Paging ColdChef! I know from his Twitter he's seen some shocking things!

I haven't ever been to a funeral in North America, but I know that the protocol is to wear something sensible and black, unless the deceased was a rocker. In Brazil, it would be weird to see anybody outside of everyday wear unless the mourners are members of the immediate family. Funerals are surprisingly informal affairs.

I'm sorry that you had to go to a funeral, jason's_planet.

What do people dress up for anymore?
Not funerals, not religious holidays, not dinners at nice restaurants, not the opera or ballet...
I guess weddings, proms, and sort of for job interviews, though all of those things are slipping too.

Not weddings.

Not work, at least for some (we're business casual- wish we were casual casual so I could be lazy and wear jeans, lol).

No, people just don't dress up for anything at all anymore. The first time I ever went to the local courthouse I was totally shocked - there were people there for their first appearance in court dressed as if they had just come directly from cleaning out the septic tank in the backyard. I mean, yeah, hey judge dude, don't mind my flip flops, filthy cutoffs and This Shirt Protected by Smith & Wesson torn confederate flag T-shirt or anything. It blew my small middle class mind, right along with the several job interview candidates I've had show up in flip flops and jeans.

[NOT FLIP FLOPIST]

I had the same court experience as mygothlaundry last year when I had to go to court over my apparent-stolen-car-felony thing (it turned out fine). I really sweated over the day and I wore a nice dress and tried to look as innocent and respectful as humanly possible. I was honestly shocked when I saw what crap people there were wearing. I mean, you expect people to at least dress up for COURT. You have some opportunity to influence outcome based on your appearance - this is, like, the one time you might really want to take that opportunity. Or so I thought in my middle class mind.

I recently talked about this in a meeting with a bunch of upper-middle-class -- well, really, upper-class in today's striated economy - women. I would have thought they'd share my appalled response to the getups some people slouched around in to court. To my surprise, they took just the opposite tack, too. When they go in to try to weasel out of a traffic ticket or a settlement they owe or what have you, they dress down, in old jeans and sweatshirts and stuff. THeir reasoning was "so they don't think you're rich and stick it to ya!" I had no idea this could even be a concern. Again, middle class mind takes a wallop.

Out of curiosity, what were the approximate ages of the offenders?

(Thanks, msali. I'm OK.)

The offenders were . . . early to mid-20s, I'd guess.

I think it depends on whose funeral it is. Most funerals I have been to over the last few years have been people killed in boat racing accidents and, in those circumstances, team uniforms are de rigeur (and often formally requested). The most recent one was a friend killed in a moto-x accident and most people wore sober, but not necesarily black, smart casual gear (although the row of motorbikes lining the path outside the chapel and the Kawasaki stickers emblazoned across the coffin made the atmosphere a bit more casual, I guess).

For an older person, particularly a relative, I think people would be more likely to dress up. Of course, for these young people nowadays, 'smart casual' means a whole different thing than it does to us oldies.

I've also had the pleasure of being in court a few times in the last few months (on the side of right, not being prosecuted) and I've been amazed at what some people wear. I wear a suit and have twice been asked by a magistrate if I'm a lawyer, I assume because of the way I'm dressed. I will be back in court more in the near future and will continue to pay what I think is due respect to the court and wear my suit.

I am on pins and needles hoping that my fiance's well-meaning but often drunk hippie cousin will not show up to our formal wedding in the apron top with nothing underneath and six inches of ass crack.

Coincidentally, An Affordable Wardrobe recently has some nice thoughts on kids these days and dressing for a funeral.

I remember sitting in court one sweltering summer (no air-con in public buildings then) with about 20 other lawyers and various assorted defendants (it was housing court, as I recall). Us ladies could wear dark blouses, and if our skirts were long enough, we could get away with no tights, but the male lawyers had to be in a suit. (It was before the days when women lawyers were allowed to wear trousers in court.)

The judge came in, realised how hot it was and said "Gentlemen may remove their jackets". As my male colleagues breathed a sigh of relief and took off their jackets, you could see the "Huh?" looks on the faces of the white male defendants, sitting there in their wife-beaters, shorts and flip-flops. Their wives/girlfriends would always be dressed to the nines, East End style, with tons of makeup, jewelry and killer heels, as if they were going to a nightclub, not a court.

