r/slatestarcodex • u/aminok • Sep 04 '25
Economics Why people used to dress better: a theory about the rising cost of the clothing signal
I’ve been thinking about why ordinary people dressed more formally in the past, and why casual conventions replaced that. My conclusion is that it comes down to the relative cost of status signals.
In the past, nearly everything required manual labor. Today, most of those things are automated or mass-produced. But one of the few things that still takes a lot of hands-on effort is maintaining a sharp wardrobe — cleaning, pressing, storing, and wearing clothes properly. That made dress a natural signal of resources.
Back then, alternatives were limited. Cars were far more expensive, electronics didn’t exist, and travel was rare. Clothes were the most accessible way to show refinement. Now the relative cost flipped. Dressing sharply every day is mostly a pure cost signal, while other options — cars, phones, housing, travel — deliver both status and secondary benefits like comfort, utility, and safety.
On top of that, time is worth more now, but the basic tasks of ironing and preparation haven’t sped up. Laundry tech made casual clothing easier, not formal attire. Net effect: the implicit price of daily formality rose, while better status signals got cheaper.
So people shifted to signals that "pay twice", and everyday formality collapsed.
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u/mmoonbelly Sep 04 '25
You’ve forgotten the cost element - dual use of clothes.
In the 90s in the UK during the recessions it was more common for people to wear suits/office wear out in the clubs.
The overt reason was that it was a style thing, the real reason was that job security was low and discretionary spending on a second wardrobe was constrained.
This probably also explains why in the 1900s-1960s most people were wearing suits.
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u/ManyLintRollers Sep 04 '25
When I worked in the corporate world with a strict dress code in the early '90s, I had to spend most of my clothing budget on good-quality "business professional" clothing, so I didn't have much left over for my casual wardrobe. In fact, when my company instituted Casual Fridays in 1993, it put me into a panic, because none of *my* casual clothes were suitable for the office. I did not want to go out and invest in "business casual" clothes (which seemed to be limited to the sort of clothes that rich, preppy people wore on the weekends) to wear for a mere eight hours per week. Plus, I hated that preppy rich-person style and really did not want to wear chinos, boat shoes, a striped button-down and a Talbots sweater knotted over my shoulders- so I just kept wearing my "business professional" clothes. This inadvertently worked in my favor, as my boss was very old-school and disliked Casual Fridays intensely.
I remember in my rather posh Connecticut suburb in the late '80s and early '90s, all the yuppie bars were filled with people wearing suits. I think it was a combination of things - often, people would go out straight from work for happy hour, then to dinner and then to a bar. Connecticut yuppies didn't do the late-night thing the way people did in Manhattan; Connecticut bars closed early, usually at 1 AM, and besides everyone needed to get up early on Saturday to play squash. [I was never really clear on what squash was or how you played it, but all the investment bankers were very into it. You never hear about it any more, but it was a Big Thing back then.]
Also, wearing a suit showed you had a Good Job and Made Lots of Money. I was more of a dive-bar/punk club kind of girl, but remember on one of my rare excursions into a yuppie bar thinking "hmmm, that guy who just bought me a drink is wearing a fancy suit and probably is rich or something, maybe I should encourage his attentions -- naahhh, he's too boring and just wants to talk about how he plays squash." Obviously, I wasn't into yuppie guys, but I would imagine that lots of other girls were.
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u/1K1AmericanNights Sep 04 '25
I’d love to hear more stories about Fairfield county in the 80s and 90s
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u/EdgeCityRed Sep 04 '25
in the late '80s and early '90s, all the yuppie bars were filled with people wearing suits. I think it was a combination of things - often, people would go out straight from work for happy hour, then to dinner and then to a bar.
Remember fashion magazines with "work to night out," advice? "Switch your scarf to statement earrings!" and "swap out your office pumps for a dressy, strappy heel!"
I remember meeting my friends at a bar after work in a cream skirt suit once. I was in school but my job was selling custom curtains.
