I spend about three-to-four months a year in Europe. The standard of how a person dresses when going out in public is uniformly higher in basically every European country. Almost everybody is dressed well enough. It shocking to many Europeans how Americans will attend class or go to the store in pajamas. It wouldn’t happen there.
Yeah, a buddy of mine (we're both Dutch) was invited as a guest professor for a semester at a university on the East Coast.
He later told me his biggest culture shock was students attending his lectures in pajama's. And not just his morning lectures, but in the afternoon as well. Not having the decorum of even maturity to put on a simple pair of jeans and t-shirt was baffling to us.
Some trashy people wear PJs to the shops here in certain suburbs of Dublin. I’m not sure of their thinking - it might be ‘dole queen chic’ or an ‘I don’t give a shite what you think’ attitude. Not a thing among students AFAIK.
It's just the perk of still being in the stage of life before you join the workforce. What difference does it really make what clothes they're all wearing to class? They came, they're paying attention, they're doing the work.
Where I live we have this belief the way you dress is how serious you take something or how you feel. So when you would show up in pyjamas you give the idea you don’t care at all. But if you are dressed up neatly it shows you give a shit, and will probably be treated as such. They expand this idea to other things too. When you feel sick or unwell, it sometimes helps to dress up well again even if you go outside for only just a bit. It really does help to feel better. But that only works when you mentally have an association with how you dress equals how you feel.
Obviously not everyone agrees with it entirely about people taking it seriously, but they still follow it anyway because nobody wants to normalise pyjamas to be acceptable, basically. It’s trying to have everyone hold up to try better.
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u/becoolnloveme 4h ago
I spend about three-to-four months a year in Europe. The standard of how a person dresses when going out in public is uniformly higher in basically every European country. Almost everybody is dressed well enough. It shocking to many Europeans how Americans will attend class or go to the store in pajamas. It wouldn’t happen there.