To distinguish between dress up like you think people dressed up in the distant past (what the moderns say the hareidim to), or whether just is this fashion evolving in a natural way, albeit along different principals than affect the hiloni world (e.g who felt obliged to stop wearing hats since President Kennedy did, or to stop wearing kapotas since King George did) – consider radical change in hareidi fashion that have taken place over the last 120 years. If the changes didn’t result in outpourings of outrage, it supports my argument that this is just a matter of fashion evolving in a natural way. Consider: non-leather dress shoes (other than on Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av); the use of fake light-weight fabrics especially in warm weather; the adoption of the bra; the discontinuance of fur hats on a daily basis (though some continue to wear them on Shabbos or if it is very cold); the adoption by men of long pants (200+ years ago men wore short pants with high socks, and 500 years ago men usually did not wear pants at all). Hareidim are not reinactors or affecting a perceived archaic style of dress; their fashions change like everyone else, but they have their own fashion sense so it sometimes evolves in different directions (unlike “moderns” who think it is cool to ape the goyim).
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