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How Sweat Clothes and Yoga Pants Ruined America
For years I’ve maintained that we Americans dress too casually. We look sloppy. We look like we don’t care about ourselves or others.
Wearing workout gear as street clothes was popularized in the 1980s (along with other self-inflicted cultural wounds such as stonewashed jeans and glam bands). That started a downward spiral that has left us with the public wearing of yoga pants, or, as I call them, the last temptation of Satan.
When I was a lad in the ‘60s and 70’s, we dressed better than today. We even had a “Sunday suit” we wore to church every week, a phrase unknown to today’s youth. Considering the shorts, sweat socks, and t-shirts I’m surrounded by in the pew every Sunday, wearing your “Sunday best” has been forgotten by adults, too.
In my hometown of yesteryear (Asbury Park, NJ) women who worked at the local department store, Steinbach’s, were required to wear dresses or skirts. Men had to be in a suit.
This formalized work attire spilled over into the streets. People wanted to look nice in front of their neighbors. Appearances mattered. Cleanliness was next to godliness. Clean, pressed clothing signaled a clean and pressed home-life. You didn’t put your business in the street, you didn’t hang out your dirty laundry, and you certainly didn’t wear unsightly or ill-fitting clothes while walking the boulevard. We were a better society for it. There’s less inclination to act the fool in public if you aren’t dressed like one.
Before my time, in the immediate post World War II years, people even wore nice clothes on the boardwalk. It was looked down upon to leave your home in worn attire that didn’t fit. 
The first I noticed this change to wearing gym clothes everyday was when Italians who weren’t smart enough to be in the mafia wore velour track suits that somehow signaled they were in the mob. Why they wanted this affiliation still baffles me today, but there it was: A man in a crushed velvet sweat suit and a gold chain with a pepper hanging off it supposedly meant he was something he wasn’t.
The Italians were followed by rap stars, who, in their quest to co-opt everything Italian “gangster,” started wearing track suits too, complete with gold jewelry — except bigger chains and more of them, from Flavor-Flav’s giant clock all the way to Mr. T’s huge collection. At the street level, each chain represented another month of unpaid rent. 
When black kids are doing it in America, white kids are sure to follow, whether it is sweat clothes as street clothes or today’s gravity-defying pants with underwear sticking out of the top. I’m stunned by that look. When I was a kid, the worst thing that could happen to you in grammar school was if a girl saw your underwear. Good grief, you might have to move out of town if a girl saw your underwear. I’m tempted when I see today’s ridiculously low-worn pants to check if there is a safety pin holding them up. Once below the hip bone, I don’t get how they don’t fall down.
Follow that with a trendsetter named Michal Jordan, who in the 80’s decided to ditch the NBA’s traditional gym shorts for a baggy pair that didn’t fit. His shorts became so long they were pants again. 
True to the “white following black” phenomenon, Jordan’s shorts then influenced the skateboard and surfer crowd into wearing clothes that didn’t fit.
Thus the destruction of America was fully underway. Now, in all places public — on the street, at work, or in church — we suffer through our neighbors leaving the house in gym clothes that don’t fit; attire that is either too baggy or too tight.
What of pride? What of humility or modesty? When it comes to men in bikini bathing suits, what of courtesy? I don’t want to see that. There are plenty of European beaches where you and your banana hammock can feel at home. You give me the willies.
By the way, I don’t like transvestites and cross-dressers’ clothing. I can confidently say that without being labeled a bigot, because those people have nothing to do with gays or the silly concern for gender that has us unsure of what public bathroom to use these days.
Transvestites and cross-dressers are simply people with bad fashion taste, who choose to dress that way. They aren’t born clothed. If Joan Rivers can make fun of people’s clothes and be a cultural icon, then so can I. If you have a “y” chromosome then dress like a man. If you don’t have a “y” chromosome, then dress like a woman. I don’t give a potato who you sleep with because I can’t see it, but you wear your clothes in front of me. Community standards matter and you’re violating them. Stop it.
