To wonder why there are so many scruffy people these days

[Quirrelsotherface]

I've been looking through old photographs lately, from the 20's through to 60's probably, my grandparents era. What I absolutely couldn't get over was the amount of people who were so well dressed back then! There were group photos, photos of streets with lots of people in the background and to be honest, I couldn't really pick a scruffy looking one out of any of them. Not particularly affluent areas, just everyday public. The clothes, though, look expensive and well cut, the men in hats and the women with beautiful haircuts. Beautiful coats and shoes.

Why then, these days do we not have this pride in appearance that they had back then? Walk out now in any town and smart people are really in the minority.

AIBU to wonder why this is?

Just to add that back when hats were popular women didn’t wash their hair as much, so I’m assuming a nice hat could hide a multitude of sins if you hadn’t had your hair “done”.

I like nice fabrics but prefer the sort of loose clothes like linen trousers and tunics which probably have me labelled as scruffy. I won’t wear makeup because it makes me feel weird and clown like. I don’t mind it on others but wouldn’t dream of judging myself or others without it as ‘scruffy’ for not wearing it.

I suspect you are taking about a certain era OP, when photographs were more common place. Pretty sure that far pre 19th century most people except the richest, or their staff, were not only scruffily dressed but also stank.

Maybe some of the well dressed also stank with their fortnightly or monthly baths & change of under garments (but photos aren't scratch and sniff ones)

I feel very sorry for the nurses in WWI who had an amazingly smart uniform (corsets and all) that took an hour to put on.

But I get your point OP, in 1900s and especially 1920s-1960s there was a more formal dress code and many people took.pride in that . I blame the introduction of jeans ... But then my fashion history isn't the greatest!

If you love dressing well OP, fabulous 🥰 , I bet your grandma would be proud of you! I'm in awe as I hate suits and fitted skirts, can no longer wear high heels, don't wear matching accessories and get by with 'just smart enough for work' outfits. It's not my priority and can at times hinder the role I do. I have been known to shock people when I turn up in a suit and my hair isn't left loose around my shoulders! (Reserved only for big meetings).

I think this is a very interesting thread for Aibu.

At 63, I've lived through most of this. What's factual. Most people have a washing machine at home, and do laundry daily so they have clean clothes most days. But machine-washable still doesn't work for most custom-made clothing, because of the linings and interlinings that are essential to structure the garments.

In the 50s and 60s, the high street was limited to M&S, C&A and a few others, but the youthwear revolution was still in the future, so for work, even a teenager with an office job would use a dressmaker or sew at home to get the clothes she wanted, and if you've done that, you would make sure it fitted well. But most clothes were made in the UK so the skill levels were much higher, and cost more relative to the cost of living. Because it cost so much, you'd take great care of clothing, and that would have meant staying the same size... outside of pregnancy, but you would probably have walked or cycled everywhere, and not needed a gym, so less of a problem. And the choice of foods was smaller. There were fewer labour saving devices in the home, so housework was more physically demanding.

Fabrics have changed, for better and worse, as have dyes. Times have very much changed in every way.

It is a good point that you could not washing machine many of these clothes in the past. In the eighties I bought a beautiful coat from the fifties. I wore it until it was threadbare. But it could only be very carefully dry cleaned.

i love dressing well, i have sweat guards in all my clothes that have sleeves, change as soon as i get home into my indoor clothes and hang up or clean what i've worn outside. I have only in the last 6 months owned a pair of trousers that are not active wear and haven't owned a pair of jeans since i was 15.
lots of my friends think i over dress but i love it, each to their own though, i wouldn't expect everyone to do as i do but i do prefer past times when more effort was made.

I suspect that people used to have two wardrobes: going outside clothes and at home clothes. The first would be of better quality and better cut and you’d change every time you went out of the house. There was a pride in looking neat and smart. Nowadays not so much of what you see on a typical high street people going about their business and lots of people of all ages both male and female simply don’t make any effort or don’t have the skills to do so or think it is not important. but most people actually go to work and dress up nicely to go to work but are not that visible.

Yes, hats were not rationed in the war, there was not the hair products either

I dress for comfort not style. I love my pink crocs and I may or may not have driven the kids to school in my pjs

Having said that I do shower twice a day and wear fresh clothes everyday.

I would have to agree. Either my standards have got higher or other people's standards have dropped. I am sick of seeing kids in leggings what happened to pretty dresses.

My granddad would have a wash shave and go out wearing a smart suit and tie
His idea of being a slob was to leave the tie at home
I live in my pjs and dressing gown and wear much less smarter clothes (jeans/leggings etc) to go to the shop in-it’s a bonus if I’ve brushed my hair

Haven't rtft but I saw some pictures of people in the 50s going to the beach in full suit. Seems bizarre now.

