Roman collars, as they have for eons. But if you see a photograph of, let's say, a Catholic Priest in the 1940s, except when in his vestments, the distinction between him and his flock, while real, isn't all that great as a rule.  Now he's singled out like no other.

And that quite frank is something that's overlooked in this area.  It's common to hear that the collapse of the dress code leveled things out as now everybody looks the same, more or less, even though that's not really true.  Indeed, those who work in heavy industry don't look the same, as their clothing remains highly specialized, and that's true of others as well. But what isn't noticed as much is that as some people remain in occupations which, for various reasons, a formal code appears in some setting, those who could have claimed some portion of that status have lost it, at least a little.  Now those who must wear it are set out as truly separate and apart, as if they're truly above everyone else.

And the loss of the standard has contributed, a bit, to the concept that nothing is really specialized, or special, to some degree.

Court provides a good example of both.  A small businessman appearing in court with a lawyer, or a mechanic, may not have had a suit that was as nice as the lawyers, but if he had one, it said that he was a professional too, just of a different type.  The lack of one suggests he's not.  And court is a special setting, which deserves acknowledgement of its status, just as Congress, or a legislature, or perhaps numerous other settings are, or should be.

But is there any going back, at least in part?

If there is, it isn't obvious.

Footnotes:

1.  This is much less true of female lawyers, for some reason. They largley continue to adhere to a higher dress code.

2.  I've written about this before, but its intersting how this applies so much to New Yorkers.  In the early 20th Century the United States had two Presidents from New York, both Roosevelts, who had very distinct upper class New York accents.  Their speech was distinct and polished.  In contrast, we just had President Trump who has affected the odd Goodfella style of speech mixed in with a personal style of speaking that's odd and sometimes oddly childish.

3.  Distinctions remained with very formal clothing, which was the province of the well to do.  If you look at wedding photographs, for instance, taken up until the 1970s, average middle class men tended to wear a suit that they already had, as did the male wedding party.  Women's clothing was different, but men came in a suit that they othewise wore to other things, including work.  If you see tuxedos in evidence, it's an indication of wealth.

4.  Porters were often African American, and all Pullman Porters were.  The reason for the latter has been explained to me by a person who remembered them by way of "people liked to be served by black people", so it was racist in nature, but in a very odd fashion in that the job paid fairly well.   The Pullman company's porters actualy contributed to the rise of the black middle class both through their pay, but also because they traveled widely and were a source of information to African Ameican communities.  They also interacted with European Americans routinely and becuse of their sharp appearance generally left a good impression. They remained an all black institution up until the Pullman company went out of business in 1969.

5. This photograph is also intersting in that it shows how much police uniforms have changed since the 1960s.  These mounted policemen are all wearing leather jackets, something that became very common with policement starting in the 1920s, depending upon their roles.  At first heavily associated with motorcycle policemen, by the post World War Two period some departments issued leather jackets to every patrolman.  Chicago actually issued a fur collared leather jacket up until 1965, at which time they went to another one that was more like a Second World War flight jacket which was issued until 2013.  Current mounted policemen would wear a helmet, rather than a peaked cap, something that came into mounted police use following World War Two.

Related threads:

From Reddit r/100YearsAgo: July 6th, 1922. The Inquiring Photographer asks women in the Flatiron District if they'd go out with a man who didn't wear a coat and vest.

The kind of dumb stuff you say when you actually really care about "your 'basic' fashion sense".

People On Wall Street Dressed Better Back In 1979

The Casualty of the Dress Code and COVID 19

And now Brooks Brothers. . .

How many trousers?

Clothing

Why do all the Neo Agrarians feel that they have to look like hippies?

The Demise of the Necktie

Swing of the Pendulum? Lex Anteinternet: The Collapse of the Standard of Dress. Maybe not so fast?

The Collapse of the Standard of Dress

The massively declined standard of dress (and does it matter?)

Standards of Dress

Monday at the Bar: International Law Class, Columbia University. October 2, 1918. Observations on dress, then and now.

The Trappings of Office. Do you affect them?

Chicago Tribune: CO-EDS SHOULD SET FASHION Nov 29, 1916

Standards of Dress: The high school graduation

The decline in formal address.

The decline in formal address.

The Necktie (and inevitably the suit somewhat as well).

Froma Harrop on Dress Codes

NCSD Board Policy 5375. Dress Code.

Summer rules

Lex Anteinternet: Standards of Dress. The police. A semi topical post

The Raging Debate, looking back on Lex Anteinternet: Standards of Dress: Office, city and town wear ov...

Standards of Dress. The police. A semi topical post

Standards of Dress. Attending school

Standards of Dress: Office, city and town wear over the past century.

Wyoming Lawyer February 2014: Standards of Dress.

Style, Fashion, and the decline of American Standards