Why Don't People Wear Decent Clothes?

If a nice looking outfit costs the same as a pair of jeans and a "message" T-shirt, why do people choose to 'dress down'? Or, as this article articulates, with "gracelessness and self-exposure"?

Brit Charles Moore opines about how what we wear affects those around us.

It was sunny. The service was good, and so was the food. The atmosphere was relaxed.

And yet I felt slightly uneasy, as if something was jarring. Eventually I realised what it was. It dawned on me that the people passing up and down did not look very nice.

I do not mean that they looked like nasty people. There was no aggression or bad
behaviour. People were pleasant. No, it was simply that almost everyone was badly dressed.

Badly dressed, rather than poorly dressed. The town in question, without being swanky or chic, is one of the most prosperous in Britain, with virtually no unemployment. Almost everyone passing could afford decent clothes.

How can this be? How can the ability of mass production to offer an affordable choice of clothes to most citizens for the first time in history have coincided with hundreds of millions of people starting to look like slugs?

Convenience can slide into laziness; the liberated person can turn into a slob.

In a society in which people will live much longer than in the past, why is it so important to try to preserve youth?

If you say of a middle-aged woman, "Doesn't she look young?", you are praising a quality which, even as you speak, is diminishing. If you say, "Doesn't she look elegant?" you are noting something which may never fail.

Likewise, the idea that beauty is the same as athleticism fits ill with our ageing society, and makes the definition of beauty much more narrow and harsh than it should be. It tells you something about our way of thinking that the word "fit" now means "sexy".

Wouldn't it be a greater freedom if our clothes made the best of what we are, rather than pretending that we are what we aren't?

In the case of clothing, people say, "Wear what you are comfortable with". It would be perverse to argue that you should wear what you are uncomfortable with. But, surely how your clothes affect other people matters just as much?