Tuesday, February 12, 1924. Rhapsody In Blue.

Rhapsody In Blue, a jazz masterpiece, premiered today.  It was written by George Gershwin for Paul Whiteman, for "An Experiment in Modern Music". That event occured on this day in Aeolian Hall, New York City.

It's a masterpiece.  Indeed, it competes for the title of greatest American musical composition.

It's never aged, and indeed, was used relatively recently by United Airlines in its television commercials.

Indeed, that overlapped a bit with their net based and on board commercials that featured sports broadcasting figure Katie Nolan, who recently was a finalist on Celebrity Jeopardy.

 Coolidge put firing Denby on ice, for the time being.

Friday, April 6, 1923. Armstrong records

Louis Armstrong was recorded for the first time, playing with King Oliver's Creole Band, on Chimes Blues.

Weather Bird Rag was on the flip side, on which Armstrong also played.

Babylon. . . um, then or now?

 An original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Description of the movie Babylon.

Seriously?

Well, in keeping with the ostensible focus of this site, let us first acknowledge that early Hollywood was a complete moral sewer.  I haven't seen, obviously, Babylon (nobody in the general public has yet) and I'm not going to, but it would frankly be difficult to inaccurately depict the moral depravity of early Hollywood by going too low. . . which is what makes it the perfect topic for Hollywood today, doesn't it?

Before the Hayes Production Code came in, in 1934, movies were unrestrained by any standards other than community and local ones, and they plumbed the depth as far as they could.  As we earlier noted:

The Hays Production Code of 1934 had been a voluntary code that the movie industry had imposed upon itself to prevent further regulation due to outcry of the moral content of early films, some of which were outright pornographic even when aimed at a general audience and even when camouflaged with supposedly religious themes with even such moviemakers as Cecil B. DeMille taking that approach.  The code had imposed eleven items that were outright prohibited in films, including nudity and associated sexual portrayals, but also banned such items as profanity, disrespect to the clergy, childbirth and willful offense to any religion or race.  It also included twenty five items that film makers were required to be careful about in their depictions.

Indeed, illustrating the above, Cecil B. DeMille, whom we associate with Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments, released a "Biblically" themed silent movie which still receives viewer warnings today due to such scenes depicting female "saints", in Roman times, writhing in agony, nude, chained to columns.  People went to see that in order to see nude women on the screen and have some excuse for it.  It was pornography then, and it remains pornography now.

And not just that, although that's a spectacular example.  Fairly routinely moviemakers slipped in nude scenes of women to see how far they could go.  One famous example involving a well known actress then and post code had a brief snipped of the actress emerging from a bathtub.  It's apparently really brief, but the point was she was nude.  Filming nude swimming actresses was pretty common, barely obscuring them.  You get the point.

And not just that. The moral tone of movies itself was often amazingly low.  Indeed, many popular films of the pre code era were refilmed shortly after the code was put in place, in part because they could still be viewed.  1940's beloved Waterloo Bridge was a remake, for example, of the 1931 variant by the same name.  IMDB provides the plot line for the 1931 version as this:

In World War I London, Myra is an out-of-work American chorus girl making ends meet by picking up men (i.e, by being a prostitute) on Waterloo Bridge. During a Zeppelin air raid she meets Roy, a naive young American who enlisted in the Canadian army. They fall for each other, and he tricks her into visiting his family, who live in a country estate outside London, where his stepfather is a retired British Major. However, Myra is reluctant to continue the relationship with Roy because she has not told him about her past.

The 1940's variant? Well:

On the eve of World War II, a British officer revisits Waterloo Bridge and recalls the young man he was at the beginning of World War I and the young ballerina he met just before he left for the front. Myra stayed with him past curfew and is thrown out of the corps de ballet. She survives on the streets of London, falling even lower after she hears that her true love has been killed in action. But he wasn't killed. That those terrible years were nothing more than a bad dream is Myra's hope after Roy finds her and takes her to his family's country estate.

A little different. . . ^{1  2}

As far ago as a century back, it was widely known that actors and actress in Hollywood were a libertine set, which they remain.  Scandals surfaced early on, with marriages breaking up and affairs sufficiently rife in order to hit print from time to time.  While social standards generally remained fairly high in American society itself.  People basically turned a blind eye to it, as long as it didn't surface.

Of course, it did surface spectacularly with the death of Virginia Rappe, an actress now remembered only for her death.  We had an item back on that in 2021, which we will repeat here in its entirety, as it is realevant to this entry:

Labor Day, September 5, 1921. The Wages Of Sin

On this day in 1921 one of the most infamous, most misreported, and one of the most still most mysterious deaths in Hollywood history occurred.  And one that features all the things that still cause Hollywood to fascinate and repel.

The death of young actress Virginia Rappe.

Even though the critical events in the death of Rappe, then age 26, occurred at a party, where lot of people were around, what really occurred leading to her untimely death remains a mystery.  From what seems to be clear, we can tell the following.

Rappe was a guest at a party hosted by Fred Fischbach, a friend of celebrated silent movie comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.  The party was partially in celebration of a hit Arbuckle movie, Crazy To Marry.  The five reel movie was a recent release and doing well, although it is now obscure and may be in the category of lost film (I'm not sure of that).  At the time, Arbuckle was making $1,000,000 a year from films, a gigantic sum not only now, for most people, but particularly then, given the respective value of a dollar compared to now.  Arbuckle, we'd note, was married, with his spouse at the time being Minta Durfee, although the couple had recently separated.  In spite of that, it should be further noted, Durfee would call Arbuckle in later years the most generous man she'd ever met, and that in spite of their 1925 divorce, if given the choice, she'd do it all again.

Minta Durfee.

Fischback rented three hotel rooms, and, in the spirit of the times, supplied them with large quantifies of bootleg booze.  Rappe was an invited guest, and arrived with  Bambina Maude.  At the party Rappe drank a lot of alcohol.  At some point in the party it seems that he and Rappe went into room 1219 of the hotel alone, and shortly thereafter some sort of commotion occurred, Arbuckle emerged and Rappe was desperately sick.  She was taken to the hospital and died four days later from a ruptured bladder and peritonitis.

One of the hotel rooms after the party.

Arbuckle was arrested and accused of rape and manslaughter, with an essential element of the accusation being that forced sex had caused Rappe's death.

Seems, at first blush, clear enough, but it gets very confused from there.