The Indian, Pakistani, African and Caribbean men were always very smartly dressed. The West Indian ladies would wear their church hats. Sometimes the Nigerians would turn up in their tribal robes, which I loved to see.

I so agree with y'all. Even dg re: team uniforms. There are funerals where stuff like that is important. Requests of the family should be followed.

The problem is, I believe, that people aren't taught how to dress for certain situations. The only reason I know is that my mum taught me and my sibs. As far as I know it's not taught in high school (wasn't at mine, anyway). It might be taught in some business courses, but I don't know. Yeah, people see how people dress at court and funerals on TV, but hey, that doesn't apply to regular schmoes like me, right?!

jason's_planet, I'm with you. My mother's sister's funeral was a parade of late 90's yard work clothes, and I was horrified. I didn't even LIKE THE WOMAN. My husband had never met her and managed to show up in a suit. I'm barely over 30 and I still agonize over whether it's appropriate or expected for me to wear nylons to any particular thing. I understand socio-economic differences, and I appreciate people who show up in the best they've got, but then there are people don't put in any effort. Which is disrespectful, IMHO.

I guess deborah's right - much like people who can't boil water for want of ever being shown, people also can't dress properly for want of ever being shown.

A lot of people don't actually own more formal clothing for such events. Hell, I own exactly one jacket and it's about 8 years old, and not fitting the best anymore. I don't own a suit. I have exactly two dress shirts. And, I really can't afford to correct that situation, either.

This isn't to say I have no understanding for proper dress in situations like funerals. I do my best. However, I acquired those few formal items back when my income stream allowed the expense. They aren't Armani, mind you, but of reasonable quality.

However, for a huge part of our population, spending money on a jacket you might wear four or five times in your life is a waste of what little money you have. There are more pressing things they need to spend their cash on.

Now, people who do make a good living and still can't bother to dress appropriately...that's a whole other thing.

You can almost always find suits and jackets at thrift stores. I worked in an internship while I was finishing my BS that required full suits four days a week. I had no money so I bought all my clothes at the Goodwill store. Ten dollars for suits and ties for two dollars each. It's probably twice that since this was in the mid nineties but you get the idea.

It's the effort, really. Maybe all you own in the world is T-shirts with cartoon pigs on them and camouflage pants but at least they could be clean and without holes. I am also unwilling to think that that's the full extent of the wardrobe of the literally hundreds of people I've seen dressed like that for various occasions and believe me, I know a lot - and am learning more every day; the stories at my job are enough to make anyone despair - about poverty in the southern Appalachians at this point.

Clothes are cheap today, much much cheaper than they were when my parents were young and everyone wore suits and hats and stockings and girdles and white gloves and stuff. That's the interesting part, in a way, that now you can buy an entire brand new reasonably decent outfit at Wal Mart or Old Navy for under $30 and well under that used in good shape if you hit the thrifts and yet people just don't care. Or they really don't know and I'm not sure which is scarier.

I'm sure it's because they don't care (in most cases) - clothes are so cheap these days that you can buy a complete brand-new suit for under $100 (yeah, that much money is an impossibiity for many, I know), so it's not really because people can't afford to buy 'proper' clothes.

But, you know, funerals are (in my experience) a vastly different thing to what they used to be. Funerals used to be dramatic, sombre affairs where everyone gathered in a church, pretended to sing hymns and listen to carefully prepared eulogies delivered in a monotone. Later, everyone would gather at someone’s house and politely drink cups of tea and nibble on biscuits making small talk. Everyone was miserable and uncomfortable. It didn’t matter who the person was or how they lived – that was the ‘proper’ way to conduct a funeral.