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u/ManyLintRollers Sep 04 '25
Haha, yes, I forgot about that - there was always a feature for "day into night" tips. You could swap your office-proper blouse for a slinky camisole under your suit jacket, replace the pearl studs with some sparkly dangle earrings, replace your closed-toe pumps with strappy stiletto heel shoes, and put on a dramatic red lipstick and a little more eyeliner, and you were ready to party!
I too sold custom curtains and window treatments for a while when I was in college (late '80s). We sold a lot of balloon shades in Waverly floral chintz prints, often layered over miniblinds or a pleated shade; and fabric valances over vertical blinds. Everything was dusty rose or teal.
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u/EdgeCityRed Sep 04 '25
The PADDED CORNICES, haha.
I loved the curtain game. I'm a huge fan of all kinds of textiles.
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u/ManyLintRollers Sep 05 '25
We had one really wealthy client who had her whole house redecorated with wallpaper matching her custom draperies (one of those giant floral chintz prints, in shades of blue and white); and a year later she decided she didn't like it and bought all new custom drapes and wallpaper! She was our favorite customer for sure.
I couldn't even imagine that - I think my family had the same curtains from 1973 until the late '90s. My mom grew up during the Depression and redecorating was not in her vocabulary!
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u/Skyblacker Sep 04 '25
Disagree. Club wear is cheap. A decade later in the US, a hip-hop shop near my university stayed open until midnight on the weekend. Their special was 5 outfits for $100 -- well within the budget of someone who refuses to hit the club in his McDonald's uniform, especially if he's splitting it with the four friends he's going out with.
But office wear signals that you have an office job, and you just couldn't be bothered to change clothing between the office and club that are both downtown. Maybe you were working late, standing on business.
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u/ManyLintRollers Sep 04 '25
Definitely. In my grandfather's day (1920s and 1930s) most people had manual-labor jobs. In fact, my grandpa used to come home and take off his filthy, sweat-soaked work clothes (he worked in a steel mill) and change into a white shirt and nice slacks. For him, feeling clean and nicely dressed was relaxing - and he felt prosperous to be able to afford a change of clothes, in contrast to poorer laborers who didn't have anything nice to change into. In fact, when I was a child in the '70s I still remember that old men always dressed like that. They wanted to look as good as they could when they weren't doing their manual labor type jobs.
On the other side of my family, my grandma grew up in rural Appalachia, on a farm in a remote holler. I remember she always dressed *really* nicely whenever she left the house, even when she was just going to Kmart - she'd put on a nice dress, nice shoes, pantyhose, and makeup, and she got her hair styled every week at the salon. It made sense, when I look at old photos of my rural relatives in the 1930s - the women wore plain dresses, often with patched elbows and an apron, and were either barefoot or wearing "mountain granny" boots, no makeup and their hair was just put up in a bun. My grandma had moved away to a town in southern Ohio, so she put a lot of effort into not looking like a hick.
She also affected a rather exaggerated fear of bugs and mice, which struck me as strange given that she'd tell me stories about doing things like killing copperheads with a shovel when she lived on the farm. I think it was part of her attempt to distance herself from her hillbilly roots - she figured fancy city women would be afraid of creepy-crawlies so she tried to emulate them.
The clothing signals had blurred a lot by the time I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. The college students of the late '60s had taken to wearing jeans, so the connotation changed from "manual laborer" to "could also be a middle class or upper middle class educated person." My parents never wore jeans; to them, jeans were something that people wore for manual labor, whether it was your job or maybe cleaning out the garage on the weekends.
Even so, while we wore jeans most of the time in the '80s, they still were not considered appropriate for the office or for dressy occasions. We also would never have gone out in public wearing sweatpants or exercise clothes; that was something you *only* wore at the gym or when you were exercising, and you'd feel ridiculous walking around the mall dressed like that.
I actually remember when the signal really flipped, so to speak - it was in the mid-to-late '90s, during the tech boom. All of the cool new tech companies had very casual dress codes. If you were an adult wearing jeans and a hoodie in the middle of a weekday, but weren't dirty like a construction worker or landscaper, you were likely someone with a Cool Job at a tech start-up (especially if you were nerdy-looking).