Arbuckle maintained his innocence throughout.  He was tried three times, resulting in two mistrials, and then an acquittal.  Bambina Maude was a witness in the story, filling in lurid details, but she was later revealed to be a procurer who used that role to blackmail recipients of the favors she'd arranged to supply, although there was no evidence that she was acting as a procurer at the time of the attendance at the party.  Indeed, while there are multiple stories as to what occured, one of the versions that exists is that the room that Rappe went into was the only one with a bathroom and she went into it to throw up, going through the bedroom where Maude was having sex with a movie director. In that version, which isn't the only one, Arbuckle went in the room to carry the collapsed Rappe out. ^[1]. 

The final jury apologized to Arbuckle for what he'd been through. And, indeed, it seems fairly clear that whatever occurred between Arbuckle and Rappe, it wasn't that which resulted in her death, but rather a chronic medical condition that was exacerbated by alcohol.  It's likely her drinking at the party, which killed her.

Rappe, who was at one time regarded as the "best dressed girl in films".

Even that, however, doesn't flesh the entire tragic story out.  Rappe was only 26, but by that age was already a photographic veteran, having worked as an orphan raised by her grandmother as a model since age 14.  She had some trouble holding alcohol and was inclined to strip when drunk.  She'd been the live in with Henry Lehamn only fairly recently, to whom she'd been engaged.  According to at least some sources, which may be doubted given that they are a century old, she was freer with her affections than the norms of the time would have endorsed.

What occurred between Arbuckle and Rappe is not known and never well be and now too much time has passed to sort it out.  About as much as we can tell is that it seems that Arbuckle might have made some sort of advance on Rappe and that at first Rappe might have welcomed it.  That she was desperately ill is clear.  Her illness killed her.

This, in turn, provides an interesting look at public morals and standards, then and now.  At least some of the conduct Rappe and Arbuckle were engaging in was immoral by Christian standards, and Christian standards were clearly the public standards of the day.  Be that as it may, it's clear that in his trials, the fact that Arbuckle was doing something with a drunk woman doesn't seem to have been held against him, or at least it ultimately wasn't.  Of course, maybe the jurors didnt' feel he was doing anything with her, or even aiding her, or at least some must have thought that in all three trials.  If Arbuckle was advancing on her, it most definitely would be regarded as improper today.  Having said that, it wasn't all that long ago that "get her drunk" was sort of a joke which implied that inebriation to the point of being unable to consent was consent.

Arbuckle's career would never recover from the evening.  Perhaps, in some ways, it shouldn't have.  He wasn't a killer, but what occurred was unconscionable for other reasons. .  reasons we seemingly have managed to forget, however, over the years.  Even after his acquittal he was more or less blackballed in the industry for a time, and then when that was lifted his star power was gone.  He changed his name and made a much smaller living behind the scenes before starting to stage a minor comeback in the 1930s.  He died in 1933 in a hotel room from a heart attack.  He was 46.

Arbuckle movie poster from 1932.

It's interesting to see how this event compares to contemporary ones.  We have a person in attendance at the party who associated with the rich and famous whose role seems to have been supplying female favors (Maude), much like Jeffrey Epstein and his hangers on have been accused of.  We have a Hollywood set who lived personal lives that departed greatly from public standards, something that's still the case, although less so now as standards have declined so much, and we might have some sort of sexual contact between a male Hollywood figure and a very drunk actress (or not), something that in our contemporary culture would be a career ending event irrespective of the accusations of rape.  Indeed, accusations of rape in Hollywood, not all of which are substantiated, have become very common in recent years.

In the end it was a terrible tragedy.  People thought they were going to a party  Rappe probably knew she was drinking too much.  Arbuckle surely knew he shouldn't make advances on her.  Death came like a "thief in the night", which nobody anticipated.

On the same day, elsewhere, the League of Nations convened for the second time and admitted Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Finland and Luxembourg.

Footnotes:

1  Yet another version, upon which a book was written asserts that Rappe had received  botched abortion that had nicked her bladder, and it ruptured when she tickled Arbuckle and he accidentally kneed her.  

Others criticize that assertion, which would by definition be based on a large element of speculation.  It seems based on Rappe having reported received something like five prior abortions in an era when they were all fully illegal.

Rappe's death remains a tragedy, but the wider details of how the overall situation came about, sex, abortions, alcohol and the like, are pretty beyond the pale even now.

Or are they?

Nothing since Rappe's death in 1921 has improved, morally, in Hollywood.  Indeed, the irony of Babylon is that moral depravity that was recognized as such in 21 is celebrated now, in no small part because Hollywood always recognized that going below a moral standard generated income.  The problem always was that once you erode a standard, you need to go still lower still.

Which in one way brings us back around to Babylon.  Apparently it contains an orgy scene.  Is that something unreasonable to depict as to Hollywood in 21?  No, not really.

Could such a scene have been included in a movie in 21?  Frankly, probably. Which is why the Code came about.

Reports hold that the actresses who were filmed in the orgy scene were worried it would be cut out of the movie.  It was, of course, not.

Why would it have been.  Post code, the moral standard today are much lower than they were in a century ago.  The movie might not even be a success, moral depravity and all. And part of the reason for that is depicting the shocking violation of a moral standard, which in our heart of hearts we know remains one, might not be all that interesting when we already figure this is pretty much how Hollywood is today.

Harvey Weinstein. . .Jeffrey Epstein. . .your cue to appear on screen has been lit.

Footnotes:

1. The plot of the first version is remarkably similar to one of the vignettes in Rosellini's Paisan.

2.  Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon is also a remake.  For one thing, the first version had veiled references to homosexuality in it.  Reportedly the second version is almost word for word the same as the first, but for things offending the code removed.

20s Charleston Dance - "Bei mir bist Du schön" New Orleans Jazz Band

Sunday, February 19, 1922. A revolution in Mexico?

Officially, by this date in 1922, the Mexican Revolution was over.

On the ground in northern Mexico, and at the border, things didn't quite appear that way.

Or at least to the press. 

The recent invasion of Mexico from the United States side, at Columbus, was only 30 men in strength.  The Obregón government, which had been consolidating power, strongly reacted, however.  And not just in this instance.

The United States Bureau of Prohibition successfully interdicted the British rum runner Annabelle with aircraft, the first successful use of its new fleet of eleven airplanes.

WJZ in New York made the first broadcast of a live radio entertainment program. Comedian Ed Wynn reprised his "Perfect Fool" character with difficulty, given as he lacked the reaction of a live audience.

Political cartoon by Clifford Berryman, published in the Washington Evening Star on 19 February 1922.

Jazz had come to Washington, D.C.

Friday July 15, 1921. Summer activities.

