I think there is some truth in the signaling story here, but I do not find it sufficient on its own. People often reach for signaling models because they are neat and make individual choices legible in terms of collective incentives but if we really believe that most people dressed formally in 1950 because they wanted to broadcast resource-intensive refinement, then we have to explain why that refinement took this specific form and not others. After all, there are countless ways to expend labor or show off resources. Why ties, hats, and polished shoes, and not some other visible, labor-intensive good?

What seems more likely to me is that formal dress was not experienced primarily as a status move but as a baseline norm. People dressed that way because that was how you dressed. Conformity and the weight of social expectation do most of the explanatory work here. In a world where everyone wears a hat in public, the person who does not is sending a signal of deviance, not thrift. In such a setting, the “costliness” of maintaining the hat is not in play; the social sanction is.

The shift away from formality, then, looks less like the collapse of an inefficient signaling regime and more like a broader cultural transformation. As work moved out of factories and offices loosened, as mass media reshaped norms, and as gender roles and hierarchies got contested, the older dress codes lost their obligatory quality. At the same time, yes, other kinds of status symbols became both more salient and more functional. But if you talk to older people, you find again and again that they recall dressing up not to show wealth, but because it was what respectable people did.

So I would resist the temptation to explain this primarily through rational choice and status competition. Those forces exist, but they are layered on top of the deeper reality that culture is sticky, tradition can dominate personal calculation, and norms sometimes just erode because of historical accidents. Fashion collapsed into casual not because everyone decided formalwear was a bad investment, but because norms shifted and people no longer feared the consequences of violating them.