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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 20, 2020
The whole "people don't dress nice anymore!" usually reeks of fedora-tipping, but people do still follow fashion. If you've ever seen an arab wearing oddly-padded jeans or a soyboy wearing a giant padded jacket in +2 weather, you've seen someone "dressing up" for their day out. For a long time, fashion has tended to follow labourers, too, as others have already said. Hence the weird padded jeans and giant jackets, evocative of people who get up and down off their knees all day or spend long times in the outdoors doing Ever So Manful Things.
Keep in mind also that things like double-breasted suits and literal fedoras were all that were available when they were popular, and themselves were borne of utility -- the double breasted suit comes from shit like chefs' jackets that were made that way to protect you from heat and be reversible for when you inevitably get a pot of soup dumped on you but still have to go out and meet some high profile client. Avoid a burn AND have a clean surface to show off all at once! Then it mutates into the modern suit where half the buttons don't go anywhere. Same for brimmed hats. Umbrellas are mechanically complicated and clothes weren't waterproof, so you wear a brimmed hat that keeps the rain out of your face and off your shoulders. Waterproof clothes get cheap and umbrellas can be made from cheap stamped metal, so hats fall by the wayside, and umbrellas die too because eventually everything comes with a plasticized hood. Even pocket squares follow the same dynamic. They fell out of favour around the time people started carrying around those dumb little packets of tissues. Fleming even made fun of it in "You Only Live Twice" (the book, not the weird fever dream movie) where Bond's new Japanese handler tells him off for keeping a dirty rag full of boogers in his pocket instead of using cheap throwaway paper.
People have always dressed in cheap shit too. A suit might seem expensive and like a special thing now, so it looks like everyone Back Then dressed up so nice, but consider how easy it is to make a suit compared to anything else available then -- it's made up of panels, probably of cotton or some other plant fiber, made on a completely mechanized loom. Compare that to something like a knit sweater, or even a heavy cloak. Those things are complicated to make, or require huge bolts of continuous and expensive material. A suit is made of stitched-together panels. They looked good and fit nicely, but once you're making that kind of thing, it's not hard to make a few cuts and re-stitch it to fit. Compare it to gammy knitting you a sweater that actually fits on the first try. The latter is a fucking miracle and takes a goddamn month to make, with intimate knowledge of your measurements. Or you could wear a leather cloak, that requires half of a horse's hide all in one piece and manages to be too hot for winter and too cold for summer. The suit jacket was cheap, functional, and prolific in comparison to anything else you could wear in the day. No wonder everyone had a couple, just like everyone now has a few beloved hoodies or poly jackets.
Keep in mind also that things like double-breasted suits and literal fedoras were all that were available when they were popular, and themselves were borne of utility -- the double breasted suit comes from shit like chefs' jackets that were made that way to protect you from heat and be reversible for when you inevitably get a pot of soup dumped on you but still have to go out and meet some high profile client. Avoid a burn AND have a clean surface to show off all at once! Then it mutates into the modern suit where half the buttons don't go anywhere. Same for brimmed hats. Umbrellas are mechanically complicated and clothes weren't waterproof, so you wear a brimmed hat that keeps the rain out of your face and off your shoulders. Waterproof clothes get cheap and umbrellas can be made from cheap stamped metal, so hats fall by the wayside, and umbrellas die too because eventually everything comes with a plasticized hood. Even pocket squares follow the same dynamic. They fell out of favour around the time people started carrying around those dumb little packets of tissues. Fleming even made fun of it in "You Only Live Twice" (the book, not the weird fever dream movie) where Bond's new Japanese handler tells him off for keeping a dirty rag full of boogers in his pocket instead of using cheap throwaway paper.
People have always dressed in cheap shit too. A suit might seem expensive and like a special thing now, so it looks like everyone Back Then dressed up so nice, but consider how easy it is to make a suit compared to anything else available then -- it's made up of panels, probably of cotton or some other plant fiber, made on a completely mechanized loom. Compare that to something like a knit sweater, or even a heavy cloak. Those things are complicated to make, or require huge bolts of continuous and expensive material. A suit is made of stitched-together panels. They looked good and fit nicely, but once you're making that kind of thing, it's not hard to make a few cuts and re-stitch it to fit. Compare it to gammy knitting you a sweater that actually fits on the first try. The latter is a fucking miracle and takes a goddamn month to make, with intimate knowledge of your measurements. Or you could wear a leather cloak, that requires half of a horse's hide all in one piece and manages to be too hot for winter and too cold for summer. The suit jacket was cheap, functional, and prolific in comparison to anything else you could wear in the day. No wonder everyone had a couple, just like everyone now has a few beloved hoodies or poly jackets.
Textiles are probably the oldest industry, even older than prostitution. Clothes have always been very cheap, and produced en masse, by every poor person who has at least one hand. Even reading accounts of poor people coming to the new world, it's almost always to come over and end up producing clothing. There's even a jewish phrase for it, which persists to this day as a catchall for shitty low-cost low-reward industry done by the poor and unadventurous -- "Schmata Business", literally "rag business", from when poor jews would settle in new york or somewhere near and do piecework or straight-up collect and resell rags to be made into aprons or cheap hats or somesuch. Or just go into making those aprons and hats.