Texas National Guard, Brig. Gen'l. Wolters Com'd'g., Camp Mabry, 1921 

The Texas National Guard was doing Annual Training at Camp Mabry, which is near Austin.   This unit is obviously a cavalry unit. Texas had two National Guard cavalry regiments in the 20s through the 40s, and this must be part of one of them.

Greek forces retook Afrium Karahissar in eastern Turkey.  The city at that time had a population of over 200,000, about double its current population.  It was, and is, agricultural center which is known for its opium production.  Indeed, its original name, Afrium, simply meant opium.

The USS Florida sank the German torpedo boat V43 as a target.  The HMS Harmodius accidentally rammed the E. Marie Brown, sinking her with the loss of four crewmen.

 Monsignor Atanasia Vicente Sole y Royo

Monsignor Atanasia Vincente Sole y Royo visited Washington, D.C.  I attempted to learn who he was, but was unable, but I get the sense that he was associated with South America in some fashion.  He was clearly important enough to receive an official audience, and he was certainly impressive looking.

Members of Washington's Krazy Kat Klub, were photographed on this day in 1921.

The club was a jazz age institution in Washington D.C. that was Bohemian in the extreme.  It served alcohol during prohibition and was libertine in all senses.  It closed when one of its owners, depicted in the photo below, moved in the late 1920s.

No inside photographs of the club exist.

Places like this fancied themselves on the cutting edge of everything.  In retrospect, they seem pretty superficial.

Also on this day, a photographer took a picture of this house made out of repurposed streetcars.

Repurposing

House made of streetcars, July 15, 1921.

Thursday, July 24, 1919. A "Quiet and uneventful day" on the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy, Cedar Rapids to Marshalltown, Iowa. 75 miles in 9.5 hours. The Round The Rim flight takes off from Washington D.C. National Association of Negro Musicians meets in Chicago..

A typical day for the Motor Transport Convoy.

Breakdowns, rescues by the Militor, lunch and with the Red Cross.  The Knights of Columbus, in this instance, provided refreshments and dinner at Marshalltown, Iowa.

A "Quiet and uneventful day".

The Knights of Columbus were one of the many U.S. service organizations that responded to World War One.  As we addressed earlier, an organization like the USO didn't exist during the Great War, and service organizations filled that roll instead.  The war was now over, of course, but many of them were still acting in that role as mobilization wound down, and of course they would have responded to events like this in any event.  The KoC is a Catholic service organization.

It wasn't as quiet at Bolling Field at Washington D.C. where the U.S. Army commenced a second transcontinental expedition, this time by air.

A single Martin GMB bomber with five crewmen took off to circumnavigate the rim of the U.S. border, counter clockwise in what was billed the Round the Rim Flight.

The country had been crossed by air before, as indeed the country had been driven across before, but a giant flight around the periphery of the country was new.  That the air branch of the Army would commences this while the Army was driving across the center of the country is a bit of an odd coincidence, if it is.

The flight by a single aircraft was about 10,000 miles in length, and it took until November to complete.  Completion, we'd note, was a returning to Bolling Field.

Stealing thunder?  The Round The Rim Flight made the front page of the Casper paper.

The National Association of Negro Musicians commenced its first meeting in Chicago.  It's the nation's oldest organization of black musicians and had formed that prior May.

African Americans had a strong presence in American music since it became a thing of its own.  The Great Migration had brought, and was very much then bringing, African American musicians and forms of music north, and into the American mainstream at the time, with jazz and blues influenced musical forms very much on the rise.  That the conference was held in Chicago, a northern city, cannot be regarded as an accident.

Pondering the Post War World. . .hit and miss. . . the news of November 13, 1918.

On this mid week of 1918 (this paper was published on a Wednesday) the Wyoming State Tribune was pondering the post war world with some optimism.

Not all of which would prove warranted.

First we'll note, however, that the depiction of Germany's new borders was spot on, showing once again how remarkably accurate these World War One papers tended to be.  They weren't always, and this past week with rumors of the armistice arriving prematurely, and with additional rumors that Red German sailors who had in fact sabotaged their ships to some degree were going to come out fighting, they were off the mark more than a little. But by and large, they appear to be on in just about the same degree as modern papers tend to be.

But as to a post war economic boom. .  not so much.

In fact the end of the war brought on a mild recession that started this very year; 1918. That recession would continue on into 1919, when a recovery would be staged, but following that a severe recession hit in 1920 and lasted until 1921.  

Overall, both periods of recession were brief, and there were some oddities to them. The American recession of 1918 actually started in August, which is flat out bizarre when it is considered that the United States was really just getting fully committed to combat in the Great War at that time and that it was conscripting all the way through the end of the war, thereby creating labor shortages that were growing worse.  That a recession would hit should have been expected, but a rational expectation should have been that it would have hit in early 1919.  It didn't, and overall the first recession only lasted seven months.

The second much worse one hit in January 1920 and lasted until 1921. That one makes much more sense if we keep in mind that while the fighting ended, the war technically went on into 1919 and the United States continued to maintain and supply a large overseas army that was on occupation duty that entire time.  Indeed, combat troops finally left Europe in September 1919 but an occupation force of 16,000 U.S. troops based out of Coblenz remained in Germany until 1923.  And somewhat forgotten, while the fighting had ended in France and Belgium, it continued on in Russia where a U.S. commitment remained until fully withdrawn on April 1, 1920. 

Of course, this has an expression in what we was called the Jazz Age.  No era of any kind every has a clean break from one to another, but in this case the effects of the war in various ways lingered through the first recession until the lid really came off and the post war world set in which gave us the Roaring Twenties/Jazz Age, which continued on until the crash of October 1929.  The Jazz Age, in a lot of ways, was the preamble to the 1960s, brought to an abrupt end by the economic realities of the Great War.

In Wyoming, as is so often the case, the national economy didn't really follow the path of the national one.  The oil boom of the Great War came to a screeching halt with the end of the war.  Oil production and refining of course went on, and the conversion of Casper Wyoming from a minor oil town into a significant oil city, was permanent.  But a local recession was inevitable with the end of the war.

Amplifying that recession was a general recession in the agricultural sector as a whole.  Massive demands for meat, wool, leather, and grain came to a rapid end, and with it came an agricultural depression that lasted through the economic recovery and on into the next recession.  1919, in fact, was the last year in American history in which farm families shared economic parity with urban families.

