Dress Code for Mass

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I don’t think I am. She said she would wear that to meet the queen, and you said it is not day wear. She feels it would be appropriate for the queen, but not for mass. That is her choice to make.
 
I’m pretty sure a cocktail dress would be equally inappropriate for church. Which is what daytime formal for a woman would be. If I was actually going to meet the queen I would presume I could obtain proper advice on what to wear from a British person.

The actual most formal outfit I own is a plain black knee length dress and a gray suit jacket to go over it. Which I would consider inappropriate for church.

(As an aside I hate actual women’s suits. It’s impossible to find something where both pieces are anywhere near the right shape for one’s body.)

Realistically, what I’m wearing now is more what people think of as “church clothes”. Mid-calf loose skirt, heavy tights and mary janes, a winter velvet blouse and a fairly understated necklace. Standard winter office attire for me, but certainly not my “best clothes.”
 
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Office attire is good enough for mass.

I wear clothes suitable for a job interview when attending mass but I don’t wear dresses.
 
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DarkLight said:
I’m pretty sure a cocktail dress would be equally inappropriate for church. Which is what daytime formal for a woman would be
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A cocktail dress is not the formal day dress that one would wear to meet the Queen.
 
My grandmother used to tell us about a time when she was a little girl, a man came to church who was new. He had just bought a farm (this was a farming town) and wanted to get into the church. He wore, as she described it, “a button shirt with a starched collar, nice shoes, and his denim overalls. It was clearly his work clothes but he was very clean and his overalls were pressed and ironed. He looked nice” A few Sundays later the ladies group got up during the announcements and proclaimed they had taken a collection and they would like to present 50 dollars to the man, so he could buy some “appropriate clothes for church”. The farmer refused the money and left. And never game back. Apparently my great-grandparents were very upset by this.

I wonder if these people did that man any good worrying about why he wasn’t wearing a suit and tie.
 
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I don’t think making announcements like that is a good idea.
That’s what strangers on the internet are for – to instruct people about the concept of “church clothes”! 🤣
 
StephenBales said:
Now think to yourself you are meeting the King of all creation. What do you wear? The best you can actually manage.
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And yet there have been people on CAF in the past who have complained that when ones “very best” is expensive, that it’s being a show off and assumptions have been made about how much one is giving to charity. Really, the best thing is keep your eyes on your own paper.
 
In other words, the best thing is to avert one’s eyes from the yoga pants, midriff tops, etc.
 
Loud-living-dogma said:
In other words, the best thing is to avert one’s eyes from the yoga pants, midriff tops, etc.
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Tell that to any young boy in the throws of adolescent hormone deluge or to any man who struggles with lust…

I think the argument has drifted…it’s not (for me at least) the wearing jeans, overalls, evening dresses ect…it is the presenting of temptation to others.

It is being a stumbling block and all ya know…
 
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Did I say “everyone else”?

I do have family and friends that I know don’t own a suit jacket. Personally the only one I own is OD green and was issued to me around the year 2000.
 
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Loud-living-dogma said:
No, daytime formal wear is not a cocktail dress.
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At least around here, women’s attire has:
Evening wear
Cocktail/party dresses
Business formal
Business casual
Casual

Those are about the only levels around. Frankly what most people wear to mass is about business casual level to maybe the nicer end of casual. And a lot of outfits people think of as modest church wear (e.g. maxi skirts or brightly patterned blouses) would be considered casual.
 
Well, imagine you were to Google “Kate Middleton dresses”. Don’t you think you’re missing a category – like daytime formal, or daytime dressy, or something? That style of dresses (sleeves, tasteful length, not “body-con”) is I think what a lot of people associate with “Sunday best” or “church clothes”, etc. I know people are going to say that her clothes are expensive, sometimes the skirts don’t cover the knee, but the general style of having sleeves, of a dressy fabric, tasteful, hitting near the knee is what I mean.
 
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But many women don’t own those kinds of dresses. And wouldn’t be comfortable in the shoes many of them call for.
 
It is a challenge to find dresses / skirts like that. I think people could wear flats instead of heels with nice daytime dresses.
 
Eh, it’s possible (and unsurprising) that there’s nuances that the very well off have in their dresses that the rest of us don’t. I know what I listed would cover pretty much every social occasion I could imagine, as a middle class american woman, being invited to.

Which is all beside the point. The point I was making was that most of us don’t truly wear our best to church. I could afford a nice formal dress, sure. But I wouldn’t wear my most formal dresses because they’d be far too showy for church. It would just look like I was trying to show off.

Whereas the business casual outfit I described a few posts back is about what most people actually think of when they think of dressing up for church. Even people who likely own nicer clothes.
 
DarkLight said:
Eh, it’s possible (and unsurprising) that there’s nuances that the very well off have in their dresses that the rest of us don’t. I know what I listed would cover pretty much every social occasion I could imagine, as a middle class american woman, being invited to.

Which is all beside the point. The point I was making was that most of us don’t truly wear our best to church. I could afford a nice formal dress, sure. But I wouldn’t wear my most formal dresses because they’d be far too showy for church. It would just look like I was trying to show off.

Whereas the business casual outfit I described a few posts back is about what most people actually think of when they think of dressing up for church. Even people who likely own nicer clothes.
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Okay, your “business casual” is my “daytime dressy”. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

And it’s funny you act like it’s some rare thing to need clothes like that, but Catholic women do go to church every Sunday, do they not?
 
Loud-living-dogma said:
Okay, your “business casual” is my “daytime dressy”. 😄

And it’s funny you act like it’s some rare thing to need clothes like that, but Catholic women do go to church every Sunday, do they not?
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That’s not the point.

The point is that we’re not wearing those clothes to “give our best to God” because those aren’t actually our best clothes. We’re wearing them because it’s a social expectation. There are social connections between dress and the occasion and respect. Now I’m not for bucking social expectations willy nilly - they have their place. But I think it’s worth recognizing that they are cultural norms, not divine mandates. Cultural norms can change (and in this case are - not just with church either) and it’s not inherently wrong to not hang on to them.
 
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