Funerals these days (again, in my experience) provide a much better opportunity to both mourn the loss of a friend/relative and to celebrate the person they were and the life they lived. Almost exactly a year ago, my friend Mick was killed riding his motorbike – a tragic loss of someone liked by everyone who met him and who lived his life according to his rules and nobody else’s. Did we all stand around singing hymns and being polite? Like hell we did. The service was held in a chapel, but that’s pretty much the only ‘traditional’ part about it. A traditional coffin was at centre-stage, but it had huge Kawasaki stickers down each side and Mick’s helmet sitting on top of it. His favourite heavy metal music was played at ear-splitting volume throughout the service. Anyone who wanted to was invited to speak about how they felt about Mick and many did so – not from prepared speeches, but from the heart. After the service, the coffin was placed in the hearse and it drove off led by several of Mick’s friends on their motocross bikes (including his best mate riding the bike Mick was riding when he died and the 8 year-old son of another friend). The procession disappeared from sight and, a few minutes later, the bikes came back up the road without the hearse and parked in the driveway. Mick was gone.

Mick had a hotted-up car that was his pride and joy – a car that he’d had since he was a teenager. When the hearse drove out the driveway behind the motorbikes, following behind it was his wife driving his car. As she pulled out onto the road, someone called out ‘do a burnout’ and she stopped until the hearse was up the road a bit and then let loose with an enormous burnout, then drove slowly out of the cloud of smoke and out of sight behind the hearse, to return a few minutes later at the head of the group of bikes.

After all that, everyone gathered at the cricket club where Mick played and there we all stayed until late in the night, drinking, reminiscing, remembering who Mick was – celebrating him rather than mourning. I’m sad that Mick’s gone, but glad that I knew him. I would have hated to think that his friends couldn’t see him off in a way that he wouldn’t have approved of just because it wasn’t ‘proper’ or respectful – the way the funeral was conducted was far more respectful than any ‘traditional’ service would have been.

Most of the funerals I’ve been to over the past few years have been this way – conducted to reflect the person rather than according to some ridiculous protocol. Although, I’ve lost so many friends in the last few years to motorsport accidents that I swear, if I have to see another helmet on a coffin, I’ll break down sobbing on the spot.
After all that, my point is that maybe it’s not such a bad thing that people feel free to dress to their own standards rather than others’ expectations. Maybe it’s a good thing, in fact.

I can’t imagine a ‘traditional’ funeral including having unregistered, uninsured motorbikes being ridden on public roads by helmetless riders, much less how traditional views would approve of the widow doing burnouts in the deceased’s car behind the hearse. But I can’t imagine seeing Mick off with a traditional church funeral – he would have been mightily pissed off if that had happened. I bet, wherever he was, he was laughing his head off.

I think it depends on the person being put to rest, really. My brother was dismayed when one of our second cousins showed up to my grandmother's funeral in a wrinkled shirt, khakis and worn out tennis shoes. My take on it was that my grandmother would not have cared one bit about anyone's wardrobe (and likely would have laughed her ass off that I wore a dress and heels.)

I'm definitely on the side of dressing up, FFS. My mum taught me that appropriate wear for funerals was dark colours (not black unless you're immediate family), and preferably a dress or skirt & blouse and nice shoes. (Obviously it's different for people with different backgrounds, but you get the idea.) I like the idea of dressing for the person being mourned, too: at one friend's funeral, one of the pallbearers was in head-to-toe leather, which horrified the friend's family but he had hated his family anyway (they really were pretty unpleasant) so that was kind of a bonus. I was a starving student at the time and still managed to put together a decent outfit, as did all of my punk rock, starving student friends.

As I see it, part of the point of dressing up for things like funerals is to mark the event as important and discrete from day-to-day life; it's part of the ritual that helps us mourn. I'm not a religious person, but I do think that with the collapse of rituals to mark significant events such as death, marriage, and coming of age, and set them apart, we become poorer as a culture, and the events themselves lose significance. Now, this doesn't mean that rituals can't or shouldn't be individualized -- sticking to tradition for its own sake seems as meaningless as not doing anything at all -- just that I think that such events should be treated with more respect than, say, a day lounging on the couch.

So, the scary bit is: Maybe that's what passes for dressed up in their life. sigh. I'm old, too.

... part of the point of dressing up for things like funerals is to mark the event as important and discrete from day-to-day life; it's part of the ritual that helps us mourn. I'm not a religious person, but I do think that with the collapse of rituals to mark significant events such as death, marriage, and coming of age, and set them apart, we become poorer as a culture, and the events themselves lose significance.
Well said.