Coincidentally I just watched a 90 second clip from The Brady Bunch. I’d forgotten how formally everyone dressed on TV … even in their own homes with no guests visiting. The father is wearing slacks and a tie. The girls wear dresses. Not realistic.
Not going to make an argument for the realism of The Brady Bunch, but people did certainly dress more formally in previous decades.
At my first job bagging groceries and stocking shelves, we wore a dress shirt and a tie.
At my first corporate software job, it was only a year or two past the time they had to wear a suit and tie to work. By the end of the 90's people went to work at a corporate job dressed the way I dressed at the beginning of the 90's to go skateboarding.
Depending on, for lack of a better word, class people did dress up more in general. My father didn't have a tie on at home. But we did dress up way more than today when we went out--and especially if we were traveling by air or going to a restaurant.
In business, I was just joking the other week that, in the course of my career, we've gone from business suits being the expected attire at industry events to jeans with T-shirts at least being perfectly acceptable.
They were always so dressed up, like they were planning on attending a wedding and at the last minute decided to play Donkey Kong.
The real world looks as it always did, as I sit here "computing" in my gym shorts and a dirty tee shirt from changing the lawnmower oil this morning.