So the paper got that one wrong.  But its map of post war Germany was quite right.  The rest of the new European map had yet to be worked out through the process of the Versailles Treaty and local effort in new nations, to include the effort of new wears that erupted following the collapse of empires in the Great War, but that process was going on at the very time this paper was printed.

Holland didn't really treat the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II like any other interned German officer.  He became a permanent exiled resident who never did come to see his removal as justified or his actions as questionable.  He'd die there during World War Two.

And while the paper gave a positive prognosis on the news that Theodore Roosevelt was in the hospital but would recover, the old lion wasn't himself anymore.

Nonsensical Decadal Characterization

 A calendar for 1897. Featuring a calico cat and an artist, the way we typically think of the late 1890s. . .right?

You know you've heard or seen them.

"A look back at the turbulent 60s!"

"A tour through the Rockin' 50s"

"The Roaring 20s"

Or even just "The 80s".

Whatever.

All of these decadal references are darned near worthless, as whatever supposedly characterizes a decade, tends not to.

That doesn't mean that there aren't eras, even short ones of ten years or so, that are unique.  But they just don't start on the first year of a decade, and end on the last.  Indeed, that's highly deceptive.

Consider, for example, "the 60s", a decade we hear so much about because it supposedly "defines a generation".  Well, if it does, it defines it oddly.

The 1960s of course, started in 1960 and ended in 1969. But are 1960 and 1969 really in the same era?  They don't seem to be.

Indeed, the era up to 1964 is really part of what we consider to be the 1950s, really. Styles, haircuts, music, etc., all really fit into that "1950s" class of things. This is so much the case, in fact, that the movie that started off the whole 1950s nostalgia craze of the 1970s, American Graffiti, is set in the early 1960s not the 1950s.

It isn't really until 1965 that the "60s" started, and probably with our intervention in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, which started all the way back in 1958 in the form in which we entered it (or in 1945 in its French Indochina form), seems to be central to the "turbulent" 1960s, due to the war itself, I suppose, and the following opposition to it.  Conventional American ground forces went into Vietnam in 1965.

But they left in 1973.  And really, the 1970s at least as late as 1973 are really part of the "1960s". All the same protests, wars and controversy is party of it.  Shoot, Jimi Hendrix died in the early 1970s, not the 1960s, and so did Janis Joplin.

And regarding the 1960s, are the Cold War standoffs of the early 1960s really part of the same era that gave us Woodstock?  They don't seem to be.  Was the nation that was ready to go to war over Soviet missiles in Cuba the same one that was disenchanted with our involvement in Vietnam?

All that sort of means the 1970s, that "Me Decade", which should probably regarded as The Baby Boomers Second Decade, as they defined the "1960s" as well, really probably started in 1974, and probably ended perhaps in 1981 when Ronald Reagan became President.  Oddly, as a result of that, the "80s" fit about as neatly into a decadal calendar slotting as any decade, as a new era started when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

What about the aforementioned 1950s?  Well, they didn't really start until 1955.  Surely our image of the Korean War doesn't fit the 1950s. That's some other era, one that ran from 1946 to 1955.  It seemingly has no name, other than occasionally "the early Cold War", or "the post war".  It's not "the 40s", however, as that's World War Two, which as an era really runs from about 1938 until 1945.  And the post war era, in which people were eager to return to school, start families, buy consumer goods, take advantage of the GI Bill, etc., doesn't quite match the war years, but in some ways it does.  It sort of looks like them, in a home front sort of way, but it doesn't quite feel the same, and it didn't sound the same either, as the big bands, so notable for the sounds of the late 1930s and the war years, began to pass away pretty quickly after the war.

The "war years", that we associate with the "1940s" creeps into the 1930s, of course, but the 1930s is really thought of as The Great Depression, which started in 1929, truncating the Jazz Age, which started in 1919, with the end of World War One.  World War One, like World War Two, is really its own age, and while the war theoretically ran from 1914 to 1918, we probably ought to go back to at least 1912 for the era.

That would close out, sort of, The Progressive Era, which came up, sort of, with McKinley's second administration, or 1900.

So what area are we in now?  No way to tell.  You have to be past them, by some distance, to know.

Not that it particularly matters. Any one age is what it is. Except the easy mischaractrization of any one age does create some pretty false and superficial memories.  "The 1950s" as the age of teenage rock and roll doesn't really do much for a decade that featured wars in Korea, Indochina and the Middle East, and a titanic face off between the East and West, for example.  The years 1945 to 1955 are darned near forgotten except to historians.  The early 1960s are lumped into the 60s in a way that doesn't accurately reflect them at all.

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

This blog notes, as we've stated many times before, changes over history. Specifically, it supposedly looks at the 1890 to about 1920 time frame, but we also frankly hardly ever stick to that.  Oh well.

Business men (lawyers) in the early 20th Century. These men aren't dressed up, they would have been dressed in this fashion every day.  Given the boater style hat worn by the man on the left, this photograph must have been taken in summer.

A lot of times the observations that take place here are based on what we can observe in historic documents and photographs. But on this topic, which I just posted on in a way in a post on school clothing standards, and which I've flat out posted on before, I've actually observed a change, and I'm really starting to observe in an ever increasing fashion now.  As I noted in that post, the clothing policy that's in place now, was the same on in place 40 years ago. Having said that, public standards of dress really have changed, and changed a very great deal.

On that, I'll note that it's one thing to say that we can look at photos of the past, which we can, and note that clothing standards have declined.  It's another to be able to say that you personally recall it.  And its something else to say both.

This is brought on, really, as I've been in a lot of airports recently, although I've also been noticing it in other contexts as well.  If there's a place that's better suited to observe a cross section of Americans than the airport, I don't know what it is.  At the airport, and more specifically a big city airport, people of every class and station are present. And man, have our dress standards declined.

 

Denver International Airport.  If a person enjoyed people watching (which isn't my favorite thing to do), this would be a good place to do it.

I'm not anywhere near old enough to be able to recall an era when airline passengers wore suit and tie, and the equivalent for women, but that has been something that's been widely observed.  I've seen that explained on the basis that air travel was special, and people accordingly dress up.

 

 Sailor boarding Western Airlines C-46 in the early 1950s, from the Casper International Airport.

I don't believe it.  They dressed up for the train and bus too. 

 Cross country train passengers, on rest break, Kearney Nebraska, 1944

 People were, quite frankly, just better dressed, and everywhere.

