There was a time when people dressed up to go to town.

I remember Grandma would always change into a dress. Grandpa might not have put on a suit and tie, but he made sure he had on clean overalls and a clean shirt. They weren't going to a wedding, church, or some special occasion. They were simply going to town, and being seen in public meant making yourself presentable.

It was just what you did.

Looking back, I think the erosion of that standard may have begun earlier than we sometimes realize. The early 1960s seem like a reasonable place to look, when a lot of America's old expectations about clothing and public appearance were beginning to change.

John F. Kennedy provides an interesting example. There's a popular story that Kennedy killed the men's hat by refusing to wear one at his 1961 inauguration. That's not quite true. Kennedy did have a traditional top hat that day and wore it briefly, but the JFK Library notes that he generally disliked hats and spent most of Inauguration Day carrying his rather than wearing it. He was one of the last presidents to include a top hat in his inaugural attire, and the Library notes that Kennedy is often cited as one reason hats fell out of fashion during his presidency. Lyndon Johnson didn't wear one at his 1965 inauguration. JFK Presidential Library

It sounds like a small thing now. A hat. Who cares?

But that may be precisely the point.

Kennedy didn't need to announce that men no longer needed hats. A young, fashionable president simply demonstrated that a man could be well dressed, respectable, and even presidential without one. A convention that had once seemed almost mandatory suddenly wasn't.

Maybe that's how these standards usually disappear. Nobody holds a meeting and decides the old rule is dead. Enough people simply decide that one little piece of it no longer matters.

The hat disappears. The tie follows. Dresses become less common. "Sunday best" becomes an expression instead of an actual category of clothing. Jeans move from work clothes to everyday clothes and eventually become acceptable almost everywhere.

None of that is necessarily bad.

My generation certainly didn't grow up believing a man needed clean overalls or a woman needed a dress to run errands. Jeans and a decent shirt were perfectly acceptable. Sneakers replaced polished shoes. Casual became normal.

But we still got dressed.

There were work clothes. There were clothes you wore around the house. There were pajamas. And then there were the clothes you put on when you were going somewhere. The categories weren't written down, but everybody seemed to understand them.

For a lot of us somewhere between Generation Jones and Generation X, that distinction is still rattling around in our heads. We abandoned most of the old dress codes, but apparently nobody told that little voice from our childhood that it was allowed to retire.

Which is why some of us can walk into Walmart at ten o'clock at night and suddenly encounter SpongeBob SquarePants.

Not on a child.

On a grown adult's pajama pants.

And there is a tiny part of our brain that immediately hears Grandma asking, You're going out dressed like that?

I'm not suggesting we need to bring back hats, gloves, dresses, polished shoes, or Sunday suits just to buy a gallon of milk. Grandpa's clean overalls weren't exactly formalwear, after all. This was never really about fashion.

It was about perception.

There was an understanding that how you presented yourself in public said something about you. You didn't have to be wealthy. Your clothes didn't need to be fashionable or expensive. Grandpa's freshly washed overalls might have been patched, and Grandma's dress might have been several years old. That wasn't the issue.

They were clean. They were presentable. You had made an effort.

I remember asking Grandma about that once. I don't remember my exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “Why do we care what anybody else thinks?”

Her answer has stayed with me.

“We don't.”

Somebody else's opinion wasn't the point, she explained. She didn't change into a dress to go to town because she was worried that someone might see her in her house clothes and think less of her. She changed because being presentable was a matter of self-respect.

That distinction took me a while to understand.

Grandpa's freshly washed overalls might have been patched. Grandma's dress might have been several years old. Neither one was trying to impress anybody, and neither needed somebody else's approval. They simply had a standard for themselves.

They were clean. They were presentable. They had made an effort.

Maybe that's the part we've lost sight of when we talk about how casually people dress today. It's easy to frame the whole thing as worrying about appearances or judging somebody for wearing pajama pants to Walmart. Grandma would probably have rejected that argument herself.

The person whose opinion mattered was the one looking back at you from the mirror. Perhaps that's what gradually disappeared.

We didn't go directly from Grandma putting on a dress to somebody wandering through Walmart at ten o'clock at night wearing SpongeBob pajamas and bedroom slippers. There were sixty years of small changes in between. Each generation loosened the definition of what was acceptable a little further, and most individual changes probably seemed insignificant at the time.

And perhaps they were.

Still, some of us will change our shirt, pull on a decent pair of jeans, comb our hair, and make ourselves reasonably presentable before heading to the store. Nobody at Walmart particularly cares. Nobody is standing at the entrance checking whether we've met some long-forgotten public dress code.

Grandma certainly isn't standing at the door.

She's standing somewhere in our heads.

And apparently she still has standards.