Do folks still dress for regular dinner?

[stevejobs]

In the movies of the 40s and 50s family dinner was a proud and formal activity where everyone was properly dressed in decent and suitable attire. Do you know of anyone, including yourself, that dresses up for family (non-guest) dining?

 

[Sui Generis]

I wear a suit during dinner sometimes, but only if I'm still wearing it when I get home from work and dinner is already on the table. Of course, my tie is loosened and my jacket is off.

Times have changed. Watch I Love Lucy and you see Ricky wearing a smoking jacket around the house. Guys used to wear a suit to a baseball game, or on a plane flight. Those days are over.

 

[Dewey]

i think the phrase, "dressing for dinner," dates to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when dinner was the main meal of the day. and it took place at noon.

if one was on vacation, at a resort, or living a gentlemanly life of leisure, dinner might be the first thing of note you would do. the whole day could revolve around it.

and "dressing for dinner" involved not just dressing to create or maintain a respectable appearance for one's family and guests, but also for one's servants. dinner would be served by a group of servants, and one did not go to dinner in one's sleeping clothes, even if there were no guests on this day. so you had to get dressed before you would come down to dinner. of course, some people would go down for a meal in their sleeping cap, but this was eccentric behavior and the kind of thing that distinguished one as an oddball.

i think families stopped dressing for dinner because "lunch," which used to mean "quick and informal snack," became a regular meal. changes to the workday did this. dinner became the evening meal. who is not dressed by six pm?

also very few families are served dinner by servants. private family life is much more private among well-to-do families. there is far less need to get dressed for the meal. the dining rooms of the well-to-do are not the semi-public spaces that they could once be

movies and television shows were not realistic in their representations of family life. the families behaved like they were living in public spaces. they dress for their dining rooms as they would for a restaurant. the bedroom scenes, with mom and dad in separate twin beds and their whole bodies covered in robes and scarves, are famously awkward.

and is not the case that men wore suits to baseball games because suits were all they had? the closets of 1915 were about three feet wide. also the baseball games took place in the middle of the day, so men work their workday clothes. and suits could be "sporty" right. they did not have such limited meaning as they have today. they were just clothes.

 

[alliswell]

Among the classes that dressed for dinner, dinner was always the evening meal, not the mid-day meal. You only need to eat substantially during the day if you're going to work hard in the afternoon.

 

[Tarmac]

JUST STOP

 

[Conrad]

I'm 22 I did until i was about 15, it kinda stopped when my parents split. I'd dress for school, come home and change into play clothes, and before dinner came back in and change into something appropriate (typically back into what I'd worn to school that day).

So while I didn't dress formally, i was always clean coming to the table.

 

[LabelKing]

I believe supper was the traditional term for what is commonly called dinner now.

 

[Dewey]

i'm stoppin'. what's up with that, tarmac?

 

[stevejobs]

Originally Posted by Tarmac

JUST STOP

tarmac is disturbed

 

[Dewey]

i'm sorry to hear that.

 

[DocHolliday]

Originally Posted by LabelKing

I believe supper was the traditional term for what is commonly called dinner now.

Depends on where you're talking about, I think. In the Southern U.S., the evening meal is still supper, while the midday meal is dinner. But, IIRC, in many places supper was a originally a lighter meal than dinner. As such, you might have Sunday dinner -- a large family gathering with hearty portions in the afternoon.

 

[JimInSoCalif]

I would not expect many folks to dress up for dinner at home when they don't even do that when they go out to a nice resturant - at least in my part of the country.

I would like to find a restaurant where the patrons dress as well as the piano player.

Cheers, Jim.

 

[Meursault]

As already pointed out, in the UK at least, dinnner among the upper and middle-classes has always been the evening meal. Supper (a term still frequently used among selfsame classes) was and is a lighter, informal evening meal.

In the country, plenty of people still dress for dinner, particularly if they've been out huntin' shootin' and fishin' all day. But these days, an evening meal with just family is more likely to mean just fresh shirt, trousers and shoes, with maybe a sportcoat, rather than anything formal. Sitting down at a proper dining table in a t-shirt or jeans just feels wrong to many people.

 

[VKK3450]

If a dinner jacket is only meant to be worn after 6 pm, then doesnt that mean that dinner has to be served after 6, so therefore its an evening meal?

K

 

[JayJay]

Originally Posted by JimInSoCalif

I would not expect many folks to dress up for dinner at home when they don't even do that when they go out to a nice resturant - at least in my part of the country.

I would like to find a restaurant where the patrons dress as well as the piano player.

Cheers, Jim.
Same here.

One would be hard pressed to find people dressing nicely at the nicest restaurants here in this neck of the woods. There is not a restaurant in these parts that requires a jacket, thus you rarely see them worn during the dinner hours.