The final horseman of the America’s couture apocalypse is women wearing yoga pants everywhere they go (I don’t know if men are wearing yoga pants — and don’t tell me because I don’t want to know).
Yoga pants are literally a catastrophe of biblical proportion. Recently a blogger named Veronica Partridge did a post revealing that she has given up wearing yoga pants (in other news, there are still such things as blogs).
Veronica’s reasoning for her rejection of Satan’s leggings is temptation. She spoke to her husband, and he admitted that it’s hard not to break the 9th Commandment when in a room full of ladies dressed as yoga pant-wearing strumpets.
The 9th Commandant is “Thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife,” so you heathens don’t have to stop reading to look it up. “Covet,” for you illiterates, means “want.” Never mind the 6th Commandment to not commit adultery; the 9th says you can’t even want another woman, even for a second!
Christianity is a hard hustle. You see, humans are part of the animal kingdom with inbred instincts. One of those instincts is survival of the species, so when a man sees a woman there can be an innate reaction inside him toward perpetuating the species, which, of course, is done through sex. When a man commits to a woman, these innate parts of his being don’t shut off. If married, he ignores or suppresses them to the point where they don’t matter to him, except for his wife.
Now, the more the temptation, the harder it can be on a guy to ignore or suppress that desire to propagate. If he’s in an old-folks home, he may experience little desire to propagate the species. When he enters a go-go bar, he may be suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to propagate some dancer’s brains out.
So being a good Christian man is hard enough. Since desire can rise and fall with temptation, all Veronica Partridge wants to do is not be Satan’s tool. Good for her — and for us men, too.
Of course, not everyone is Christian, but I’m sure men of other religions and even atheists want to be faithful in thought to their wives. Ms. Partridge’s refusal to wear skin-tight sportswear in public will help those guys, too.
Now, before you radical feminists say anything, shut up. Don’t start bringing up “rape culture” and blaming rape victims for the way they are dressed. I’m not talking about touching a woman. This is about fashion. I know you people have “slut walks” and such, so feel free to be one. I imagine heaven is a crowded place, so by all means go to hell. But if you make a show of yourself, don’t complain if people judge the show. 
As for you people who are going to compare Ms. Partridge’s sentiments to Islamic culture that forces women into a head to toe burka, you can shut up too. She made clear in a disclaimer at the top of her post that everyone can continue to wear what they want, which includes her, in case you missed that point.
We all have our own fashion sense and fashion is one area that gets judged, like it or not. We all take it on the chin. I prefer cardigan sweaters around the office, prompting some of the younger guys to start humming the theme song to Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood when I walk by. When some muscular lunkhead is walking around in a sleeveless shirt while the temperature is 10 degrees outside, I’ll tell the showoff he’s not dressed weather-appropriately.
Just because we have freedom in America to wear what we want doesn’t mean we should. We are civilized. We shouldn’t dispense with decency. Propriety in fashion separates us from the animals. And the Middle East.
Yet our community standard for what is acceptable fashion has been obliterated over the last generation. These yoga pants make it exceedingly easy for men to picture women naked, prompting the question: how close to naked will we accept? What’s next after skin-tight, see-through yoga pants?
Jimmy Kimmel has the unfortunate answer:
Published in General
I was seriously thinking of getting one of the classier versions they have. But what’s the point when you canna carry a sgian dubh into most work places?
in girls…but not guys. yes, girls, the jeans are essentially spray painted on.
My silly brain registered that sentence as “he is wearing a suit of fish.”
Clearly, my grey matter needs an upgrade.
Of course. He was outdoors. Even indoors, he would have dressed properly for dinner.
No, on guys. On nearly every (fashionable) guy I see.
In the 1920s,
suits were inexpensive.Even adjusting for inflation, one could get a decent suit back then for about $30 to $40in today’s money.You want to blame somebody for the casualization of dress? Blame the European designers who made
even basicdress clothes a luxury item from the 1960s on.(My memory was in error. The average price of a man’s suit in 1920 was between $20 and $40 in 1920 dollars, according to this image. That works out to between $238 and $476 in today’s money, which actually seems about right for a cheap-but-decent suit. Mea culpa.)
