One aspect of the weakness of character which marks most people today, is that they devote all of the time that they can, not to real human activity worthy of a free man and child of God (viz., the intellectual and the spiritual life), but instead to bodily rest and bodily pleasure (which are lower things we have in common with brute beasts).

Such people have no sense of the propriety of their attire but always seek comfort – as long as that comfort is in a manner which conforms with the opinions of the “crowd”.  When they go to church (if they do go to church[1]) or when they attend a special dinner with friends, most people dress like slobs nowadays.  But, again, they dress like slobs only in a way which conforms with the approval of the “crowd”, by wearing the particular sloppy clothes that conform to what everyone else approves.

Such clothes tend to be vulgar, base, and banal in those circumstances.  Thus, many people wear ripped trousers – but those trousers must be jeans (or jean-type pants).  These people would not be “caught dead” in ripped pants which are not acceptable to their peer group!

They wear conforming casual clothes to the office too.  Only certain clothes are acceptable and they know what sloppy, casual clothes they should wear because everyone follows and imitates the same “fashion” guidelines.

Universally, from the beginning of history, clothes have shown a person’s office or station in life.  So, those persons who perform rugged manual labor dress appropriately for that hard work.  Throughout history, those who do intellectual non-physical work for a living (e.g., thinking, speaking, writing, making decisions, or managing people), dressed in a way showing their occupations.  Kings, presidents, lawyers, judges, mediators, etc. did not dress in clothes that are suitable for being a farmer, a black smith, a mechanic, etc.  They wore clothes showing their office or station in life, through wearing the fabrics and the cut of the clothes that show they are not dressed for manual labor.

Here is how this truth is explained by St. Thomas Aquinas, greatest Doctor of the Catholic Church:

Those who are placed in a position of dignity, or again the ministers of the altar, are attired in more costly apparel than others, not for the sake of their own glory, but to indicate the excellence of their office or of the Divine worship.[2]

 

Similarly, in former times, when people went to church, they wore formal clothes (their best clothes), which were not suitable for hard manual labor.  They wore their best clothes to show respect for God, as St. Thomas explains immediately above.

Down through the ages, when people attended a symphony performance or an intellectual activity like a lecture, they dressed up, showing respect for the activity (cultural or intellectual) and for the persons attending with them.  When invited to dinner at someone’s home or when a young man took a young lady to dinner, he dressed up (as did she) to look their best and show respect for each other and for the importance of the activity in which they were engaged (viz., seeking a spouse and life-long companion with whom to start a family).

In short, the reason why we should dress well is to honor the others we are meeting and show that we esteem their dignity and/or that of the occasion.  We also show that there is a hierarchy of occasions.  By contrast, when we dress like slobs, we show that the other person (who has to look at us) or the occasion is not worth our efforts or our better clothes.

As the world around us gets ever-more corrupt, we see the pronounced trend of people dressing in whatever way makes them most comfortable. That is, they dress down and thereby inherently show another person that they disregard him and that their own comfort and gratifying their passions is more important to them than the other person.  In better times, people showed proper respect by dressing well (as was the reasonable custom, etiquette, and propriety) when coming into the presence of persons of a higher station of life.

But revolutionaries and communists sought (and seek) to destroy this order in society.  So, the Chinese communists wore “Mao suits” earlier in their revolutionary times.  These suits were poorly-tailored, and in the same medium gray color, to falsely pretend that everyone is equal.  Similarly, starting in the 1960s in the U.S., the cultural revolutionaries wore blue jeans even to high cultural events because they aimed at destroying the propriety of attire that society respected (showing contempt for custom) and sought to portray a false appearance of equality.

We live in a time of deliberate destruction of those morals and good customs which were developed over the centuries of Catholic culture and civilization.  We must be counter-revolutionaries!  We should do what is in our power to stand up for virtue and reason, against the cultural revolutionaries who are destroying Western Civilization.  This culture – though much of it has been destroyed since the height of Christendom – is worth fighting for! 

We must strive to be the sort of soldiers of Christ that God and our reason show us that we must be.  In this way, we will have spent our lives doing something truly worth living for, and if God wills, also dying for!  Let us do this together!