Dress Up

Source: teaattrianon.blogspot.com --- Friday, May 11, 2018
From First Things : How is it that we have gone from wearing suits and ties to the office to wearing T-shirts, Baseball caps, and a variety of military garments and ranch hand wardrobes? Everyone who’s ever perused photos of Baseball games (or almost any other crowded venue for that matter) in an old Life magazine from the mid-twentieth century finds it remarkable that the majority of men in the crowd are wearing white shirts and ties, and business hats (a category of menswear now extinct). The metamorphosis over such a relatively short time to polo shirts and cargo shorts on most of the crowd is a bit staggering, almost as though we were looking at two different species. The history, the sociology, the psychology of dress all seem to come rushing in to confound my thoughts. But then I’m not alone. Let’s start with the history. The man’s tailored wardrobe—which has been with us vir­tually unchanged in form since just after the Civil War—has been under attack for half a century now. While the twentieth century can legitimately be thought of as the century of the suit, the high point of that garment seems to have come earlier rather than later. Some would say the oft-heralded demise of the suit and its accompanying accoutrements has been occasioned by the long trend towards comfort in clothing enhanced by breakthroughs in the science of fabrics. And there’s no doubt of the truth in this theory, particularly when you stop to conside ...

from Baseball https://ift.tt/2wyNTDx