Styles of clothing come and go, but one constant applied throughout all history until just a few decades ago: people always wanted to look their best to be seen in public. Now, by contrast, the object in dressing seems to be to get away with as much slovenliness as is socially permissible. (The phenomenon is not confined to the sphere of clothing, but extends also to the tacky fad of going unshaven—I refer to men, not to women, although, if women are shaving their legs less frequently, this would explain why they also wear trousers so often these days—and to the degeneration of our language into what I call Vulgar English. To elaborate fully on the second point would require another Fifth Column; let me say only that many of the best-educated persons of our day make syntactical and grammatical errors that would have embarrassed a college undergraduate in previous centuries.)
This doesn't mean that no sense of fashion exists, but the primary recent vogue (unless one counts the overdone-casualness itself), i.e., the baring of more and more flesh, certainly is a shoddy substitute for what was considered chic in former times. This is a kind of low comedy that elicits no laughter, but it's also lamentable: after all, wearing modest but aesthetically pleasing clothes adds charm and grace to life, and those are two qualities in short supply these days.
