American culture makes dressing up easier to learn than dressing down

Evidence

It is probably easier in America to learn how to dress up than it is to learn how to dress down-perhaps because the whole system is geared to express its devout belief in upward mobility. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1161

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s immodesty-dress moral panic article — dressing as class signaling in public urban space; also evokes Goffman’s self-presentation cited right here.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the immodesty article’s class-and-identity-dress theme: it adds the asymmetry that upward dressing is universally legible where downward dressing is not.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1161