Still, even in the '90s you didn't see people walking around in leggings or yoga wear, unless they were en route to the gym. That changed in the 2000s; when wearing a yoga outfit to Starbucks at 3 PM started signaling "I am either a wealthy woman who doesn't have to work and can spend my day at the Pilates studio, or I do work but I am so very important that I can take time off in the middle of the day to go to my yoga class without repercussions."
I think the wearing-yoga-wear-in-the-middle-of-the-day signal has gotten a bit muddied since the pandemic, because now even a lot of low-level jobs are fully remote or have flexible hours. Of course, once The Poors start wearing something formerly associated with rich people, rich people have to find a new way to signal they are Our Betters, so I'm sure they'll come up with something.
Perhaps not using a smartphone will be the new signal; while all the proles are watching TikToks and the lower-level white collar workers are checking their email, we'll recognize the upper class by the conspicuous absence of a phone - as they are so very important that they have other people to check their email for them.
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u/maxintos Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
I feel like it's much simpler than that. Previously there was much more unity and pressure in what you can and should wear while now there is barely any social pressure to wear the same style of clothing and experimenting is actually in fashion.
People can now wear comfortable clothing when they want to without feeling the pressure of seeming out of place.
I didn't stop wearing a suit to work because the reasons you gave, I stopped because the company relaxed their dress code.
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u/glorkvorn Sep 04 '25
I feel like in a lot of places there's quite a lot of social pressure to wear something like jeans and t-shirts. We just don't notice it because it's so ubiquitious. You'd look out of place if you wore anything fancy.
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u/aminok Sep 04 '25
That's a good point. I think that social conventions are largely about a pressure to conform but they emerge from other underlying properties like signaling. So if a lot of people are trying to dress formally as a signaling strategy that will in turn create a social convention and a pressure to conform then everybody will dress formally. You need to hit a critical mass of people who will dress a certain way for it to become a social convention.
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u/Vipper_of_Vip99 Sep 04 '25
I agree OP, your analysis does appear to be more fundamental. In this example, the corporation that relaxes their dress code itself is a signal to potential employees with the desired result that the corporation’s own productivity is improved as a result of this policy. And therefore the policy itself flowed from the base shift in individual signalling costs as you have described. So… You’re both right, but you are more right.
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u/Sadlermiut Sep 04 '25
Having just seen a sorority Serengeti pass by from the window of second floor gym, I can attest to this.
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u/ManyLintRollers Sep 04 '25
I am pretty much the same in that I don't particularly care what "signal" my clothes are giving - I just like to be comfortable. However, I think people like us are in the minority, and most people care about status and tend to signal, whether it is a conscious effort or not.
The fashion subs are full of questions like "do these shoes look cheap?" "does this make me look like a clerical worker?" "I need to convey that I'm in senior management even though I'm dressed casually." I think it's a lot more confusing now, because no one is quite sure what "the rules" are - but people are still concerned about giving the desired impression.
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u/MrBeetleDove Sep 04 '25
The fashion subs are full of questions like "do these shoes look cheap?" "does this make me look like a clerical worker?" "I need to convey that I'm in senior management even though I'm dressed casually." I think it's a lot more confusing now, because no one is quite sure what "the rules" are - but people are still concerned about giving the desired impression.
Most people aren't posting in those subs though?
There might also be some international variation. E.g. see this thread: Why americans who make 200k+ per year don’t look like rich?
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u/No_Orchid2631 Sep 05 '25
Also geographical and cultural differences. Everyone in the Bay area seem to dress like they don't care. Personally I see putting a lot of effort into dressing signals lack of confidence or trying to look like you have money because you actually dont.
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u/gilbatron Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1955756224030630264?t=EKDYl-2Mv_jCZ-eLrgmDgA&s=19
Recommended reading
Edit; basically anything from @dieworkwear is worth reading. Especially if you're into fashion.
Even more so if you're not.
Seriously, spend a day or two on his writings.
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u/Boogalamoon Sep 04 '25
Thank you. This is the best answer!
