A Dressing Down

 It’s not just at restaurants that the dress code has become more relaxed; it’s pretty much everywhere. People don’t dress up for the theater, the opera, work or travel. Sometimes airports look more like giant sleepover parties than transportation hubs. And it’s been that way for some time.

This lack of formality, or interest in occasion wear, has prompted some complaining, especially among those in the baby boomer generation who see it as an erosion of public standards. I think that the right way to look at it, however, is as an expression of a much larger and more significant social and cultural shift. One that has been taking place over decades and essentially says that we all have a right to dress as we want. It’s a shift that reflects the prioritization of the individual over the institution.

--Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times

One way to know you are getting really old is when you start looking at the younger generation and you  find yourself shaking your head and saying, "What twits!"

Waitresses, who are otherwise polite and engaging but festooned with nose piercings, so at first glance they look like something really nasty is dripping out of their nostrils. Nurses whose arms uncovered by their short sleeved scrubs, covered with tatoos. 

People at airports looking like they are planning for a sleep over with their adolescent daughters.

What's Wrong With A Little Formality?

Men at expensive, fancy restaurants, where the waiters dress in tuxedos, but as customers they look like they are Mark Zuckerberg wannabes, with just a knit shirt, a hoodie or, at best, a collared shirt but no jacket or tie. Used to be if you tried to get into a fancy restaurant without a jacket, the restaurant provided you with one.

Which is not to say, dressing down is always a bad thing. In 1975, a woman invited me to see Baryshnikov at Lincoln Center, and never having seen a ballet, but knowing it was Lincoln Center, I wore a summer suit and a tie.

She wore nearly nothing: sheer white, form fitting slacks  and a diaphanous robin's egg blue shirt. No jewelry beyond simple earrings. She was 22 years old and the forty something women, who were dressed in evening dresses, jewelry and some with tiaras, looked at her with frank envy: She had a 22 year old body, and she outshone everyone in the place except for the ballet dancers, and she could have passed for one of those on a bus man's holiday. 

I felt uncool and ungainly, and I realized I had seen her boyfriend wearing a simple Brooks Brothers shirt and slacks when I had seen them together. They were cool and avant garde in their simplicity.

I was out of it.

But today, I find myself still cleaving to jacket and tie. I'll never be cool, that's a given. But it's me.