In many instances, they were more formally dressed.  Men clearly wore suit and tie much more often than they do now, well into the 20th Century. "Business attire" was suit and tie.  Now, that is not the case and the term is probably unknown to many. Men's suits have almost become relegated to a very narrow set of occupations and occasions, and even with them its declining.  I've attended a mediation, for example, fairly recently where one of the attending attorneys did not wear suit and tie, and was dressed in "business casual". Not all that long ago that would have been simply unthinkable.  For that matter, we used to always wear at least a tie in a deposition but now, more often than not, that's not the case.  I went to one deposition fairly recently where one of the attorneys was wearing sandals, something that just would not have occurred a decade ago.

 Secretary (who remain among the best dressed office workers) in the 1940s.

It isn't just lawyers, of course, who wore business suits.  The number of men who wore suits well into the 1950s, every day, is hard to grasp by modern standards.  Men who worked in offices wore suits, and many others who worked indoors, or just worked in cities, did as well.  Almost every professional wore a suit every day, but then so did men who had "business" positions.  Suit and tie, or at least coat and tie, were the norm.

Typical office, 1902.   The female secretary would have actually been somewhat unusual at this time.

This standard of dress for the employed adult remained common all the way through the 1950s, and began to decline during the 1960s.  Probably the cultural revolution that commenced about that time had a large influence, and it actually influenced business wear at the time, which didn't go away, but did start to modify. Still, into the 1970s I can distinctly recall professionals wearing ties every day. By the 1980s, some classes of them, such as doctors and dentists, no longer did.

When I started practicing law in 1990 suits and ties were already not common for most office workers most places.  That era had passed. But they were frequently seen being worn by lawyers.  They still are, but that's because lawyers, along with a very few other professions, still have coat and tie or at least suit and tie as parts of their "uniform".  But a big change has occurred even here.  As noted above, when I started out, not only would you see them frequently in the office, and worn everyday by older lawyers, you'd always see them in depositions.  Now, that's not the case.  I've attended a fair number of depositions recently in which the lawyers at them were wearing blue jeans and dress shirts, but no ties. Something that would never have occurred in the past.  I still normally wear a tie to a deposition, and except when its hot, I'll often wear one every day.  Maybe that's a call back to the old standard of professionalism, or the old uniform, or maybe that's just because I'm old.

I will say that by and large women in offices are much more routinely nicely dressed than men. Their "uniform" was always more vague, most men couldn't describe it, and perhaps that's allowed them somehow to retain more professional dress.  Anyhow, generally they are more professionally dressed. 

This doesn't men that men in offices are slovenly, but it does mean that as a rule we're now fairly casual.  Jeans and semi dress shirts are the common business attire in many places now, but not all.  In big cities, at least, the uniforms seems to hang on to a much greater degree in professional offices.  But, in some ways, the old business standard is now really only common among lawyers, real estate agents, and newscasters.  

It's not that I'm any different, however.  I'll note that while I'll often wear khaki trousers, button down shirt, and tie, I too wear jeans a lot more than I used to.  So perhaps even in noting this, I'm somewhat hypocritical.

It's not just that dress is more casual, however, but it's less real, in some ways, or odder, or perhaps more in the nature of an attempted personal statement than every before.  Men and women rarely dressed in a fanciful manner to the extent they do now.  Some did, to be sure. Some occupations have always worn very distinctive and somewhat ornamental clothing, and starting in the 1920s the young started to definitely wear clothing that tended to mark them out from their elders.   In earlier years, for that matter, "dandies" were young men who dressed fancifully, and were noted for it.  The 1920s saw flapper attire, for example, and raccoon skin coats.  So the trend, perhaps, dates back at least that far, if not further, but it's of a bit different character somehow.

 Mary LaFollette, daughter of Senator LaFollette, wearing a raccoon coat at at time when they were associated with avant guarde youth for some reason.  Ms. LaFollette would have been in her 30s at the time this photo was taken, making her choice of coat unusual.

Flapper, 1922, in winter (note the rubber boots).

Zoot suiters dancing, 1940s. The Zoot Suit exaggerated the features of the business suit, almost recalling the 19th Century frock coat.  Bigger, baggier, and bigger overall, they were considered sort of offensive to some, for some reason.  The uniform of rebellion in the late 1930s, the style was particularly associated with blacks and Hispanics at the time, which might be why white teens affecting the look were regarded as rebellious. The style has hung on to a small extent in some Pacific Coast Hispanic communities.

A full blown suspension of any concept of standard dress, which is sort of what we're seeing, is actually very recent, however.  There was prior youthful clothing affectation, but in order to actually dress to shock, there has to be some standard to measure against. That's increasingly no longer the case. At the airport, once again, it's clear that there are no standards, well actually very few standards, apply to Americans in dress at all.

At the Denver International Airport this past week I observed all manners of dress, from very formal, to extremely sloppy.  Some men were dressed in suits, probably headed to meetings or to court. Oilfield workers in the uniforms of their trade.  Many men and women in t-shirts and jeans.  Some young men seeking to show their avant guard status in the uniform of their avant guard class, impossibly tight jeans, shirt, and stubble. And women in all matters of dress from the 19th Century down to nearly no dress at all.

And that brings up a question.

Does that matter?

Well, it might.

Casual is one thing, and we've seen that around for quite awhile. But all clothing sends some sort of message, and the question therefore would become is casual appropriate for everything, and is what we're now seeing something a bit beyond casual. Let's look at the second question first.

Going back to the airport, I was walking down a concourse when, going the other way, I observed a young woman struggling with a bag.  I don't know her age, and I'm frankly not very good at judging the age of young people.  If pressed, I'd guess that she was maybe 17, which given my general inability in this area, means that she was probably at least 16 and perhaps 22.  Who knows.  Although here too, that makes a difference.

It makes a difference as her dress was, quite frankly, indecent.  It would have been appropriate for a profession in which she was offering her wares for sale, which again is to say indecent, but it certainly wasn't decent for being in common company such as getting on an airplane.  I was, quite frankly, embarrassed for her, which tends to be the reaction of somebody who knows that the actual person isn't embarrassed themselves, but sure should be.  If she was 17, her parents shouldn't have let her out of the house dressed as she was.  If she wasn't, her parents should be ashamed on how things are seemingly turning out. So should she.

But, the remarkable thing is that this is no longer remarkable.  It's hard to get through DIA without running into some woman who appears to be on display.  And it's also hard to get through DIA without running into a younger male who is also on display, which at least for men of my generations is also an embarrassing thing to see.

For that matter, however, it's been equally embarrassing to go by any of the local middle schools in recent years, dropping kids off, and having to witness what some very young teens manage to get out of the house wearing.  Not all by any means, but enough to notice. What are their parents thinking?  It actually seems to be better by the time they get to high school, having perhaps wised up a bit in the intervening couple of years.