My (lovely) MIL has 'good' clothes and inside/gardening clothes. But I can't really tell the difference as they're all jeans and jumpers! Which, to me, look identical! She knows which are her gardening/cleaning jeans, and that's all cool, I'm happy if she's happy!
She'd have grown up with very little in the way of clothing, and still had the mentality of 'saving things for best' BUT recently I've been encouraging her to rebel! She lit a candle she's been keeping for best for years, and she got the enjoyment out of it! I'll continue to encourage recklessness, and smile and nod when she feels the need to change from one pair of jeans into another identical pair!
I dress appropriately for work, but do like my jeans when I'm at home. I'd never leave the house in my jammies, but as long as my hair and skin are clean, I don't need to have my hair 'done' or a full face of make up. I also shower every day, and my clothes are always clean. I think that's more important than dressing up.

We are just lazy now, in most departments of life, everything from food to clothes is for convenience.

Even going out to a restaurant now people turn up in jeans and trainers. If you go out wearing a dress people joke and say "where you going all dressed up?". I think it's a real shame tbh

We are lazy these days about things that don't really matter. But we spend much more energy and time on our kids these days than past parents did. We also unless we are poor, go out a lot more and do a lot more with our lives.

Its not about make up or women emphasising their good bits, its about general tidiness, cleanliness and pride in the way you presented yourself, and that goes for males and females.

Doesn't mean to say you need to spend time with your kids in joggy bottoms and bloody Ugg boots though

@Sarcelle I agree, men are just as guilty of this as women. I can't stand seeing guys in joggy bottoms unless they're actually on the way to do some exercise, my DH wears them around the house but would never go out in them

Doesn't mean to say you need to spend time with your kids in joggy bottoms and bloody Ugg boots though

Why not if that's what a person chooses and finds comfortable? Why does that make them morally inferior because they don't conform to other peoples' ideas of how they should be? I'm interested in wearing shoes that don't leave me in pain and don't really care if people say it's 'scruffy', I'm not willing to endure pain to suit someone else.

I think it depends who you are looking at in the photos. Scenes of working class life show people often without shoes, in torn ragged clothes, with dirty faces. Clothes often look shabby and well worn. People in those days dressed up on Sunday or for special occasions. If you are talking about the well heeled, yes they did look a lot smarter. Because they generally had servants and didn't work so their days were about what they wore and how they looked . Men all wore suits most of the time unless they were doing manual work.

Women from the middle and upper classes were judged by how they looked because their value lay in appearances. Being slim, well dressed and 'decent' equalled marriageability. Corsets and shape wear were a thing until up to the 70's. I would have hated to be a woman forced to wear suspenders and stockings and girdles. No washing machines to speak of and no tumble driers . Keeping clothes clean and well presented was a lot of hard work. shoes were mended and polished, and everything lasted until it fell to bits.

As an 11 year old in the late 60s, I wore seamed stockings to church before tights came in. I always had a pair of black, navy and brown shoes to match whatever clothes I wore. Jumpers were knitted, skirts and dresses made at home, and I was encouraged by dm to be able to knit, read and watch the TV at the same time. Also, before TV, people listened to the radio, much easier to knit or sew at the same time.

I can even remember making a maxi coat using upholstery fabric from Lees in Liverpool (John Lewis).

My school tunic and skirt were made at home, and my school jumper knitted. I was at school with a girl who's father was MD of a massive co in the port area and her school skirt and tunic were also made at home. It was just the norm.

My mother always wore a hat and gloves to church on a Sunday morning, and it was the only time she wore her engagement ring. The rest of the week it lived on a candle in a candlestick on the bedroom mantlepeice - our house had 9 fireplaces, bedrooms included.

Carpets were re-sewn on moving house as the cost of labour was much less. She kept the remaining fabric and wool from every garment knitted or sewn and had separate tins for press studs, hooks and eyes and buttons.

I'm now 2 years older than she was when I got married, and I live in Matalan jeans and Carrefour t-shirts, definitely letting the side down

In the 80s, when I first moved from a little town in Yorkshire to the south of England, I was really shocked at how scruffy people were in the south. I thought it would be the other way around - that people in the south would be smarter because they were richer. In my little Yorkshire town in the 80s, the women looked very smart, and many of them still wore hats. Now that little town has become very depressed, and everyone is even scruffier than they are in the south.

I'm not sorry that the wearing of curlers has died out, though. You hardly ever saw it in the town centres in Yorkshire, but lots of women used to wear them all day when they were at home in the daytime, and as someone said upthread, pop out to the corner shop in them or do the gardening in them, or whatever. I always thought it looked absolutely awful when I was a child. Quite a lot of women used to sleep in them, too.

Probably because having your photo taken was a huge deal - immortalising you over the mantelpiece - best to look your best.

Oh, and on the subject of jeans being expensive in the 70s ... they really weren't. I don't remember them being any more expensive than they are now - in fact, I think really expensive jeans are a more modern thing.

I remember wearing a slip with skirts. You wore one with an unlined skirt to stop the fabric clinging to your legs. I haven't seen a slip for years.