Casual Day

Casual Day

When I heard a new restaurant was opening nearby I was ready to snatch the opportunity. No, not for a date with Bret Michaels (though I do wish that was on the agenda). It was the chance to finally wear the Nanette Lepore dress and matching coat I’d hoarded in my closet since the New Year’s blowout sale at Lord & Taylor. With high school and college behind me, I can forget about any more proms and formals as excuses to play grown-up dress-up. But this was just the place: candlelight, marble floors, baroque wall moldings outside and in. I pushed the doors open with one hand, perfectly Chanel Vamp- lacquered fingers and all—and stood cemented there. I was stranded in a blizzard of loungewear.

It seems that, in the last half-century, dress standards have done a complete 180. The slobification of America probably stemmed from several different factors. Maybe it’s all about the “cool” quotient. History tells us the younger crowd has always rebelled against the “stuffed shirts”, but it’s clear by now that even the stuffed shirts themselves have thrown in their (monogrammed) towels. More culprits for our increasingly disheveled appearance could be laziness or the sheer practicality of not having to unzip one’s fly in public after a five-course meal at some Zagat-rated haunt on the Upper East Side. Whatever the case, it seems that the concept of formality is rapidly headed the way of T.Rex. Dresses feel overdressed. Ties are disappearing faster than last season’s tan. Saunter into a restaurant dressed up and patrons in leisure suits flash you stares that sneer you’re out of place. But I have a (sort of rhetorical) question. What really is more out of place in a restaurant where you can barely pronounce half the items on the menu—my Nanette Lepore dress or holey paint-splattered sweats emblazoned with Class of ’85?

I wouldn’t say I have as much contempt toward casual attire itself as I do towards disheveled dressing. A century ago it was not uncommon for women to shed outfits three or four times a day, with men not far behind. Even though we’re not living in the Victorian age anymore, common sense says it would still be a bit more visually appealing for people to set the bar a little higher. I’m not saying that a trip to the local supermarket calls for suicide heels. But for once I’d like to not feel over-the-top at what is supposed to be a formal or quasi-formal setting to begin with. At places as supposedly formal as the Metropolitan Opera I’ve seen ripped jeans, tracksuits, UGGs, Crocs, flip-flops, sneakers of every variety (and degree of whiteness), cutoffs, tanks, and visible underpants. Not to mention baseball caps turned at every conceivable angle. It looked more like a roadside burger joint than an opera house.

Informal dressing has not always been over-the-top (or is that under-the-bottom?) deconstructed. Casual Fridays began in the 50’s as a morale booster for the new white-collar office. The Beaver Cleaver era was rather slow to digest them, but with the onset of the 70’s, a wave of foreign mass-market clothing gushing into the U.S. made Casual Fridays increasingly popular. The number of companies relaxing their dress codes boomed. Ironically enough, today it seems that the workplace is one of those rare remaining territories where dressing up isn’t ogled with contempt. In the short stint I had as an intern some years ago, I felt more in my element. There were skirts! Heels! Ties! Not a battered sneaker in sight! For once I didn’t feel like every pair of eyes in the room was scrutinizing me for not wearing something ripped, stained, or 8 sizes too big with a gargantuan logo. For once I wasn’t being sneered at as being overly tricked out. To give an idea of how far we’ve fallen, the Halloween of my junior year of college, I wore a skirt to class and people were constantly stopping to ask me what my costume was.

It was there in that office that I realized the advent of Casual Fridays must have spurred a reverse trend. Other environments that once called for extra polish have stretched “casual” guidelines to the point where, far from filtering out what was included, count almost nothing as excluded. If that’s true then there might as well be no distinction between dress pants and cutoff Wranglers. Once I decided to burn time in during a college lecture by tallying the other girls’ shoes. The UGG count was 9. The total number of girls in the room was 12. And that doesn’t count the guys, who were either swimming in x-x-x-large sweats or jeans wide enough to rival M.C. Hammer's and belted strategically halfway down their buttocks. And I thought, aren’t you all gearing up to be young professionals here? Because if they were, Mr. Trump was hopefully donning his blinders.

Alright, so I do admit that maybe I’m a tad too enamored with dressing up. After all, I was the kid waddling around in my mother’s old heels and Aunt Fifi’s vintage costume jewelry. But when you see sweats and sneaks at the opera or some Le Chateau Bleu of a restaurant, it should be cause for alarm. So is the lady in a nylon leisure suit who throws on a couple of baubles to “formalize” it. Not only is our population forgetting where to dress appropriately, they’re forgetting how. Which is why I feel my crusade to de-slobify the people of America is far from over. Until then, expect me to wear that exact same dress to that exact same restaurant again. Just to piss off the peanut gallery.