Now, I don't want to suggest that every single woman in DIA, or anywhere else, is dressed in this fashion.  Not at all.  On the same trip there were women looking for a plane that were dressed in the type of dress that Amish or Hutterite women dress in.  So you see everything.  But the change here isn't so much that we see them, as we have come to accept that young women can appear anywhere in what would have been regarded as indecent, and young men can appear in clothing that would have been regarded as perhaps more suitable for young women, not all that long ago. Quite a change.

On the women, and I'll expound on this separately, the problem is that this really is an offense to their dignity.  Once on display, they're an object, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to be regarded in that fashion.  The clothing goes from "look at me", to offering something for nothing.  And by doing that, they're no longer going to be judged for anything else, not even really their looks, but rather in what they suggest about their conduct. And as its common, it also suggests that's common conduct.  Not a good thing at all.

Well, does anyone care at all, if it does matter?

This is a topic that gets a surprising amount of discussion in some quarters, although perhaps not in the quarters which it should.  For one thing, its a surprisingly common topic on certain sites where religious conservatives hang out, as some there feel that a certain level of dress is appropriate at least in Church.  On one such site, for example, a quote from St. Francis de Sales was recently posted, in which he noted, regarding appropriate dress in general, the following.

St. Paul expresses his desire that all Christian women should wear “modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety;”—and for that matter he certainly meant that men should do so likewise.

Now, modesty in dress and its appearances depends upon the quality, the fashion and the cleanliness thereof. As to cleanliness, that should be uniform, and we should never, if possible, let any part of our dress be soiled or stained. External seemliness is a sort of indication of inward good order, and God requires those who minister at His Altar, or minister in holy things, to be attentive in respect of personal cleanliness.

As to the quality and fashion of clothes, modesty in these points must depend upon various circumstances, age, season, condition, the society we move in, and the special occasion. Most people dress better on a high festival than at other times; in Lent, or other penitential seasons, they lay aside all gay apparel; at a wedding they wear wedding garments, at a funeral, mourning garb; and at a king’s court the dress which would be unsuitable at home is suitable.

Always be neat, do not ever permit any disorder or untidiness about you. There is a certain disrespect to those with whom you mix in slovenly dress; but at the same time avoid all vanity, peculiarity, and fancifulness. As far as may be, keep to what is simple and unpretending–such dress is the best adornment of beauty and the best excuse for ugliness.

St. Peter bids women not to be over particular in dressing their hair. Every one despises a man as effeminate who lowers himself by such things, and we count a vain woman as wanting in modesty, or at all events what she has becomes smothered among her trinkets and furbelows. They say that they mean no harm, but I should reply that the devil will contrive to get some harm out of it all.

For my own part I should like my devout man or woman to be the best dressed person in the company, but the least fine or splendid, and adorned, as St. Peter says, with “the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit.” St. Louis said that the right thing is for every one to dress according to his position, so that good and sensible people should not be able to say they are over-dressed, or younger gayer ones that they are under-dressed. But if these last are not satisfied with what is modest and seemly, they must be content with the approbation of the elders.

While I suppose that some could take exception with some of this, all in all its pretty good advice and it applies in the secular world as well, which may be why dress is also a topic that shows up on certain male "manliness" sites.  And no wonder.  One of the odd trends in dress over the past seventy years is that male dress, among youth, trended towards being exaggerated blue collar in the 1950s, and then just counter culture in the 60s, to both in the 70s and 80s, but then sort of slowly slid towards the effeminate in the 1990s.  Male dress among the hip and cool is much more effeminate now than it was in prior decades, although that's a trend that's happened in some past eras as well.  No doubt there's a reason for it, but I don't know (or even really care much), what it is, other that that if a guy has to put a lot of work into looking a sort of femaleish disheveled, they have too much time on their hands.  Oddly, at the same time, there's been no trend for women to look more feminine, although there's definitely been a trend encouraging them to put themselves more on display, which benefits only men really, and not women at all.  Balancing it out on the male end, a bit, there's now a counter trend in the "hipster" category where men dress sort of lumberjack like and grow their beards out Russian Old Believer like.  I actually kind of like the trend.

I should note, in all of this, that I probably have no real room to act as a social critic here. Well, maybe I do, but not one that can't be criticized.  I was part of the great t-shirt wearing male mass of the late 1970s and 1980s and I didn't even own a suit until I was in my last year, I think, of my undergraduate studies, when I got one in order to attend the wedding of the first of my high school friends to get married (odd to think it was that late, we'd been out of high school for five years at the time).  I didn't learn how to even tie a tie until basic training at Ft. Sill, and I didn't routinely wear one until I became a lawyer.  So I wasn't exactly an advertisement for Brooks Brothers (although I've owned a couple of their very fine suits).  Prior to 1986, I was more likely to be clad in a t-shirt and jeans than anything else, even in winter.  Starting around 1984 or so I started to be afflicted with being old all winter long, which I still am, and started wearing heavy shirts in the winter, which outside of work I still do.  Getting wiser to things after that, I usually wear a long sleeve shirt even in the summer, and just roll up the sleeves when its hot, particularly if I do outdoor work, thereby turning full circle as I knew to do that even when I was a teen and wasn't.

Anyhow, looking like a cowhand  on my free time for most of my life doesn't qualify me to seemingly offer sartorial commentary.  And it probably particularly does not as, referring back to the entry immediately above, being a Catholic in the upper plains means I'm part of that odd demographic that doesn't tend to dress up for Church, so that whole debate is sort of outside of my experience.  That may seem odd, but most Catholics in this region, perhaps because the churches are either hot or cold depending upon the season, or because everyone came from a blue collar or agricultural background at one time, tend not to dress up for Church at all. They still don't either, including myself.  Only a few people do, and by my observation if you happen to attend a Spanish language Mass, you'll see the best dressed people as Mexican immigrants tend to dress nicely, but in a nice rural fashion for the men.

An interesting question here might be, what happened?  And I think the answer might be different for men as opposed to women.  What I'll note first, however, is that men who have a distinct outdoors job tend to suspend fashion and wear the dress appropriate for that job.  Oilfield workers still dress for that vocation. Cowboys dress like cowboys on and off the ranch.  Soldiers tend to look like soldiers no matter what they are doing.   And that's part of the answer to this, I think.

 Oilfield roughnecks of the 1940s.  Roughnecks today would look much the same, except that now they wear "FRs", Fire Resistant Clothing, and metal helmets have been replaced by plastic.

