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| Fashions | |
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| 1940s | Today |
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It is even reflected in clebrities:
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| 1940s | Today |
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Our First Ladies (Shown here on vacation):
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| 1960s | Today |
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| Fashions | |
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| 1940s | Today |
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It is even reflected in clebrities:
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| 1940s | Today |
.
Our First Ladies (Shown here on vacation):
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| 1960s | Today |
It is one of the things in life that I think has not been good.
The lack of...ceremony. Not in the sense of celebrating, but in the sense of people adhering to an unwritten social standard.
Examples are what you see people wearing to parties, work, church and restaurants.
There was a time when you wore a decent suit to a party. Now you wear whatever you please.
If you went to work, you were generally expected to dress a certain way. Nobody had to tell you. Now, most places have “dress codes”, and people are constantly bucking the dress code, even the reasonable guidelines.
You wore good clothes to church.
You had to wear decent clothes to a nice restaurant. Now, there is hardly a restaurant you couldn’t get into with a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops.
Look at old photos of any large sporting event up until the mid 20th century. The men are all wearing suits.
I recently saw a picture in an old Life magazine showing a typical downtown scene in a small town, sometime in the late forties. The sidewalks were jammed with people, nearly every guy was wearing a suit, women were wearing dresses, and kids wore good clothes. It was a social scene.
When I saw that picture, it could have been on Mars with today’s standards. I think we lost something when we got away from that.
Compared to the Victorian era, men in the 1940’s were slobs, too. The idea that clothes are a status symbol is something I am glad has diminished.
I was trying to put my finger on it, why that seems something important and was lost, and realized it wasn’t just to display a flashy suit in many cases.
It was to show respect for the people and the situation you were going to be involved in.
That pic on the upper right, of the guys in jeans and fairly normal-fitting shorts, actually looks neat compared to what I see during the summer...or what I call slob season. Men wear oversized, long, flapping tees, and big baggy shorts past their knees. I wish I could remember the name of the Freeper who said they look like overgrown Peanuts characters.
And don’t get me started on flip-flops....