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Notes -
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.
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