Why the Way We Dress has Changed

Reflections on how and why clothing has changed and what this means for culture.

Apologies again to my male readers for continuing this deep dive into the specialties of clothing as an aspect of culture recovery, but now I’ll try to say a bit about masculine clothing too.

Fashion in general is a positive thing.

Generally, fashion is largely made for and by older women whose bodies are fading, drooping, and softening. However, everyone wants to see younger women—who mostly don’t need fashion to look beautiful—wearing it. Which is why older women go shopping, follow fashion, go to fashion shows and love to deck out their daughters and granddaughters in the latest styles. The elders all know the time will come when the young will need the techniques they are being taught. It has provided a bridge between the generations for millennia, and times when fashions serve mainly to divide young from old are generally not positive times. Today’s culture is specifically one of those.

A woman’s dress is hardly the most important thing about her, and yet as a flowering or outgrowth of culture, it has a vitality as a marker, an incarnation of ideals. I have long seen a disconnect between what many deeply Catholic women profess to believe and the way they dress—and this disconnect drove me to ponder the problem more deeply.

Western fashion emerged during Christendom and in every regional culture, fashion branched out along certain lines to which it invariably returned—but in the twentieth century, a rupture occurred which make a full return to traditional dress impossible. Complaints about modesty insofar as they are tied to dress seem to date from that rupture, and some of those complaints may be largely due to the confusion the rupture brought about.

True, other changes in dress have to do with a loosening of morality, particularly sexual morality, and that historically affects female clothing. But since loose morals tend to produce much human misery, the pendulum tends to swing back after a generation or two. It’s also true, as I’ve mentioned, that some ideologies have attempted to change women’s clothing such as the female-body-hating ideology of feminism and the power games of Marxism. I’ve already covered these in the previous two articles and won’t reference them here.

So now I would like to parse out the other non-moral, non-ideological changes to take stock of what these changes from traditional dress are and why they happened. Again, these changes are independent of morals and ideology. But they have irrevocably changed the way that we dress:

1. Indoor plumbing. This what was what allowed women to wear pants consistently for the first time in human history, since now heeding nature’s call could now be done privately, as I’ve detailed previously.

2. The mechanized textile industry. This initiated the mass production of knit fabrics as well as polymer fabrics—polyester, rayon, and the more affordable manufacture of traditional weaves such as velvets and damasks. On top of this, chemical dyes were developed which vastly expanded the range of colors available to ordinary people. The recent print-on-demand fabric production methods are an update of this process. Hence the current obsession with body-con fashion and highly artificial or individuated techniques is partly innocent—for the first time, some things, such as seamless bodysuits, like those worn by superheroes can be made easily, so we make them, wear them, and promote them. (The fact that most non-superhero humans look awful in them is what the rest of us are now discovering.)

3. Indoor heating/cooling systems. With most people no longer spending large amounts of time outside and indoor temperatures becoming more stable, the necessity for headgear (hats) and layers of clothing for either shade or warmth—sunhats or caftans or ushankas or skirts to the ground, for instance—has passed away. Now celebrities can wear strapless minidresses with sandals in below zero temps as they stroll from limo to lobby, and the rest of us can make do with far less layers than our ancestors as we rush from car to kitchen with groceries.

4. Automobiles. When self-driven cars became normative for ordinary people, skirts to the ground were made permanently impractical for women (and in some countries, long gowns for men similarly became obsolete). Driving a car means you need to move your feet freely, and floor-length skirts with crinolines can be a safety hazard, as any girl driving herself to her high-school prom in a Cinderella skirt has discovered.

5. Cameras. Television and the virtual world of communication have done away with most headgear as well as over-long coats, skirts, trains, and costume in almost every setting of modern life outside of the theatre and historical reenactments. Historically huge hats and big clothing were costumes worn to mark the principles in vast in-person events, so that the audience can easily identify the central figures from far off. A top hat indicates a person of importance, as does a crown—as do many traditional headdresses from feathered war bonnets to gats to autogele to fengguans to very tall wigs. Now that most crucial public and even private ceremonies are televised or video-captured with closeups, no one has a strong reason to wear a hat, or a veil, or any sort of headgear. Hats block or shade the face and interfere with camerawork, and might even look ridiculous in close-ups. This combined with #3 means most men and women stopped wearing hats, making our government, politics, and fashion permanently less interesting. Only the lowly baseball cap and the sunhat for stadium and beach are hanging in there, along with beanies for winter.

Thanks to all the above, modern dress is far less variegated than the fashions of the past, and shows less ingenuity than those of our ancestors, who had to accommodate not only age and shape but cold, heat, dirt, the need to heed nature’s call, plus (for women) pregnancy, breastfeeding, and postpartum—all by using the limited materials provided by locally by nature. The previous history of fashion has been endlessly fascinating because of working within these limitations.