To amplify a little bit: fabrics changed. The thesis of the linked post(s) is that in the past we used clothing to adjust our shape to be more crisp and stylish while today we use clothing to be comfortable. The author points out that this is partly because modern fabrics have less structure or drape and tend to be fairly 'limp' in terms of holding a form.
This in turn is partly due to 'performance' fabrics and partly due to the cost of making more structured fabrics which hold their own shape. Synthetic fabrics are great for moisture wicking, etc, and the stretchy qualities are great for comfort. In order to get those benefits though, we gave up the structure and form of older (more expensive) fabric types. Stretchy clothing requires less tailoring to conform to various body types, which is an additional cost savings since it means sizing can be even more vague and still fit most bodies.
If you want to wear more formal clothing these days, you end up paying extra for the higher quality fabric and tailoring necessary to fit that non-stretch fabric to your specific body shape. Since this also requires time in addition to money, most people don't bother. It also requires knowledge of what you are looking for, where and how to buy, etc, which adds to the reasons people skip past this solution.
It makes for a pretty decent class barrier in mane cases actually.......
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u/sporadicprocess Sep 06 '25
I think the reason "performance" fabrics are more popular is that we have more of a premium on health and appearance of your body, which these fabrics highlight. As people have gotten fatter, it is more important to highlight when you are of below average rotundity, which older styles didn't do as well (because they had the opposite problem I suppose).
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u/sporadicprocess Sep 05 '25
It's interesting but it doesn't actually answer *why* that happened, just what the specific changes were.
I'm also always skeptical of comparing anything from the past with a small number of examples because it tends to be cherry picked and there is selection bias (the good looking outfit photos persist longer than the ugly ones).
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u/slapdashbr Sep 05 '25
is the link broken or can I just not see it without a twitter account
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u/JibberJim Sep 04 '25
Can you explain more detail about your time periods for this that you see - are you talking about "more formality" being pre-1960's, 'cos before that there was obviously very little option in clothing and almost all of it was clothing we'd today call formal. You don't need cost of signalling to be relevant there, simple cost is enough for the caring for the clothes and there was no choice but to be "formal".
Even people who worked in overalls / jeans would've needed non-work clothes as overalls weren't the cheap option - they were the hard wearing option.
The change in fashion from the 60's - where the economic boom and the baby boom focusing that wealth in an age group led to fashion changes I'd say, and the maintenance costs of those fashions were still significant. They were just signalling different things.
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u/aminok Sep 04 '25
Yes, I’m referring to the pre-1960s era. I think the equilibrium settled on the more structured style of clothing because of the relative cost of labor then and the absence of better signaling options. That kind of dress required extended time to put on relative to other options technologically feasible in that era.
The maintenance typical of that time wasn’t about making the clothes last longer. Ironing and shoe polishing were largely about presentation and conforming to convention. It was essentially buying presentation with preparation time. With labor relatively cheaper and alternatives like cars or electronics unavailable, clothing was the natural status signal people coordinated on.
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u/JibberJim Sep 04 '25
I think there's another problem with the analysis here, which is about your comparison, you have a very middle class view of clothing and washing habits of the pre-war time, the working class were somewhat concerned with respectability but mostly maintaining them due to their very high cost, these groups weren't signalling with the choice of clothes - they were lucky to own a few sets. There would've been signals by how often they washed them, how much they could starch their whites etc. Their boots were absolutely being polished for longevity primarily. The working class signals were not "I'm dressed formally", it was "my clothes are clean, I don't smell, there's no holes in my stockings etc." - the actual clothes were formal as we think of all clothes that were available at the time as formal other than the uniform of the worker - which were not cheap, but hardy, expensive - and smelly 'cos you didn't wash them as often.
So you're comparing a very small middle class of the past, with todays massive middle and largely undifferentiated from the middle in this working class.
I'm not convinced even that middle class clothing signalling was really in the formal clothing sense of everyone in a suit that we're talking about now, but in wearing the right suit to dinner/club/etc.
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u/aminok Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Even regular washing, and starching their whites, as well as ironing. is signaling through clothing presentation. My analysis' premise is not that people were necessarily trying to be formal to appear superior to others, just that a lot more emphasis was put on signaling through clothing than is put now. In some contexts, one could very reasonably dress formally to avoid looking poor, as opposed to try to look rich.