Modern cowboys, whose general appearance hasn't really changed much for well over a century.

In an earlier era, when every vocation was more "real", if you will, or rather perhaps when more men worked in manual vocations, there was little interest in fanciful dress.  For those who worked in town, at one time they desire seemed to be to show that they'd achieved an indoor status.  Indeed, some have noted that the standards of dress remained remarkably high in the 1920s and 1930s, first when many Americans started moving off of farms and into the cities, and secondly during the Great Depression, as that was the way of showing that you'd overcome your past.  The standards then carried on until they had a reason, or at least there was some sort of cause, or lack of a reason to change.

Let's look at this a bit more closely.

To start with, something worth noting is that the number of clothes we now have, and the ease of washing them as well, far exceeds anything from even the relatively recent past, and certain at the point we need to start this story, which probably needs to go back at least until the 19th Century, if not further back. We'll start in the second half of the 1800s.

At that time the majority of Americans were rural in character and the majority of those who were not worked at some sort of trade.  Shopkeepers, businessmen and professionals existed, but they were nowhere near the percentage of the population that they now are. And that has an impact on our story.

Most Americans, even mid century, were clothed in clothes that had been locally made, if in fact not made at home by a family seamstress. And they didn't have much in the way of a change of clothing either.  Old recounts of people at the time often note rural people wearing "homespun", that is wool clothing made from cloth weaved at home.  "Homespun" was almost a synonymy for rustic, or primitive.  When somebody, even now, talks about "homespun tales", they hearken back to that meaning, derived from the type of cloth.

Professionals in the cities, and for that matter the wealthy, didn't dress that way. All their clothes were tailored from manufactured cloth.  They were visibly different.

Manufactured clothing began to come in during the mid 19th Century, but even at that, while it became widely worn, it didn't look exactly the same as well tailored clothing and, also, the average person had very few changes of clothing.  The average farmer, a major demographic section in the US, might have just a couple of clothes including a jacket that he might want to wear on occasions calling for more formal wear.  People were conscious of this, of course, but it also meant that any average male was not going to invest in clothing that couldn't serve more than one purpose, and none of those items were going to have "Jack's Bar & Grill" blazoned across them.

In this environment, the clothing worn by people in towns and cities, particularly in the 1900s forward, really sent a message, and that's important to note.  Also important to note, up into the 1950s, it was possible to move careers of any type, without a formal education, fairly easily.

Going back to a typical American, let's say of 1900, we can see how this entire process has worked, to some degree, fairly easily.  If we take an American of 18 years old, who has grown up on a Mid Western farm, we'll be looking at a fairly typical American. He's probably within easy traveling distance, but real distance, from some mid sized or even big city, and his education, which would have stopped at high school (if it went that far) would have been sufficiently good to enter an office occupation of the era without additional education.  So, if he's the second third son of a family of five, in 1900, he'd be looking at world in which acquiring a farm of his own would be somewhat difficult and so, perhaps, he'd look to the city.

Going into the city, he'd be wearing the sort of rough clothes of his background, and he'd be conscious of it. That wouldn't keep him, however, from finding a clerk's job in some office.  Let's say an insurance office.

Boy clerk in a law office, early 20th Century.

Our subject, let's say, acquires a job in the office, but he looks like a "hay seed" and he knows it.  Probably the fist thing he'll buy is a set of clothes at Sears or Montgomery Ward, which will include a couple of shirts capable of taking a starched collar, and a suit.  Probably just one suit frankly.  And a couple of ties.  Now  he'll look the part of his job, and that would have been the uniform of his office. That it would have been the uniform is clear. And it would have been that, as this office and its owners would want to have made it plain that they were professionals, like lawyers and doctors in town. And the lawyers and doctors in town would have dressed that way because they could, and also to point out that they were successful, not merely people who had drifted in from the country, even if in fact they had drifted in from the country.

 African American lawyer, 1940s.

So, back to our hero, after a few years he'd have moved up to a better position in the little company, and his clothes would have approved a little bit over the same course of time. All the while he would have traveled back and forth to the farm, and he'd want them to know that even though he was the middle son, he was doing fine.  Probably after about a decade he'd have married, and chances are the girl he would have married would have had a similar story of some sort.  We're now in the early 10s.  By the 20s, he'd have had a family, and by the 30s, chances are that one of his kids would be entering the business. That son would enter it, in the 30s, with this standard of dress solidly in place and reinforced by the disaster of the Great Depression.

 

American novelist, Winston Churchill (not the British politician).  Probably early 1920s. Note how formal he appears, even though this is actually a fairly informal summer suit for the period.  Not too many writers would be dressed like this now, just to go to town.

It wouldn't be until the 50s, or even really the 60s ,when things would begin to change, and our example demonstrates in part why. By that time, the original message being conveyed would have been lost.  By that time, the distinction between past life and current, and urban and rural, would have been nearly completely lost.  At best, a young man of the early 60s would know of his rural ancestors, but those would tend to be just stories.

And you can play this out in any number of ways, and locations as well.  For example, you can easily imagine, for example, a Sicilian immigrant coming in as a child, say perhaps about 15 years of age, alone, into the United States via Ellis Island at this time.  He'd go right to work for some Italian enterprise in New York and even at that tender age he'd shed his immigrant peasant clothing for something more urban as quickly as he could. By the 20s he might own that or another enterprise, and by the 50s his grand children would be completely Americanized and only barely recall his immigrant past. And so on.* 

 Storekeeper, 1937.

Moreover, at that point, education had gone from being uncommon post high school to really common, which came on in a major way following World War Two.  A sense of entitlement crept in.  Looked at that way, our new subject, say in 1965, would have little connection with his great grandfather's life of 1900, and wouldn't even grasp the concept that this fellow had regarded himself as really lucky to get a job clerking in an insurance office. Chance are that he'd look at his father insurance agency as dull and boring, and not something for an educated fellow like himself. And why should he wear a boring business suit, the armor of conformity?  It shouldn't be presumed that the change came in really quickly, as that would be wholly incorrect, but change did come in and over about a 30 year period the former standards on men's wear more or less disappeared.  Women's dress, oddly enough.  Women's dress changed very substantially as well, but to a surprisingly smaller extent in the business context.**

While this was going on, something else was also occurring that would impact dress as well, and as its part of the story, it has to be added in.  It wasn't just that people moved away from a rural or blue collar background, and indeed that was only partially true.  But an increase in wealth after World War Two had a major impact on dress.