But today, mass-produced knit tees, tanks, shorts, and sweatpants can outfit the world, and fashion is in danger of becoming a soulless least-common-denominator production as a result. Everything is possible—hence nothing is ever really done. Despite pockets of creativity, modern production means that nearly 99% of us will end up spending 99% of our lives wearing the cheap slouchy knit polyester-blend fabric that is too casual and unstructured to make most of us look like anything more that overgrown children. The fact that we mostly dress our children this way, particularly boys, is a related problem!

And yet, fashion came about because people of the past—largely women—were dissatisfied with merely the necessary. Everything from beadwork to featherwork to jewelry to embroidery to dyes to patterns to weaving techniques came about because of this drive to generously do more. (The homogenization of liquid modernity means, as those who love and study women’s clothing have noted in dismay, that large swathes of sewing and handwork techniques are currently in danger of dying out or being erased altogether.)

Men’s fashion projects the desire for respect—hence tattoos, piercings, ceremonial weapons, high shoes, tall hats, capes, silk ties, power suits. Women’s fashion creates beauty, and overcomes the defects of age and weariness, and with care, can mount into the realm of near-supernatural transcendence, as seen in the costumes adorning the Madonna and Child.

In the face of this drab and non-creative fashion future, I believe we who are interested in culture recovery need to do more, specifically with clothing. Here are a few suggestions.

Get Formal, Men (and Ladies too)

Recently culture leaders like Jordan Peterson have led the way in urging men to return to wearing suits. I believe this is positive, because it’s harder, and there is something in a man that responds to a challenge.

It is probably not recognized how difficult it is for a man to commit to wearing a suit—complete with dress shirt, tie, suspenders or vest, especially if he is not used to it. First of all, it’s not easy for a man to find a suit that fits him correctly. Suits, being structured non-stretchy garments, must be tailored to the man who wears it correctly or it won’t fit him and will either look sloppy or find his movements restricted. Secondly, suits are expensive and difficult to make: probably the hardest kind of garment to produce. Women’s clothing by comparison is a walk in the park. For a man to seek out a suit that actually makes him look good requires an investment of time, attention, and money.

Finding suits that fit means a man has to pay more attention and be intentional about how he dresses, and that ultimately can carry over into intentionality for the rest of his life. There’s a reason a groom wears a suits, because of it what it symbolizes: that he is ready to take on the massive challenge of marriage and family-building. How can we reinforce this process?

One way is to teach our boys and young men how to wear suits, to give them a leg up on the skill. Now, I can sympathize with moms with young sons who give up on finding suits that fit their growing boys—I have BEEN that mom—but the clothing industry could certainly make it a bit easier, particularly department stores in country districts, who usually don’t stock any formal clothing for boys whatsoever. Add to this the fact that boys grow fast and some of them destroy clothing as fast as they acquire it. At one point in my life, I was buying every navy blue boy blazer I saw in the hope that it would fit just one of my sons.

Yet dressing boys in suits makes them realize that there are some things in life that are worth dressing up for. For me as a Catholic, the central thing worth dressing up for is the Mass.

For culture recovery, I have found that it’s important to me that my sons have suits and wear suits to Mass, even if it does make them a little more dressed up than the rest of the congregation. And that means that I and my daughters have to dress up a little more to match them. (Men, being sensitive to respect, tend to notice this.)

In the suburbs, Catholics tend to get by on Sunday Mass with khakis and polos for men, casual dresses and maybe nice slacks for girls. Sunday best has got to be a little more than that: otherwise, how can you ever convince your children that the Mass is meant to be the summit of their lives? How else do you practically communicate that meeting God in the Mass is more important than going to work, to a wedding, to a charity ball, more important than meeting the president of the company or the country, if we don’t dress up for Sunday Mass? (Here’s a guy who agrees with me.) Catholics, be the change you want to see.

I hear from my young adults that the trend is for the young adult crowd to wear semi-formal dresses and suits, and sometimes even tuxes and evening gowns to Christmas Midnight Mass and Easter Vigil—I absolutely love this. This is how we recover culture: by taking what our religion says should be the high points of our year and dressing as though they actually are like, the high points of our year.

Tangent: Why Catholic Women Stopped Wearing Veils

In Catholic trad circles, we like to argue about this. But for a long time, I’ve suspected that #3—the prevalence of indoor heating/cooling—is the culprit, more than confusion after Vatican II, the changes in the Mass, or the rebellion against Humanae Vitae (three discrete events that are often conflated in argument).

Up until the 1950s or 1960s, everyone wore hats. They kept you warm (or cool), and they communicated authority and importance. For a man, a large, tall, or formal hat generally symbolizes importance and authority. They would remove their hat in the presence of any higher authority—their boss, the president, the king. Most people remember that a man had to remove his hat before a woman as well, and not removing his hat before certain women was a signal that he disrespected them.

