There are two kinds of people in life – those who iron clothes (or had the luck of someone to iron their clothes), and those who don’t.
There used to be a whole lot more people who ironed clothes. In fact, wearing ironed clothes was the norm through much of the last century. That’s in part because dress was more formal and much less casual then. Even a laborer who now would wear jeans or work pants and a T-shirt would have worn trousers and a button-up shirt.
One never dressed casually for the office. It was men in ties and ladies in well-coordinated outfits, mostly in fabrics that required a good pressing before being ready to wear.
The demise of ironing came down to two factors: the development of wrinkle-free fabrics, and the switch from business to casual attire at work.
Steve Draper, who used to run the classy Draper and Ferrell’s Clothiers on Main Street, had an additional theory about the demise of dressing up for work.
His shop, which opened in 1975, was a mainstay of the business district and the fashion scene. I interviewed him for another newspaper when his store closed in 2020.
He told me that dressing up for work reached its end back when local businesses were bought out by conglomerates.
Throughout the history of Martinsville, until local businesses were bought by large corporations, decisions were made locally, Steve said. If you needed a loan, you went to the bank and talked directly with the person who would make that decision. The movers and the shakers were right here, in our community, part of us — and they dressed the part, sharp in their business suits.
Since the powerful people worked in the same buildings as everyone else, all the employees felt the need to be presentable. They all dressed up, following the leaders’ examples.
When the huge corporations bought out our local banks, and other significant local businesses, the leaders and decision-makers were no longer in the same building. They weren’t anywhere near Martinsville. There was no one left to set the standard, no one left to impress, so employees stopped dressing up as much.
When Casual Friday became a thing in the 1990s, it eventually made its way to the rest of the week. People who dressed to the nines Mondays through Thursdays suddenly could wear a polo shirt and *gasp* jeans, or at least a nice pair of chinos, on Fridays.
Steve said he never would have imagined selling jeans in his store, but he started to in 2015.
Jeans, of course, don’t need to be ironed.
It’s no surprise that people who were tired of ironing in the 1980s and 1990s now proudly proclaim their freedom from it. They haven’t ironed in years, many tell me cheerfully.
Don’t get me wrong. Ironing is tedious.
If you are in an ironing household, then not ironing is even worse than the ironing, because clothes build up in messy piles, and the closets offer fewer and fewer choices of what to wear, until you get around to it.
When it comes down to people who do iron, they divide into two camps: those who iron everything all at once, and those who only iron a garment when it is needed.
Each one admires the other.
“Wow, how do you make time to iron all your laundry at once!” the daily camp exclaims in admiration.
“How in the world do you have time to iron your clothes in the morning before work?” the other replies, equally impressed.
