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This is a really good way to put it. I've bemoaned the culture of dressing down before, but I never thought about it in these terms. We used to aspire to acting with respect, to courtliness; now we aspire to be so important that we can act with disrespect.
Generally agree, but with a bit of a branching split.
The suit.
Suits were originally for men conducting business to meet each other in a way to demonstrate the exact kind of respect that you and OP discuss. I like those kind of suits.
Suits, today, in companies that require them or strongly suggest them, are far more about a corporate conformity and "putting on airs" of Doing Big Business. I spent three years wearing a suit everyday to my job as a .... data scientist. I was rarely in meetings with non-technical staff. I made zero "deals". I was slightly uncomfortable all day long and I paid thousands of dollars in dry cleaning.
The suit, in that context, is functionally pointless and is a kind of weird aspirational gesture to a form of business that 90%+ of non-sales professionals really will never engage in.
What I'm saying here is that blindly aping the forms of respect (dress, appearance, etc.) can, if done without intent, actually create a kind of personal disrespect. The "corporate soulness drone" meme is, in part, a nod to the fact that trying to blend together old world savoir-faire with post-ww2 industrial capitalism fails in a non-linear way; there's no charm of a classic British firm and the efficiency of Space Age MegaCompanies gets slowed down and neutered. You get InnaTech instead of Lloyd's and instead of SpaceX.
It's not that I'm advocating a RETVRN to the business suit. I'm critiquing that we abolished the business suit with nothing to replace it.
I do believe that the American Ivy/Prep tradition is the perfect way for a white American man to dress, and that the suit or something like it is the perfect outfit for most occasions. The suit is aesthetically perfect for the male form. Structured tailoring smooths out your body's imperfections. The lapels broaden the shoulder and slim the waist. The shirt collar frames the face. It's relatively practical and comfortable if you pick fabrics and cuts properly.
But I recognize that wearing a suit and tie is a costume today in most circumstances. It might be a very attractive costume, but it's a costume. For the most part I try to achieve a similar impact with more casual clothing, a chore coat or an unstructured blazer with chinos, a zippered hoodie, etc.
There are lots of other things that can fill that role. There are lots of other ways to create an outfit or dress people well. But we haven't picked one as a society and I think that's a problem that society can choose to solve. We've lost, in most places, the basic "this is how you dress to show respect to those around you" set of rules that make life more navigable.
We didn't lose them. We explicitly chose to throw them away at the behest of an ideological movement that asserts "those around you" are not worthy of such respect.
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