Oh, it is a step up, don’t get me wrong, but it will still look casual to a great number of people, or once laden with electronics it will look even worse – hipsterish or ironically retro. Let’s face it, it is just a heavy windbreaker with shoulder pads, cut to look like it could pass with a tie.
Don’t give any of these modern performance artists any ideas. The meat dress has already been done.
I suppose I should count my blessings then, to be among the unfashionable young men. Most of the young men I see mostly wear khaki’s, or regular jeans. Nothing tight. There are bitter clingers to the droopy drawers.
There’s a story about Gerald Ford, when he became President, being told that he needed to start wearing better suits. A tailor was brought into the White House for a fitting. Ford asked how much one of the suits would cost, and he was told four or five hundred dollars. Ford responded “$500? I didn’t pay that much for my first house!”
Note: That would be about $2,403.50 in 2014 dollars, according to this site.
Well observed.
It stinks, too. (Especially after the third wearing . . .)
Seawriter
Told ya. Smashing in a kilt.
If a man has shoulders and a chest, it does look good. Their model does not.
I knew an older woman whose husband had passed BCHI (Before Carter’s hyper-inflation). One of his admonitions was, If you ever spend $5,000 on anything, make sure it has a basement. Well, after Carter, she went and got a new car, and it cost more than $5,000. She swore she was going to tie a teacup underneath as the basement.
I wondered who had introduced those saggy baggy basketball shorts. Grr. Just another reason to scoff at Michael Jordan. If we could just hide those full sleeve tats…
Sorry, but no. I cannot agree that the previous basketball fashion was superior.
No, darlin’. Let me assure you, Sean Connery isn’t missing anything.
You must get really upset by Kenny Rogers’ call to violence in Coward of the County.
Or, to get Tommy worked up, Rush Limbaugh’s tirade against black quarterbacks on ESPN.
Back in the mid-90s I was walking down 6th Street in Austin, TX when I passed a man sitting in the doorway. He had a scruffy beard, and was wearing a tank top, cut off jeans, Roman sandals, and the most elaborate over-the calf argyle socks ever. The socks did not fit the rest of the picture. I looked again, then realized they were tattoos.
I thought to myself, “we’re doomed. Give it twenty years and it won’t be unusual.”
Seawriter
Well, no, because Kenny Rogers isn’t the freakin’ Pope.
Casey, you have a looooooooooooong memory!!!
Modest casual clothing worn right:
Not tempted, Tommy?
Some people can wear overalls and a barn coat and make it look glamorous and sexy.
But, I agree, what we lack is self-restraint and good manners. Wearing modest clothing is a way of loving your neighbor without tempting him/her to lust after you.
I could write a whole post about Catholics showing up to the Wedding Supper of the Lamb in clothing they wouldn’t wear to a friend’s wedding, but that’s ‘nother whole topic.
I really like the modernist artists of the early 20th century, in part because they rebelled in their paintings, not with their clothes.
Here’s Egon Schiele:
And here’s Kandinsky. I suppose this is just a photo of him holding a dry brush up to a completed painting, but he thought he should be wearing a suit for it.
I note that he isn’t wearing a jacket. Clearly an anarchist.
@ J.D.
Ok, now I’m really impressed. A picture of my favorite Austrian artist!!
“Tirade”?
You rank Austrian artists?
Not to be overly serious in such a light thread, but I think there’s an important point here:
Many conservatives see their world view as being at the end of a spectrum, or as being a counterpole (in the magnetic sense) to the negative pole of liberalistic nihilism or Islamic fascism.
But the reality is that the current American traditionalist conservative movement is the moderate man in the middle: don’t dress so trashy, be more modest, but don’t take it to the burqa extreme. Don’t tell people what they may or may not wear, but do tell them what they perhaps should or should not wear.
It’s really something of a Goldilocks position.