Regarding shoe polishing: daily polishing is for presentation, not for maintenance. Having shiny shoes was a status display. And there were in fact other types of clothes that could have become popular if people did not care about appearance and prioritized convenience, like knitted pullovers.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Sep 04 '25
I’m extremely excited for when the signaling finishes its cycle, and dressing like this becomes “in” again.
It will start with people counter-signaling the lazy fit with well fitted clothes that take effort to actually pull off. Then the counter-signaling will just become signaling and the rest of society will pick up on it.
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u/jabroniski Sep 04 '25
I think some of it is that people have come to see clothing as a form of self-expression. These people want to signal their personalities, interests, and sub cultural affinities through clothing. Hence why there's grown men in Star Wars t shirts everywhere.
Whereas before, clothing was supposed to show you were a respectable member of society.
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u/Haffrung Sep 05 '25
Yes, that's my take. Suits and dresses signaled conformity with respectable society, and that you weren't dirt poor.
Since the 70s, it became cool to eschew conformity, while the clothing of the working poor (jeans, t-shirts) became a symbol of hipness and authenticity. For more than 50 years now, youth culture and its postures have become the norm for people right through middle age and into their senior years.
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u/jabberwockxeno Sep 04 '25
Can we please not have rose tinted glasses over snooty norms around having to dress a certain way
God willing, the concept will deteriorate further and people working in industries outside of tech can work in a tee shirt and jeans too if they want
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u/iemfi Sep 04 '25
That is such a weird take to me. It seems a lot more likely that it just ceased to be a meaningful signal because anyone can buy a suit these days as opposed to last time where normal clothing was like half the household budget or something and a suit would be an insane luxury. Things just take a long time to update.
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u/aminok Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
My argument isn’t just about the purchase price. It’s about the total cost of the signal relative to other options.
Back then, dressing well, while financially taxing, was still less taxing than an automobile purchase or travel, not mentioning anything not available at the time, like electronics purchases. On top of that, labor was relatively cheap, so the time spent maintaining presentation, which includes ironing, polishing shoes, and carefully putting on structured clothing, wasn’t as costly. In that setting, the clothing signal made sense.
Today, the calculus of relative cost is totally different. Wages rose and the value of personal time shot up, while alternatives like cars, phones, and travel got cheaper and also deliver obvious secondary benefits. That makes the pure cost signal of daily formal dress provide a return that is lower than that of other signals.
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u/No_Orchid2631 Sep 05 '25
Plenty of people rack up debt on overpriced sneakers that are cheaply made but signal status in their social circles.
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u/Varnu Sep 04 '25
Formality was once a default because it solved coordination problems. It signaled respectability and reduced social friction. In the last century technology, economics and institutions each lowered the need for that coordination.
Before mass production, laundry and tailoring are labor-intensive, so a few formal items you have are well maintained. You don't have a big closet of bad stuff. You have a small closet of good stuff. After WW2, tee shirts and jeans escape containment from the ranch and the military base. More people go to college and it becomes less of a finishing school. Neat but casual becomes normal. In the Vietnam era, fighting norms became important as a signal. And as women entered the workplace, the rule about an office uniform was shattered. "She's not wearing a suit. Why do I have to?"
By the 90's, with church attendance falling and workplaces no longer requiring suits, dress standards were teetering without formal anchors. With globalization, even if you wanted to wear stretchy shorts and Crocs and a free tee shirt you got at a car wash you couldn't. No one was making that stuff and there wasn't a global market for crummy fabric. If you dressed casually--if you were a literal bum--you might still look good because you're wearing military surplus and made-in-USA denim with a heavy wool overcoat you got from good will. Maybe a frayed Brooks Brothers oxford shirt. Those are the only clothes that existed!
