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I think this stems from two things, both of which go well beyond what we tell people to wear at airports. First, people love to look down upon the masses as though they're not part of the group. For instance, men who are into traditional men's tailoring often lament the fall of Brooks Brothers, the oldest traditional men's clothier in the United States. Brothers Brothers is the company that put American men in sack suits, Oxford cloth button-downs, Shetland sweaters, rep striped ties, and penny loafers. Today we call that "Ivy Style." During the first half of the 20th century, Brooks Brothers mostly dressed that upwardly mobile class of Americans who saw their fortunes rise with industrial capitalism. Until 1971, they operated eleven stores across the United States, all in urban, cosmopolitan centers such as Manhattan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco. But starting in the early 1980s, the company went through a series of acquisitions, each time by an entity that wanted to make a profit on its investment by growing the business. This meant expanding Brooks Brothers' retail footprint. The company went from having 11 stores in 1971 to 155 stores in 2001. By the time the company filed for bankruptcy in 2020, it operated 250 stores in the United States alone — half of them outlets. This expansion meant the company had to keep watering down its offering to pay for its real estate. Instead of sticking to the sack suits and Shetland knits that enthusiasts love (and defined Old Money style), they increasingly followed trends. On their website today, they sell stretch polos, "performance" zips, and "dress sneakers." I don't fault them for that; it's what you need to do if you want to run a large clothing company. However, many people who lament the fall of Brooks Brothers today don't recognize that they came into the store during this expansion. Without the expansion, they would have never had a Brooks Brothers location near them in the first place. Their involvement with the company as customers is part of the story of why Brooks Brothers isn't what it was before 1980. I think the same is true of air travel. American writer and commentator Paul Fussell is best known for coining the term "prole gap" to describe a collar gap (when a tailored jacket's collar lifts from your neck). I don't like the term because I think it needlessly frames a tailoring issue as a matter of socio-economic class. He carried this snobbery into his other writing, such as his 1980 book "Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars," a literary-critical history of travel writing. In this book, he treats the modern traveler as some unwashed animal, a degraded successor to the more "respectable" characters of the past (such as "gentleman travelers" and explorers, who came from the upper classes). I think it's perfectly fine to be snobbish and smug — God knows that I am, but at least I have no illusions about my class position. Fussell, the son of a schoolteacher in Pasadena, California, and an alum of Pomona College, seems unaware that he can travel for the same reason other "proles" can — it's more affordable now. Whenever I see someone on here lamenting that air travel isn't like it was in the 1950s, I wonder why they don't just pay what it cost back then to travel, which would afford them a more premium experience. It seems that people often romanticize forms of exclusivity while failing to recognize that their own access depends on the democratization they deplore. The second reason this debate comes up so often stems from a deeper conviction: the idea that people will behave better if they dressed like the bourgeoisie of the 20th century. Or, at least, some remnants of that look, such as a button-up shirt with tailored trousers or chinos (but ditching the parts that actually made the look appealing, like the tailored jacket and necktie). Some of this is rooted in class prejudice, but some is rooted in what psychologists call "enclothed cognition," the idea that people can behave differently when they're made to wear certain clothes. For instance, some studies found people more analytical when they wore white lab coats. However, the literature is contested, with questions about replication and robustness. I'm not totally convinced this applies to airport debate, as it's not clear to me that people will behave more courteously if they're wearing jeans or chinos, rather than sweatpants. A friend who works as a wedding photographer revels in telling me stories about how people get into fistfights at weddings — and these are suited guests. But regardless, if the issue is about behaving courteously, it seems that proper behavior is to treat everyone respectfully, regardless of what they're wearing. That means policing your own behavior and not treating others with contempt simply because they're wearing something you don't like. Taking a photo of a fellow air traveler and posting it online for others to mock them seems like the very definition of rude and discourteous behavior. One wonders what the photographer was wearing and if they would have behaved better if they were made to wear a suit. I think it's fine to wear whatever you want when traveling, whether that's sweatpants or a suit. Mindful, courteous behavior is always good, such as not putting your feet on someone's armrest and being polite to service staff. To me, these issues should not be conflated with dress; they should be address directly.