LA Times addresses mourning/ballpark dress (re. pbl's thread)

[DeepModem Mom]

THE REAGAN LEGACY
Mourning decorum's death
To say that California casual was the dress code among those paying last respects to Ronald Reagan is to put it charitably.


A president was lying in repose, but the occasion could just as well have been a Saturday afternoon at Universal CityWalk, judging from the polo shirts, shorts, Harley-Davidson T-shirts, tank tops, flip-flops and dirty white sneakers with pulled-up tube socks.

For some people these days, there is nothing they will dress up for — not a concert at Disney Hall, a graduation, not even to pay their respects to a former head of state.

When Americans went to see John F. Kennedy's flag-draped coffin at the U.S. Capitol in 1963, women wore dresses and high heels and men donned suits.

But during Monday's procession through the Reagan library in Simi Valley, many men did not even remove their baseball caps as they paid tribute to a man who was never in the Oval Office without a coat and tie....

***

Kennedy's death may well have been the last of the country's mass dress-up occasions. In the 1960s, the hippie movement took hold. Youth culture began to influence women's wardrobes as much as high fashion, and dress codes loosened along with social mores...."The sartorial criticism will not be as strong as if people were wearing shorts and tank tops to see Kennedy," (Kevin Jones of the museum at L.A.'s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) said. "They probably wouldn't have even been allowed in back then. Today it's just not thought about as much, just as hemlines are not thought about."


http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-et-moore9jun09,1,1795078.story?coll=la-home-style


On edit: This brief article is from the Times's Style section, and is not presented as hard news.

[LisaM]

1. Of course, people used to wear suits and dresses to baseball games...

so it's fair to say that they mourned Kennedy in their ballpark gear, too. That said, I do think that you wear shorts and hats to baseball games, a nice dress and at least nice pants and a nice shirt to a wake.