All dressed up and no place to go

Who transplanted my brain into this local journalist's head?

With the iconic Copper Room deciding to allow jeans after 70 years, dressing up is no longer a requirement of civility

By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver SunMay 22, 2010

While much hay is being made of a recent You-Tube video of six preteen California girls bumping and grinding, in skimpy navel-baring red and black lace outfits, to Beyonce's Single Ladies, there has been a far more unsettling development on the things-are-going-to-hell-in-ahandbasket front.

That would be the change, which kicked in Friday and which comes after 70 years of sartorial standard, in the dress code for the Copper Room at the Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa.

Jeans are in.

Or as the breathless press release that arrived this week put it:

"The iconic dine-and-dance club was built at a time when stylish dinner wear was the norm and the resort has since strived to continue that level of old-world glamour by maintaining a strict dress code. Reminiscent of a bygone era, the Copper Room drew diners and dancers from near and far, eager to show off their finest suits and ball gowns. Over the past several decades, it became apparent that the dress code was somewhat limiting to the resort's clientele."

In other words: No denim equals no business. In other words, welcome to the 21st century, where slobs 'r' us, where the notion of dress as a measure of civility has gone Jurassic.

The Copper Room, if you've never had the pleasure, is the resort's venerable dining and dancing establishment, the kind of place where Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, not wearing jeans, tore up the floor in Dirty Dancing.

It's renowned for its copper-plated grand piano, glass-tiled dance floor and, way back when, a four-piece band called The Copper Room Orchestra where Charlie (on reeds) and Mary (piano) Young, joined by a drummer and guitarist, played smooth tunes for more than three decades before retiring in the late 1970s.

The Copper Room was, and still is, an endearing throwback to a time when people got dressed for dinner, when conversation and dancing defined an evening out, when tablecloths and candlelight and a live band took requests and celebrated birthdays and weddings and, egad, romance was in the air.

Much of the feedback this week on the Harrison Resort's Facebook site is, interestingly, lamenting the dress code decision: "Oh, no!! The last bastion in the Northwest of the good old days ... guess this baby boomer is just behind the times" and "I'm sorry to hear that. I prefer the dress code and, no, I'm not in my 70s."

You might think it more timely and worthy to go all high dudgeon and opinionated about that video featuring those too-sexy prepubescent girls (performing in a World of Dance competition), that it would be worthwhile to once again chew up a page about the hyper-sexualization of young girls in modern society, and how our children are becoming far too inured to the daily onslaught of images that endorse inappropriate attire and behaviour.

And you would be right. This is a society that rewards overt sexuality, that exalts boobs over brains, that long ago relinquished its hold on manners and propriety. This is the culture, the one we have willingly created, that doesn't bat an eye when the promotional photographs for Miss America take a page from Playboy, when the winner of that pageant is a former pole-dancing champion, when teenage girls wear pyjamas at the mall and teenage boys wear T-shirts that say "Yo, bitch", where cleavage is de rigueur at the office and teachers wear yoga pants in the classroom and no one seems to know how to dress respectfully for court, or a funeral, a wedding or a job interview.

And so when the old-fashioned Copper Room decides it needs jeans to stay open, setting aside a long-held standard in order to survive, it's hardly newsworthy. Why, even the legendary Ritz Hotel in London has fallen victim to the times, last month relaxing its century-old dress code.

Meantime, radio call-in shows around the country are lighting up with the vociferous and endless debate over the pervasive images of violence, sex and civil misanthropy that so define this too-much information age, that so influence our children like no generation and no culture before, and we wonder aloud how we let it get this far, and what we can do to turn back time.

Little girls dressing as sluts?

Maybe we're missing the more subtle connection. Maybe the answer can be found in why their parents find it so difficult to dress up for dinner.