An aside: I remember reading something recently about the modern increase in skin cancer rates... with some blaming sunscreen and others blaming increased detection. It just struck me that people also just simply used to simply wear more clothes.
The thread isn't about fashion, really. It's about style and aesthetics. Most of the poorly fitting loose clothes that he's criticizing are "in fashion" but they look terrible. Even if you don't agree with his sense of aesthetics, learning to see what he's talking about is valuable.
> I did think the first comment was interesting, that it could be selection bias as fewer photos were taken so people dressed up.
>And there's not much selection bias in the old footage you see of crowds walking city streets at the turn-of-the-century.
Are you sure? What part of town were the photos usually taken, and for what purpose? I would actually be very surprised if there weren't selection bias in where, when and why such photos were taken.
The article in detail danced around a couple socioeconomic issues:
People had vastly higher standards of living in the good old days. A working guy in a factory could buy a house on a cheap small mortgage, have a new car, pay for a stay at home wife and a bunch of kids, and, yes, buy fancy clothes almost recreationally, and anyone higher up had an even better lifestyle, of course my grandfather had a cottage on a lake for the summer, just like everyone else in his socioeconomic group ("management"). The fancy clothes go well with the nice house and new car that even relatively poor people could afford... back in the old days. People are much, much poorer now, much more hand to mouth, if that. Long term socioeconomic decline. I'm sure Rome after the fall of Rome was not quite as stylish as Rome at the peak of the Empire, and now its our turn for steep permanent decline and all that results from it.
Profit must be maximized at all costs explaining why designer clothes are so boring. If you are in the business of buying nice fancy attractive imported shirts for $10 and marketing them for $250, you're more or less legally obligated to buy the cheaper more boring looking shirts for $5 and market them for the same $250. And this trickles down to lower financial levels. So no more fancy multi-part button down shirts with elaborate buttons and collars and shaping, you get the cheap rumpled looking tee shirt with the expensive label.
People in general are statistically very fat and fat people have ... unusual, generally inaccurate, very optimistic ideas about what makes them look thinner, like skin tight clothes so they're still a size "large" despite looking very overstuffed. And due to mass marketing everyone has to wear the same style so as a thin athletic guy I have to dress like how a 300 pound guy inaccurately thinks makes him look thinner. If I shop at Target or Old Navy or something like that, I look like a thin guy in a scarecrow stuffed with straw costume. Fat people clothes are NOT flattering on thin people; ironically they're also not even flattering on fat people. But in 2025 everyone has to dress the same and everyone has to dress like them.
Racial vs socioeconomic status signaling. In the old days if you were not a manual laborer you'd dress fancy to make a visual point of not being a manual laborer. Now we have racial profiling where if you're not obviously an illegal you're clearly not a manual laborer, so there's no need to dress up like a factory owner to make it clear you're not a factory worker. I, and people like me, don't need to dress up for people to assume I'm not a groundskeeper on sight. You're judged based on your demographics much more intensely in 2025 than in 1955. All people need to know is my obvious visual demographics and my postal address and where I hang out, they don't need to look at the quality of my clothes, to have an accurate idea what socioeconomic class I'm in. No need to count the pleats in my pants or measure the starched width of my collar.
So, basically, everything is downstream of slow long term economic collapse, profit taking, normalization of fatness, and multiculturalism.
> People had vastly higher standards of living in the good old days.
As a percentage of spending on groceries, people used to spend 25% and now it's 10%; for clothing it used to be 10%, now it's 3%. In 1900 people used to spend over 40% of their budget on food:
Compare the Mustang (and Charger) in the 1968 movie Bullitt compared to today: more horsepower, more torque, better fuel mileage, better safety and comfort (air conditioning!).
Didn't really resonate with me, I'm not very interested in fashion.
I did think the first comment was interesting, that it could be selection bias as fewer photos were taken so people dressed up.