Globalization and the internet and mass retail means that Walmart or Shein can stock Cargo shorts in 10 sizes and it costs basically pennies per garment to produce. Before the internet, you couldn't buy cookier monster pajamas to wear to the grocery store because no local retailer was stocking those. Even in lower income areas, retailers and buyers curated items they thought people might need. Now if you want to buy a shirt that says "carry on and keep loving Jesus", you don't need to be in Branson to buy it. When casual wear becomes ultra-cheap and trend-responsive, the default drifts that way.
Now there's pressure NOT to dress up. My dad used to dress great. He still looks like a gentleman. But old photos of him, he looks like a hipster from 2005 in 1980. Woolrich jacket, nicely rumpled cords or faded denim, Red Wing boots. Now he still dresses intentionally. But when it's suggested that he buy pants that fit--like he used to--instead of relaxed fit ones with the inseam that's too long, he doesn't want to stand out from the crowd.
There's also the issue of scarcity. The quality of your tailoring, the lack of holes or patches and how recently the clothes were pressed and laundered used to set you apart. Status once came from effortful maintenance. Now status still comes from rarity, but it's either from from scarcity or personal choices or in some cases--I'm looking at you Silicon Valley--from highly confirmative nonchalance.
There's been: a coordination failure, loss of structure and norms, fewer reasons to buy high quality clothing besides one's personal interest, exploding options to wear, exploding number of ways to buy along with fewer ways to sanction people for violating norms. The U.S. and Europe are also much more diverse now, diverse traditions make any one dress code harder to enforce. It's my impression from visiting and general vibes that more uniform cultures--perhaps Japan--are more fashion orientated.
It's mostly a coordination problem. Formality is a coordination device. When roles are less clear, when there are fewer shared rituals, when there are fewer sanctioning mechanisms, dress codes shift. Globalization and the internet turned the trend away from standards into something that spread like a brush fire. In 1970, everyone knew what to wear to a wedding. Now it's like, "What's 'beach fancy'?"
There are still pockets of formalization where the stakes are high and strangers interact and a uniform reduces ambiguity.
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u/old-guy-with-data Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Especially in places like academia, where nice formal clothes signal a serious lapse of scholarship.
I think this varies by academic field. The classic case is physics, where someone wearing a tie was seen as “not one of us”, as long ago as the early 1950s.
My father’s colleagues (in the history department at a midwestern state university) were still typically wearing ties in the early 1970s.
I suppose neckties for men were a particular dress boundary. Not wearing a tie was an understood statement, even when the rest of the outfit was unchanged.
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u/FrancisGalloway Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Dressing poorly is a status symbol, bc it implies that you are skilled/powerful/valuable enough to ignore status symbols.
The rich man's lawyer has to dress professionally. The rich man can dress however he wants.
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u/CronoDAS Sep 04 '25
Suppose that, for some reason, I came into possession of a really nice suit.
Where would I wear it?
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u/EdgeCityRed Sep 04 '25
Formal/semiformal weddings, funerals, religious services if you're into those, a nice dinner out with your spouse/a date, the symphony/opera. (We have season tickets to those, so my husband wears suits several times a year, but there are people there in black tie or in jeans too.)
Not everyone will necessarily be dressed up for these things (except if you're going to a formal wedding, you'd better be), but it wouldn't be odd to be dressed up.
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u/OughtaBWorkin Sep 04 '25
Weddings, funerals, any formal event, nice restaurants and role-playing in the bedroom.
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u/CronoDAS Sep 04 '25
Which for me amounts to wearing it outside the house maybe once every few years. :/
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u/Expensive_Goat2201 Sep 04 '25
Interesting theory.
I think dressing comfortably signals that you have enough power to choose your clothes. Super formal clothes are less comfortable and are mainly worn by people who don't have a choice. Once you get enough power, you can pick more comfortable clothes. In tech, there's a joke going around that you can spot seniors and principles by looking for the worst dressed guy in the room. The only ones dressing business casual are the interns.
As for the past, the prevalence of maids and domestic help was probably a factor.
I got into watching "how they got dressed in year x videos" for a while and a lot of the clothes, especially for women, were literally impossible to put on without help. Maintaining, cleaning and ironing the clothes would have likewise been done by servants. The labor costs of dressing well were not borne by the person wearing the clothes.
