Americans Used to Dress Up Everywhere — So Why Did We Stop?

Look at any photograph of a 1950s baseball crowd and almost every man is wearing a suit, a tie and a hat. Women wore white gloves to the grocery store. Families wore their Sunday best on airplanes. Then, in about one lifetime, America stopped dressing up. So why did we stop? I'm Hal Whitmore. I taught American history for 36 years, and my mother would not go to the grocery store without her white gloves. In this video I walk you through how it actually worked: the hat and its rules (including the Straw Hat Riot of 1922), Sunday best, school dress codes, the tailor and the shoeshine man, wartime clothing rationing and the nylon riots, and the ironing day that made it all possible. Then I count down the five things that ended it, and the biggest one is not about clothes at all. Key sources: the Straw Hat Riot, New York City (September 1922) · War Production Board order L-85 (1942) · the Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles (June 1943) · the postwar nylon riots (1945–46) · wash-and-wear (1950s) and permanent-press (1960s) fabrics · Aloha Friday, Hawaii (1960s) and the spread of Casual Friday (1990s) · women first wearing trousers on the U.S. Senate floor (1993) · JFK's 1961 inauguration top hat. This video is history and education.