Yep. Also fails to explain the significant decline of all the other accoutrements of the early 20th century's well-dressed man, such as the waistcoat, the tie, and the suit.
It's more of an overall long-term casualisation trend in society from the Victorian era through to today, reflected not only in clothes but also in speech and manners. It seems to me that we might have hit rock bottom in the 1990s and started clawing our way back up, but maybe that's just the circles I move in.
I agree about the casualisation. Especially ironic: People who wear tee-shirts to work complaining about today’s youth wearing trousers so low that their boxer shorts are hanging out. As if, you know, wearing an undershirt as outerwear in public is somehow more dignified than wearing underpants as outerwear in public.
Yes, and tradition. A woman can get hired to work at a bank with pierced ears, but probably not with a pierced nose. There's nothing in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics that says one is more acceptable than the other, though. It's purely cultural.
That difference will be gone in ten years if it isn't already, although oldsters will continue to bemoan it for another twenty.
Well, yes. The fact that if you walk around with only a t-shirt covering the upper half of your body then people say nothing whereas if you walk around with only a pair of underpants covering the lower half of your body then people say "ugh, good god, put some fucking pants on, dude!"
This is not a random arbitrary social choice, either; if you're showing your underpants then you're not far away from showing other stuff we really don't wanna see. That's why the social convention is that you need two layers downstairs and one layer upstairs to be considered dressed.
If your next question is "yes, but why do people object to seeing strangers' genitals?" then I could point you at some ev-psych just-so stories, but the answer is "we just do, okay?"
I think it goes back even further than the Victorian era, whose fashions were in many ways simpler than the height of 17th/18th-century aristocratic fashions. For example, the wig fell out of fashion, and elaborate embroidered suits, gowns, and capes were replaced with a more standardized range of coats made out of plainer fabric (often just plain black). By the Victorian era, nobody was dressing like this dashing fellow anymore: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georg_Friedrich_H%C3%...
Indeed, in Handel's day, only Handel and other rich important folks dressed like Handel.
Fast forward to 1900 and everyone from lords to labourers is walking around wearing a plain suit. You can still tell the difference between the two, but it's subtle rather than ostentatious.
It's more of an overall long-term casualisation trend in society from the Victorian era through to today, reflected not only in clothes but also in speech and manners. It seems to me that we might have hit rock bottom in the 1990s and started clawing our way back up, but maybe that's just the circles I move in.