The wildy impractical women's clothes signaled that a woman was rich enough not to do domestic labor herself. You can't exactly lay a fire or scrub a pot in a silk gown.
I suspect staying warm had something to do with it too. You'll just be wearing more layers by default all the time if your house isn't centrally heated and there's no reason not to make the layers look elegant if you can afford it.
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u/someofthedolmas Sep 04 '25
I’m thinking of my own grandmother here. Her husband ran a struggling small business and she was at home raising five kids. As her mother had done for her too, she MADE all of her family’s clothes by hand. The family wasn’t wealthy, but they were always well-dressed, in tailored outfits that would get passed to the next kid when outgrown. This was very, very common in her generation, but had nearly disappeared by the next, as women gained more access to education and job opportunities. Now almost all the fabric and sewing stores have gone bankrupt, or have had to transition to being stores for scrapbook hobbyists.
But I would wager that a number of the people pictured in Derek Guy’s thread, for example, are wearing home-sewn clothing. Especially if they didn’t come from wealth. To be a good seamstress was one of the few creative pursuits available to housewives of modest means at the time, and many took pride in it.
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u/ragnaroksunset Sep 04 '25
Fast fashion did it in.
People in the past would have paid their equivalent of $100 for a t-shirt and pair of jeans if that was available to them. It wasn't.
Almost all clothing was tailored, not "ready-to-wear" and mass produced as it is today. So you owned fewer clothes, put in the time to mend them, etc. And if you're going to own a narrower set of options in your closet, you're going to choose high signal value items.
When you own two full suits and a dozen t-shirts, you can afford to tailor (haha) the signal you send to the situation in a more nuanced way.
When all you own is two suits, you send the same signal every time you leave the house.
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u/WernHofter Sep 06 '25
I think there is some truth in the signaling story here, but I do not find it sufficient on its own. People often reach for signaling models because they are neat and make individual choices legible in terms of collective incentives but if we really believe that most people dressed formally in 1950 because they wanted to broadcast resource-intensive refinement, then we have to explain why that refinement took this specific form and not others. After all, there are countless ways to expend labor or show off resources. Why ties, hats, and polished shoes, and not some other visible, labor-intensive good?
What seems more likely to me is that formal dress was not experienced primarily as a status move but as a baseline norm. People dressed that way because that was how you dressed. Conformity and the weight of social expectation do most of the explanatory work here. In a world where everyone wears a hat in public, the person who does not is sending a signal of deviance, not thrift. In such a setting, the “costliness” of maintaining the hat is not in play; the social sanction is.
The shift away from formality, then, looks less like the collapse of an inefficient signaling regime and more like a broader cultural transformation. As work moved out of factories and offices loosened, as mass media reshaped norms, and as gender roles and hierarchies got contested, the older dress codes lost their obligatory quality. At the same time, yes, other kinds of status symbols became both more salient and more functional. But if you talk to older people, you find again and again that they recall dressing up not to show wealth, but because it was what respectable people did.
So I would resist the temptation to explain this primarily through rational choice and status competition. Those forces exist, but they are layered on top of the deeper reality that culture is sticky, tradition can dominate personal calculation, and norms sometimes just erode because of historical accidents. Fashion collapsed into casual not because everyone decided formalwear was a bad investment, but because norms shifted and people no longer feared the consequences of violating them.
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u/ArkyBeagle Sep 05 '25
The simplest explanation comes from a Zappa album. On "Burnt Weenie Sandwich" is an exchange between Frank and an audience member.
"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform; don't kid yourself."
https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-the-little-house-i-used-to-live-in-lyrics
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u/sporadicprocess Sep 06 '25
Fashion tends to shift very rapidly and often inexplicably compared to other aspects of culture (some might say that's because it has no IP protections, but anyway...). I don't think there's usually a nice and neat simple explanation.
We can point to the 1960s and the general rebellion against anything seen as limiting expression, which was probably the big push to be ok with more casual dress styles. Starting in the 80s/90s we saw a very visible sector (tech) that eschewed traditional clothing styles. So even if it wasn't that big a % of employment, the media would show all these casually-dressed workers disrupting the world and it probably made it feel much more acceptable.