But most people have forgotten that in Western culture, women did NOT have to remove their hats before any authority. I think most women enjoyed this, and this fact was an important counterbalance to their limited public authority in early modern times.

This prerogative of women to remain hatted even followed them into church. In church, men were asked to remove hats in order to lay down their respect, importance and authority before the ultimate Authority, God. But women, as always, were allowed to keep their hats on. (Women avoided wearing huge picture hats to Mass in case they would block the view for others, but generally speaking, a small hat did not need to be taken off for any earthly authority, including God.)

Veils were an “easy hat” that could be carried in a purse and put on in church, and also were the reverse of attention-getting. (It’s also worth remembering that in cultures other than America, most women wore veils all the time as part of temperature control. )

Once temperature-controlled environments became normative in many part of the world, men stopped wearing hats, and now there was nothing particularly special about women getting to keep their hats (or veils) on. So when men stopped, women stopped as well, and since most women never really understood the significance of the veil, they naturally stopped veiling in Mass as well.

That this coincided with the end of the Second Vatican Council, the changes in the Mass, and the rebellion against Humanae Vitae was what made the whole shebang a perfect storm.

I refuse to join the rebellion against Humanae Vitae, I have no problem with Vatican II, and I actually love the Novus Ordo, but I am determined to resist the casualization of all liturgy, and veiling is a simple and easy way to dial up the reverence. To me, a veil communicates silence as well, and wearing one reminds me not to talk in the sanctuary, because I am there to listen to God, Who speaks in silences. It also adds a welcome note of formality and intentionality to the act of going to worship, one that communicates my inner actions to others.

And I guess I’m not alone. See this recent article.

As I’ve mentioned before, veils are worn not to hide ugliness but to underscore the sacredness of beauty. A woman’s body was recognized as sacred, and a man’s body by contrast (especially his arms and chest) were not really that special, which is why he could bare them while using them for hard labor. Christ’s nudity on the Cross was an example of this submission of the body to mission: He used His body in the hard labor of saving the world. The Blessed Mother, by contrast, is always veiled in some way to underscore her sacredness. (Recall that long sleeves and skirts are also a form of the veil.)

But now we see quite a contrast. Today on formal occasions the man is expected to be fully clothed from neck to ankle and vested with authority, while the woman is expected to be barely clothed and the sacred parts of her as naked as propriety will allow. This is a strong contrast to the imagery in every Catholic Church, where the Man is naked and the Woman is clothed and crowned with glory. We could meditate upon this for a long time.

(Tangent upon a tangent. Sorry.)

Healing the Rupture

Since this post is lengthening, I want to list a few practical things that could be done to recover culture in the way of dress.

1. Embrace aspects of traditional dress that make sense for your lifestyle. I’ve talked about why I choose to wear skirts casually, formally, and professionally whenever I can.

2. Resist casualization and homogenization and eradication of natural difference in favor of formality, variety, and contrast. I think it’s useful to hearken back to traditional clothing characteristic of your area in some way, shape or form, whether that’s figuring out how to wear calico or re-adopting local headgear. Some American states already do this very well: I remember meeting an young Asian man after Mass whose formal outfit was startlingly striking. When I complimented his string bolo tie, suede leather vest and stylized boots, he smiled and said, “Yes, we Texans do it right.”

3. Preserve traditional handcrafts and styles. And if a particular form of clothing was important to your ancestors, try to carry on that tradition. Some of my relatives persist in wearing the folk blouses of their ancestors even on formal occasions, and I love seeing this.

4. In the face of a homogenized environment, return to the seasons of nature and liturgy for inspiration. There’s a naturalness to wearing warm colors such as reds and oranges when the weather turns cool and cool colors such as blues and greens when it’s warm. I personally try to take this a step further by echoing the liturgical colors of the year in my dress—wearing reds after Christmas, warm greens in springtime during Ordinary Time and cool greens during Ordinary Time in summer.

5. Recognize that not everything needs to bow to the virtual and digital to become a fashion. Despite the camera, I think big and tall hats and capes should make a comeback.

6. Pay more attention to fashion, not less. Create your own local or group fashions. Incarnate your beliefs in the time-honored mediums of leather, warp, and woof. Learn to sew. If you like handcrafts, try to carry on some of the traditions of embroidery, beadwork, and so on. Support local craftsmen and craftwomen, Etsy stores, and artisans. Wear that handcrafted piece. When you see someone on the street wearing something truly beautiful, impressive, or striking, compliment them. Fashion is a social phenomenon: do what you can to encourage it in the best directions.

My daughters, making a difference. So proud of them.