So true. This whole thing about 'Sunday best' - where did that come from?!
The term 'Sunday best' comes from a time, not at all long ago, when clothes were very expensive indeed. The making was cheap, but the cost of the fabric out of reach of most people. It is a term used of and by poor people, not rich ones.
This is not as long ago as we might imagine. In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens talks of people - Mrs Bob Crachit for one - wearing 'thrice turned' clothes, and her son having to borrow his father's one and only collar to wear on Christmas Day. In Little Dorrit the heroine wears the same dress for years on end; she makes shirts for her father but she only has one dress.
Turned clothes were those which had been undone at all the seams and made up again inside out, because the fabric inside was not as worn as that on the outside. Thrice turned is a garment to which this has been done three times; each time in an effort not to look quite so threadbare. Hats and seams would be brushed with shoe blacking, holes darned or patched over and over.
In such an age, people would make a real effort to have two sets of clothes, and would count themselves fortunate if they did. They would then wear one set during the week, and the best set on a Sunday, either to church or to sit at home. Most would try not to work if they could.
Mrs Bob Crachit does not have two sets of clothes, only one. When she wants to look presentable on Christmas Day she has to resort to sixpence worth of ribbons, and her daughter does the same.
So, Sunday best is your second best suit of clothes or dress when you have only two. At the point your working clothes actually fall to pieces and can be no longer turned, it becomes your working dress, and you then attempt to afford another set of clothes for Sunday best. Not everyone could manage it. Even those who could might well resort to pawning their Sunday clothes to get them through the week, redeeming them on Friday or Saturday, when they got paid, and perhaps pawning them again the next week.
In our time fabric has become very much cheaper, and we all have far more clothes than we could ever wear out. We no longer 'turn' clothes because the cost of doing so is more expensive than the cost of new clothes.
After clothes were worn out completely they would still not be wasted. In my great grandparents' time the fabric would be cut into strips and made into raggy rugs. They were coal miners. Every year there would be a new rug. At Christmas the best would go on the parents' bed, the one from the bed put onto the front room floor, the one from the front room moved to the kitchen, the one in the kitchen perhaps passed to a poorer family. A new raggy rug would then be started, and made by the kitchen fire by the wife, as she waited for her sons and husband to come home from work.
Very often wives with a husband and sons at work never went to bed; they slept in a rocking chair by the fire, because they were constantly waiting to meet those coming home from different shifts at the local pit. And in between they made raggy rugs from scraps of worn out clothing.
Sunday best is not an affectation of smart clothes to impress our neighbours. It is an attempt to have something decent to wear on a Sunday, at a time when it would not have been acceptable to wear working clothes to go to church. Working clothes would have been far too dirty, far too shabby, and the people would have had more pride than to wear them in the House of God.
Fireinfolding just reminded me of a time when my husband and I first got married and were really struggling financially. We were going to a 'faith' church and wearing shoes with holes, tshirts that had overstretched and looked dreadful, but that's all we had. But we would faithfully tithe to the church every week. What a contrast it was when the pastor had a rolex watch and took his family to Disneyland on holiday with the churches money telling us 'you can be rich too, just have faith'. Something is not quite right about that..
Yeahhhhh, and now that I'm not dreaming anymore... 
