Look at any old photograph of people from a hundred years ago and one of the most striking things about it is how well dressed everyone was. Even men out laboring in the fields or fishing in rivers, their sleeves rolled up and foreheads slick with sweat, often wore button ups, sometimes even with a tie. It was culturally expected that when you appeared in public – and, often, even when you didn’t – you would put thought and effort into your dress and grooming.

Today, things are different. Like so many traditions of the past, the idea of dressing up to go out is viewed as an oppressive and arbitrary rule from a bygone (and uptight) era, largely discarded in American society. Yet we fail to realize that the old-fashioned “rule” wasn’t arbitrary at all; it is we, not they, who have surrendered to a tyrannical force.

We live under the tyranny of the casual. We collectively flee from any suggestion that anything is really all that important, that anything is worth showing respect to through our bodily appearance and disposition. This atmosphere of casualty dominates our culture, cutting deeper than just fashion, although fashion is one expression of it, and it’s ultimately yoked to our loss of the sense of the sacred. While our deteriorating standards of fashion have a lot to do with American egalitarianism, I think their real genesis lies in our secularism and subjectivism.

In a subjectivist society, where everyone creates their own truth, no universal norms can be imposed because no universal truth is acknowledged. In this environment, common customs deteriorate because common customs are based on a common sense of the way the world is, and how to act in the world. But our custom is to have no custom because we deny any common, universally valid truths. While past generations understood that certain ways of dressing aligned better with objective truth, we deny that there’s any objective truth to align with.

In his book “The Abolition of Man,” C. S. Lewis made an observation that illuminates an older understanding of fashion and dress:

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.

Traditionally, people understood that the realities we encounter deserve a certain reaction on our part. A waterfall, in Lewis’ example, deserves our admiration and wonder. A galloping stallion really should inspire us, whether or not it actually does. With this understanding, culture in general was an expression of those fitting reactions to reality. Custom communicated a common understanding of things. In the case of fashion, dressing well or dressing poorly expressed an individual’s attitude toward the world around them. And when we dress well, we express an attitude of respect toward ourselves and others.

Dress is a way of conforming to reality. Human beings are symbolic creatures, and what we wear expresses our inner disposition. Thus, when we dress up for church, a wedding, or our job, we are expressing our understanding that the activity we’re engaged in deserves respect, and we’re willing to give it that respect. We’re in the presence of something bigger than ourselves. We recognize the goodness, the value, the importance of these things – and that recognition blooms exteriorly in our very appearance. Ironically, there can be a kind of humility in wearing a suit to a special event and a kind of arrogance in wearing shorts and a t-shirt because the latter says, “This isn’t important enough for me to dress up; I don’t need to conform myself to this higher reality outside myself.”

Why dress well outside of special occasions? Because – as our ancestors knew – our own bodies and the bodies of others deserve respect at all times. In the Christian understanding, every human body is the work of an omnipotent God, and every human body is, at least potentially, a temple of that same God. This awareness of the sacredness of the body engenders a natural tendency to adorn it fittingly.

Here, we can see the impact of materialism and atheism in American society. The materialist attitude sees the human body as nothing special; just an overdeveloped monkey body, a kind of cosmic oddity, composed of the same raw atoms as everything else we see around us. It has no inherent value and therefore deserves no special respect. This is a tragic loss of perspective.

Unsurprisingly, when we embrace reality and conform ourselves to it in dress as in other ways, we receive additional benefits even beyond the gift of abiding in the truth. Dressing well has been shown to improve confidence, clear thinking, and even others’ perception of us and our competency. Due to something called the “halo effect,” when someone sees one positive trait in us (our respectable sense of fashion, for instance), they’re more likely to attribute other positive qualities to us. If philosophy isn’t enough to convince, practicality should be.

Life is serious. Of course, it’s also joyful and merry, but it nevertheless deserves our respect. And our fellow citizens deserve it too. We can express our reverence for the mystery of humanity found in both ourselves and others by dressing accordingly.

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News.

Image credit: Freepik