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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Then we are likely a lost cause and should abandon all hope. More women wear bras than men wear ties and undershirts. If these things need fixing, the work must start at a more basic level.

Ehh I think undershirts mess up the tuck of my dress shirt.

Are you ironing both your undershirt and your dress shirt?

Is that the trick?

The real workaround is the shirt stay, which if you’re not familiar is a garter that wraps around your thigh and keeps your shirt tucked in with full range of motion.

I wear them almost every time I wear a shirt that’s tucked in.

@The_Nybbler will be here soon with your welcome bag.

We're all out, as usual.

I mostly agree.

I can understand. I disagree - I really don't want to go back to the requirements of my youth of wearing hose over any bared leg and having to do my hair in something more presentable than a pony tail. But I understand people who think we're all a too slovenly.

Things have changed pretty quickly. I remember when my mom first wore jeans outside of the house/yard. Now my kid'll wear sweat pants in public. 3 generations - from skirts and hose in public to PJ bottoms.

If you accept that fashion is signaling, then the overall move might be less toward "informality" than toward subtler and harder-to-fake signals of wealth and status.

Formal clothing controls and covers your body, allowing most people to look presentable if they can buy approximately correct garments and keep them in good repair. By contrast, sweatpants look good almost exclusively on women who can afford to spend a lot of time at the gym and yoga studio (or later, the plastic surgeon's), and who know how to do understated high-quality makeup with expensively well-maintained skin and hair; everybody else just looks schlubby and run-down, like the poors they are.

I've heard a similar argument made about the transition from corsets to the "freedom" of bras and elastic waistbands: every body fits neatly into an hourglass-figure dress when wearing a corset, but now we have to stress and starve ourselves to manufacture de facto corsets out of our own abdominal muscles, yay. And I suspect stockings, bras and other undergarments probably work the same way. Lissome twenty-somethings, and the class of older ladies who drop $$$ on sclerotherapy and implants, look fine in bare legs and bralettes; not so much the rest of us.

If it took us three generations to get here, it'd be unreasonable to expect us to take less than three generations to go back. Baby steps.

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