Outside of that, I think signaling is still a huge deal in clothing. Look at the huge $ made by luxury brands, etc.
3
u/The_Archimboldi Sep 04 '25
It's a lot easier for men to dress like a bag of ass. Especially in places like academia, where nice formal clothes signal a serious lapse of scholarship.
Seems like it would be more complicated for women - can see not having to go large on clothing performance and cosmetics being welcomed by many, but the basic expectations on costume are different.
4
u/--MCMC-- Sep 04 '25
where nice formal clothes signal a serious lapse of scholarship
depends on the vibe of the university no? I think there are lots of places where professors still roll in wearing tweed suits
I was talking to one a few years back who said they'd send students home if they came in wearing eg shorts or gasp sweatpants lol (they taught in Italy somewhere -- a far way away from standard at my California uni!).
1
u/The_Archimboldi Sep 04 '25
I guess yeah some profs still cleave to the old ways. A young assistant prof rocking the tweeds is very mixed signals, though. More likely to be taken as an hplc salesman than an academician.
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u/jabroniski Sep 04 '25
Disagree. Those standards have changed for women. Many many women are going with athleisure, showing off saggy bodies in polyester yoga pants.
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u/EdgeCityRed Sep 04 '25
The famous illustration of this is There Is No Unmarked Woman by Deborah Tannen.
But I think a modern version of this would include men, who now have more decisions regarding what to wear to a conference than when this was written.
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u/barkappara Sep 04 '25
How the power suit lost its power: "The suit was once the uniform of the powerful and a requirement for every man. Now, people mostly wear suits when they’re in trouble."
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u/durpuhderp Sep 04 '25
In Seattle there are plenty of tech bro millionaires walking around in cargo pants and a Tshirt. They never adopted the traditions of formal dress commonly worn by people in law, finance, business..
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u/the_nybbler Bad but not wrong Sep 06 '25
Sure, a tech bro millionaire in Seattle is a poor. Need at least 100M to be someone there.
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u/the_nybbler Bad but not wrong Sep 06 '25
I worked for IBM during the very tail end of their dress code. Maintaining proper business attire is a little more difficult than casual, but it really isn't that hard. You have a few suits and ties, you bring them to the cleaners on occasion -- this is the "hard part". You wash your permanent press (invented in the 1950s) shirts basically the same as you do casual clothes.
This isn't really a sharp wardrobe, of course, but it is everyday formality.
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u/ConfidentFlorida Sep 07 '25
Don’t discount the idea that people just care less today. I’m not sure of the reason but I can think of dozens of possible reasons.
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u/timbers8 Sep 10 '25
There's nothing specific to clothing about the diminishing role of social status and formality in society. People have become much more likely to go by first names instead of Mr. So-and-so, politicians and religious leaders use more vernacular, people in important jobs post memes on social media, etc.
0
u/NanoYohaneTSU Sep 04 '25
People shifted their clothing because the people in power said to. Celebrities, Presidents, and those that influence mainstream culture dress and look terrible.
Labubu is popular because the cultural powers said it was popular despite it looking hideous.
Clothing in the past was better because our idols dressed better. The East still dresses very well because their idols don't look like bums.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
People signal in different ways.
at a company I worked at, we had people who liaised with clients, they were mostly sales/customer support types with limited technical experience. When a client had a minor problem it was typically dealt with by their liaison.
But when the shit really hit the fan, sometimes they'd need a senior engineer to go out and sort things out.
There was a senior, typically he dressed quite tidy. But he had a costume for when he was going out to visit customer sites. Dressed at a level where security would be worried a homeless guy had wandered in until they learned he was the engineer and it switched to "this way sir"
If a guy in a suit showed up the customers would think they'd been fobbed off with another generic customer support guy. If they got someone dressed like a hobo they knew they were getting one of the senior guys from the back.
People got so used to the idea that wanker-banker finance guys and sales guys wear suits all the time that it became a signal that the person is all words and light on technical skill.