Do you miss the way we used to dress before everything became so informal?

[strawberrydress]

I was at work today and thinking how much dress codes have changed. Even just five years ago I was wearing pencil skirts, blouse and heels to the office and that was a totally normal outfit. I feel like if I wore that now everyone would think it was really weird! Today I saw people wearing trainers, jeans, t-shirts. I don’t remember the last time I saw a man in a tie. Everyone was so casual.

I feel I notice the same thing everywhere - people don’t seem to dress up for things which used to be seen as quite formal events like going to the theatre or out for dinner.

I used to really enjoy clothes and thinking about what to wear but it doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore and there aren’t many opportunities to wear nice things without looking out of place. Does anyone feel the same or is it just me?

I agree with not dressing up too much for things like the theatre/opera. I'd usually wear smart trousers and a nice top for either, perhaps slightly dresser for the opera. Even for glyndebourne I wear either a smart/casual dress with a nice jacket or dare I admit throw or pashmina or silk trousers and a silky tunic or wrap top. For black tie parties, we still have a few, silk trousers and a velvet tunic or a dark sequined wrap jacket. Things aren't nearly as dressy as a couple of decades ago and in the 50s/60s my mother and grandma would have worn furs to the opera/black tie events.

No, not at all. Ultimately a person can wear whatever they like regardless of what they perceive others are doing, and plenty of people do and did long before the pandemic came on the scene.

The precursor for women especially to dress to accentuate certain aspects of the body with tight fitting/underwired/high heeled shoes either at the workplace or socially always was hideous in it's origins. I didn't need to lockdown to come to the understanding that actually feeling comfortable was preferable - but I must say I am especially pleased that heels (for now) aren't an everyday item, they're so bad for the feet in most cases.

My social life now doesn't contain the type of event that I'd need to dress formally for, which is money-saving in and of itself. Feeling obliged to buy a dress/bag/shoes for something formal for a certain date was never something I enjoyed or thought was a good use of money or time. If I really felt the need to 'dress up' and go all out- which I may well do at some point as absolutely it can be enjoyable- then I'll machinate or book something to go to where I'd need to and would thoroughly enjoy myself I'm sure!

It's a long time since I wore clothes that weren't informal.

Last wore a suit and heels to work pre-2010 and the pencil skirt and blouse people are describing sounds like something I would have worn when I first started work in the 1980s.

My pre-Covid wardrobe was smart jeans, low healed boots and a top/thin sweater or a jersey or jumper dress with thick tights and low heeled boots . I wore a version of this whether going to work , going to the pub, for a meal, meeting friends etc. I also had my 'scruffs' - joggers and a fleece for my days off - cleaning, waking the dog, supermarket run .

My wardrobe now is much the same but the proportion of time I wear in my scruffs is a lot higher than in my normal clothes as the majority of time I am working from home. I probably have got lazy - but it's a lot cheaper.

I remember the days of walking to the psych wards with my ECG machine and having to guess who was a member of staff to ask where a patient was.

I've found it more the opposite way round with the relatively recent trend of 6th formers at school now being expected to wear suits or 'business wear' - which seems ironic as 'business' seems to have universally relaxed from the expectations 30 years ago - I can no longer tell who are the teachers and who are the pupils now they all wear suits.

I do concede this might be to do with my age

The precursor for women especially to dress to accentuate certain aspects of the body with tight fitting/underwired/high heeled shoes either at the workplace or socially always was hideous in it's origins.

I assume that ‘pressure’ autocorrected to ‘precursor’.

I’ve been in professional jobs since I graduated in 1992. What is this pressure you speak of? I trained with a Big 4 accountancy firm. We were never asked to wear tight fitting clothes, or underwired bras or high heels. Ever. We had to look smart, which meant dressing as smartly as the senior people at our clients. Which, up until the mid 2000s when business casual started to become a thing, meant tailored clothes in serious colours. For the male trainees, it was suits and a tie. Plenty of the female trainees chose to wear what I would describe as ugly shoes. Their prerogative, not my taste, but both counted as ‘smart’.

If anyone had turned up in very tight fitting clothes with chest aloft, somebody would have had a word!

Unless you are talking about the 1950s but the sort of clothes women wore to work then, if they worked in an office, weren’t that different to what they wore for everyday.

I’m noticing the usual outpouring of ‘heel hate’ on this thread. Posters claiming that they look outdated and weird. They clearly haven’t looked at a copy of Vogue, Elle or Bazaar recently.

I find it really curious. Why the vehement dislike of a style of shoe? Why do you care so much about what other women wear, to the extent that you’re attempting to baby them by telling them that they will ruin their feet, like a tut-tutting grandma? I assume that the shoe represents ‘how dare you look glamorous and make me feel bad about myself, you potential husband stealer’.

@Zipps I fear that was me.

I love dressing for the theatre. Nearly had a nasty moment though when an impatient man stood on the back of my dress and nearly caused a Madonna style tumble backwards down the stairs.

@Iamthewombat I don't think heels.look outdated or weird but I have never really worn them. Neither, however, have I ever worn "ugly" shoes. I think you need to define ugly.

The benefit of always wearing flatter shoes is that when you are old, like me, your feet are still presentable in summer sandals.

I think I get where the OP is coming from. Two things however. Firstly for those who can do so, working from home at least part of the time means having to think less about style etc and saves money. Secondly, fast fashion is one of the larger causes of climate change, and if not having two or three different 'wardrobes' reduces that, so much the better.

Ok but I, for one like thinking about style.

Secondly if the concern is about waste, I think a lot of posters have been talking about clothes they already have in their wardrobes that are going unworn. Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't one of the biggest areas of fast fashion spending this last couple of years been loungewear?

