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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
