My mother came from a dirt-poor family which basically had just enough to eat. My father came from a wealthy banker's family. Both my parents made a point of dressing well: my mother because she had a horror of her early poverty; my father, because he was just used to looking a certain way. By well, I don't mean fancy. I just mean that they dressed cleanly and appropriately, and that they would not have dreamed of leaving the house without clean, pressed clothes, combed hair, brushed teeth, etc.
The "middle" class - that is the working class with aspirations/conceit - is the one group that is likely not to dress well, either because they are stupid enough to think they can pass for "rich" by dolling themselves up, or because they want to show their "contempt" for the rich by being unnecessarily unkempt.
On the other hand, maybe all this doesn't really apply in the U.S., where people think that the rich dress they way they do on T.V., so dressing rich is like dressing like the people on T.V....which really makes everyone look ridiculous.
Joanna
frank scott wrote:
>>
>>
>> "Poor people tend to dress up well because dress is a message about a
>> person
>> who wears it."
>>
> very much so, and poor, and working people, frequently "dress" so as
> not to appear...poor and working class!
>
> and those who are neither poor nor working class have no need to
> appear to be what they are not...
>
> dress is not simply some individual or marketing choice, but often
> socially imposed...
>
> that's in urban areas...in rural areas, slightly different fashions
> rule...
>
> fs
>
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