What an utterly bizarre assumption! Most posters are saying that high heels are uncomfortable and for them, feel old fashioned as it's something they last wore several years ago. Any shoes or clothing appearing in fashion magazines, or even worn on very young women on an evening out are not necessarily going to feel relevant to what a 30-something-plus woman feels comfortable wearing in the office. As for thinking that the high-heel-wearers are out to steal their husbands - hilarious !

I suspect that heel wearing may depend a little on where you live. I noticed last time I went out in the evening to our nearest City centre that a lot of young women were wearing extremely high heels. In the country pubs where I would normally go for a meal that would not be a normal/common look.

I took Iamthewombat's comments to be a reference to the unreserved glee expressed on so many threads on here - premature in my opinion - about the alleged demise of heels. As a flats wearer of very many years (who admittedly has never worked or socialised anywhere that expected heels) I've found it a bit odd.

I wouldn't go for a night out in flats of any kind though, it would feel like slippers to me! I wear heeled boots, heeled sandals or courts with an ankle strap. Not platform or anything OTT, and I don't wear tight dresses, or 5" heels, but I'll have a mid heel stiletto (2.5 - 3" max). I don't need the height as I'm not petite, it's just a dressier look that I prefer and makes me feel like I'm on a night out.

I think heels are changing though. There are lots of very solid, blocky heels around at the moment that don't feel like the heels of old at all. I've just bought some after about 40 years of very rarely wearing anything but flats, and I'm pretty impressed.

Clearly not someone who's worn heels (which were often specified in an office dress code - I think a few women took their companies to employment tribunals to get a ruling it was discriminatory in the end) for the last twenty years...

On a night out - it's a different thing entirely. It's likely to be for a few hours, you might be sitting for most of it etc

But when it was required office wear, and you're carrying a laptop bag, and you might have to stand for a couple of hours each way on public transport, and you wanted to get some shopping but that will unbalance you even more, and your feet are wet and cold in the rain and you can't walk any faster in the damn things, and you discover there are so many places with slippery tiles/cobbles/ cracked pavements that it takes all your concentration to even cross the street. And then if you carry trainers you have to have this massive handbag. The hassle never ends.

And all you want to do is your job, and someone makes a crack that wearing heels means you're probably a husband stealing hussy...

And they give you bunions if you wear them for long enough...like 10 hours a day, five days a week for decades.

Speedweed you've brought back a memory, when I was 7 months pg and still wearing pointy heeled courts for the office, but also had to travel by train to meetings with a cabin size wheely case of folders and a laptop etc and then walk for probably half a mile after getting off the train... oh my poor pregnant feet! And it just never occurred to be that I could or should wear flats because nobody wore flats, smart flats for the office weren't a thing then. Ballet flats were ok for casual wear, but these were also uncomfortable because of thin soles and no arch support.

The woman involved in the ‘high heels’ case worked for an agency that supplied receptionists to large companies (eg investment banks, professional firms).

amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/may/11/receptionist-sent-home-pwc-not-wearing-high-heels-pwc-nicola-thorp

This lady was sent home for refusing to go out and buy high heels to work on the front desk at PWC. She lost a day’s pay. She complained, with justification, that it was unfair. Her complaint was upheld, and rightly so.

That is one of a small handful of cases in the past ten years where an employer has attempted to insist that female employees conform to a dress code that includes high heels. I doubt that airlines still require it. That’s a long way from all women in all professions having been required to wear tight fitting clothes, underwired bras, high heels etc., as a previous poster claimed.

What an utterly bizarre assumption! Most posters are saying that high heels are uncomfortable and for them, feel old fashioned as it's something they last wore several years ago.

No, they aren’t. Have you read the thread? It’s peppered with statements like:

i can’t imagine why anyone would want to wear heels.

Ons of the mums at the school gates wore heels and she looked really out of place.

Here’s another, from the first response to the OP. This poster isn’t only saying that she finds heels uncomfortable . She also calls them ‘silly’. That’s the point: why does a style of shoe worn by other women evince such emotion?

I don't miss heels - I think they are silly, impractical and uncomfortable

And this:

A mum at pickup today had great big heels on today and a skirt. Looked so dated and weird. Everyone wears trainers now.

Poor woman, being denounced as ‘weird’ for being a shoe traitor.

I like the fact my dc can go to clubs in their jeans and vans and not have to totter along in stilettos.

And here’s one for my bingo card. Any thread that touches even tangentially on the wearing of high heeled shoes must include a reference to ‘tottering’. Lots of people are capable of walking capably in high heels. That must be disappointing for you.

I like the shoe change as I have a disability which means I can't wear heels so I always found it quite tricky to find flats that didn't look too try-hard-quirky or made me look like my 14 year old self at school.

I find the clothes more stressful though as office wear is 'safe', easy to put together and you always look smart but my job involves moving between settings that vary in formality now so I often feel too informal in some and too formal in others, when before everyone wore the same!

One of the mums at the school gates wore heels and she looked really out of place

A big 4 accountancy firm is not the school gates. I think employers in very formal, professional environments are right to require a level of presentability from their staff (especially from the first person a client sees when they go in). These places rely on how others perceive them (in terms of reliability, quality, formality, etc)

What next? No bras? Unkempt hair? Laddered tights? Not in such environment

I used to wear lovely clothes to the office. And I planned my outfits carefully. I always looked well-put-together. My clothes were good quality high-street. You wouldn’t get them now...

We (my friends & me) also wore nice casual outfits of skirts, fitted shirts, good jackets at the weekend. And lovely, flattering jeans, too. Before skinny jeans / leggings...

Saw a young woman in flesh coloured leggings recently (looked like she’s no bottoms on) & I remember thinking how good we used to look in our jeans...