As we've already noted, people in the early half of the 20th Century tended to have fewer clothes.  Indeed, my father noted to me once, while I was buying a suit, that a good thing to get is a suit with two pairs of pants. Apparently the last time he'd bought a suit, which had been appreciable time earlier, that was still an option, and apparently it had been a common option. The reason for that was that people repeated their clothing frequently, and having two pairs of pants for one suit made that much more easy to do.  I've never seen this option offered for the sale of a suit, so as they became less common this option must have died out.

Anyhow, prior to the end of World War Two people just had fewer changes of clothes. But the war brought in cotton clothing to an extent that hadn't existed before, and cotton clothing is easily washable.  And the big increase in wealth that was brought on by the end of World War Two and the boom in the consumer economy meant that people could afford to do that.

Not only could they afford to do that, moreover, but the degree to which clothes needed to have an immediate utility declined fairly substantially with the rise of urban centers.

Prior to the war, nearly ever teen had worked in some capacity, and nearly everyone, even the wealthy, had done at least a little manual labor.  Clothing, therefore, wasn't typically ornamental as it couldn't be, that much.  But after the war the extent to which the young were employed only by self option increased.

Concurrent with that, however, was the fact of the recent war itself.  The youngest of those who were conscripted for World War Two were only 28 years old in 1955 (although the oldest were 57 that same year).  There was a large societal experience, therefore, with the war and also with blue collar labor, which had been an important aspect of the war.  As already noted, college availability massively increased following the war, but not everyone aspired to that.  With an increase in wealth, and an accordingly large increase in youthful leisure, for the first time you really had "rebellious youth".

Now, some youthful rebellion has always been around, but the character at this time was really different.  Youth in rebellion, before World War Two, had really been sort of a college demographic thing.  It had popped up in the 1920s, following World War One, and it had expressed it self in one rebellious set in the jazz age culture of that time. I.e, flappers, etc. In another set, it actually expressed itself with the surprisingly large flirtation with Communism among college youth at that time, which oddly enough also had a sartorial expression, particularly with women.  Whitaker Chamber noted that at that time it was easy to spot a Communist woman as they all had the same bobbed hair style, including that affected by his wife when he met her (although she wasn't a Communist, but a different type of Socialist revolutionary).  Some of this continued on into the 1940s, sufficiently enough that Bill Mauldin made it the subject of one his early post World War Two cartoons.

But rebellion at the late teen stage was truly new, and it was informed by the recent war and the heroic status of the American working class.  So, armed with surplus cash, it affected a costume reflecting that, blue jeans, white t-shirts, and leather jackets, all stuff that recalled blue collar work or Army life.

That in turn was the situation when the turbulent 1960s came on, and everything that came on with it occurred.  And that gave us the onset of the decline in clothing standards.  It certainly did not complete it, however.  That took some time. But the decline in the standards in youthful attire were pretty well established by the 1970s, and the pushing of the boundaries in female attire were in swing by then as well.  By the 80s the decline had firmly set in, and by the 1990s the idea that a person should advertise themselves in some fashion was pretty well entrenched.***

Now, then, the second part of the question. Does it matter.

It probably actually does.

Wes, we answered that a bit above, but we'll conclude with it again.  While perhaps it really shouldn't matter, it seems to.

A funny thing about clothing is that it appears to send a message no matter what a person wants to do.  And the fact that it does it appears to cross all cultures at all time, and to be understood by all, even out of context.  It's not really too hard to look back and portrayals of earlier eras and determine who was formally dressed, who was not, and who was a dandy, and to even draw conclusions about those people accordingly.  People seem to do it instinctively.

That doesn't mean that people should dress the same way at all times. Fashions do indeed change, but perhaps the basic messages clothing conveys remain remarkably unchanging.  People who affect a certain fashion due to their occupation generally give off the message that they're in it, and usually they're proud of that.  "Real" clothing sends a message.  Dressing to a fashion that intentionally sends some avant guard message, or worse yet attempts to co-opt the real, usually just looks silly over time.  The "dandies" of one era look silly later on.  People, whether they should or not, will look at women's fashion with a sharper eye than men's, and men who work really hard to achieve a certain trendy look usually look silly even in their own era, at least a bit.  So, perhaps, the really exposed view of fashion some women are taking now ought to be backed off, and maybe everyone ought to pay a little more attention to the basic rules, which doesn't mean that everyone needs to go out and buy a frock coat or something.

Of course, a person could start with themselves.  I wore blue jeans to work most of last week, something that would never have occurred in most law office even twenty years ago.

___________________________________________________________________________________

*While citations to movies are always risky, this is an area in which some of what's described here can really be demonstrated via movies, and in two ways. One is movies set in their own times that simply accidentally demonstrate the conditions of the day, and another is movies set in a period that do a really good example of illustrating the same thing.  Movies do have to be approach cautiously, however, as even some really respected films really blow it in these regards.

As to the first category, a movie that captures the relationship between presentation of success and dress in American culture prior to World War Two is the film White Heat.  A person wouldn't think of it in that fashion, but if you look at it carefully, it demonstrates this very well. All of the central characters in White Heat are really bad, but they dress increasingly well as the film goes on. They're gangsters, but they don't dress gansta. Why not? They're blue collar and they want to look like they've made it, in the context of their times. And they do.

In the second category, two really good films in this category are The Godfather and The Godfather, Part Two. Part Two does a super job of present dress over time, all the way from about 1900 up to the early 1960s, and the second example I've given above is more or less given in the film, albeit in the context of the "family business" being a criminal enterprise.

**Again, to use well done film as an example, this is interestingly illustrated on the big and small screen.

In terms of movies, the degree to which suit or suit jackets held on is illustrated by the police dramas The French Connection and Shaft. Both show the trend away from it, but they also show how it was hanging on.  Popeye Doyle and Shaft are sort of hip and cool, in context, but they're surprisingly well dressed as well, in a way.

On the small screen, popular television series of the 1970s show this as well.  Shows like Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart show people in office settings in which their dress, while contemporary for the times, is much more conservative, as a rule, than presently, and coat and tie hang on.

***Citing a film again, the view of this sort of change, and the degree to which that view was naive, is perhaps well set out in the film The Graduate.

In that film, Dustin Hoffman plays a recent college graduate trying to find his way, with his parent's generation portrayed as hypocritical. But with an informed sense of history, and now looking back on what is now a very old film, the Hoffman character doesn't come across so well.  He's a privileged youth with a college education, among a generation that had to fight for everything it ever had.  So as a revolutionary, he's sort of a slacker.