In early photographs from the 1800s into the early 1900s, everybody was dressed very formally, irrespective of what they were doing, including physical labour, construction, etc.
Why did everyone dress so impractically, sometimes in suit pants, a waistcoat and button up shirt for activities such as tree felling, construction, etc? Was there no sense of dressing practically?
I'm going to start with something a little different, just to illustrate a general point: women's tennis. Specifically, when women's tennis was first started in the 1870s. Here is a video from British Pathe in 1938 with a recreation of 1870s tennis. The dresses were, well, heavy. As the narrator says, "there was none of the dash of the modern game", and women's fashion in tennis by the 1930s was more like this (picture from Smith College, 1930). (The film’s dresses are a little off and the bonnets are a few decades off, but the gameplay is right.)
With a modern eye, the original game might seem almost comical, but keep in mind the cultural context was to emphasize grace, not athleticism. Women just wore their normal dresses. From the 1873 published rules (as written by a man, Walter Wingfield):
They are graceful and gentle; they have spirit and enthusiasm; and in tennis, as in other things, they stimulate man to do his best ... If they fight against you, what winsome, if not winning, adversaries!
Even by 1900, when women's tennis was a sport at the Olympics, there were still dresses at the court. There was no practical reason to cling to dresses, just like there is no practical reason modern women's tennis-wear sometimes embraces a dress-like look. There was both cultural inertia and the over-imposition of expected standards of women's behavior.
Similarly, when judging clothes worn by laborers of the 1800s, it is tempting to simply try to draw a concrete reason for all those layers, but don't underestimate the sheer power of cultural inertia.
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Let's next try to calibrate how we look at pictures of the 19th century, both in the way they would have viewed them, and what things might be invisible.
This is high-class-ware for the late-19th century eye: suits. In the late 1800s they are tailor-made for bodies (1930s is when "baggier" suits became acceptable). Generally speaking it was a marker of one of the upper classes if you routinely wore one, and you were not supposed to be diving into the muck.
Not only was the working class shorter than the middle class (by about 6 inches) their clothes indicated their position. One 14 year old (Elizabeth Fanshawe) with working class roots won a scholarship for High School and on her first day she was made to stand in front of the entire class to have the errors in her clothing pointed out.
It was my first encounter with the "class" society; the types of clothing one wore was far more important than one's academic achievement.
For workers, they had something like this 1874 picture of carpenters, with them wearing overalls. Or this picture from around 1900, in New Mexico.
Context when evaluating old pictures of clothing is important. Perhaps you might be thinking of a picture like this one, but: this is not showing workers in progress. This is a golden spike ceremony of the completion of the transatlantic railroad (railroad directors and officers were engraved on the sides); there were hundreds of guests there. This is a more realistic photo of an actual railroad in progress (Union Pacific Railroad Construction, 1868, photograph by A. J. Russell). Even so, the working class would try hard in the context of the public eye (which includes photography) to look "respectable".
Also keep in mind this was not, for the working poor, one outfit of a large wardrobe, one new one every day. There was a lot of re-use of a particular garment, that might need to last a long time; quoting the 1914 book How the Other Half Lives:
There is no Monday cleaning in the tenements. It is wash-day all the week round, for a change of clothing is scarce among the poor. They are poverty's honest badge, these perennial lines of rags hung out to dry, those that are not the washerwoman's professional shingle.
In a study of a manufacturing town, the author Lady Bell talked to a worker who bought a "so-called flannel shirt" that had disintegrated in 3 days, so had to resort to buying an old army shirt from the pawnbroker, where two of them was enough to last for an entire year.
Lady Bell also noted that work at the local iron plant was "ruinous" to any clothing, and that a person in general might wear "a greasy, torn old coat with holes in it, patched trousers, frayed at the edge, tied tightly below the knee" with the intent of changing when not working.
Having said that, you may still ask: why all those layers? It is true that it is not unusual to find rolled-up sleeves (you can spot one rolled but not the other in the Union Pacific picture). There is quite a bit of evidence of improvisation. The journalist James Greenwood in England was watching over 200 people working on a railway in 1867, and noted some of them were bare-chested; others wore "red smocks, blue smocks, and white smocks" (the modern smock is mostly associated with painters, but it wasn't uncommon for workers in dirty professions). Or consider the invention of the T-shirt, which happened in the 1880s when British miners and longshoremen took long johns and cut them separately into pants and shirts; the knit top was able to stretch with the body.
To summarize
a.) cultural inertia was very strong so improvisations like the t-shirt took a long time to develop; it didn't really become acceptable as outer-ware (outside the confines of the work shift) until the 1950s
b.) 19th century standards of formality were different, with heavy expectation of clothing to reflect the respectability of one's family; even for the working class, there was an sense of needing any facing in public to keep up appearances
c.) during actual work the workers sometimes improvised, but there would have been active avoidance of such things appearing on camera (a good analogy would be how obscenity was common in private in the era, but was avoided in print and in front of "fragile ears")
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Bourke, J. (2008). Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity. Taylor & Francis.
Richmond, V. (2013). Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press.
Snodgrass, M. E. (2015). World Clothing and Fashion: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Social Influence. Taylor & Francis.
The short answer is, for the most part, they didn't do that.
Prior to the 20th century, we must remember that most people in Western Civilization wouldn't have had more than a few sets of clothing at once unless they were fairly wealthy. Textiles were FAR more expensive and time consuming to produce than today, and clothing was harder to produce in general.
Most working class to middle class people would have had a set or two of everyday clothes which would be modified based on the activity they were partaking in wether they be laboring in the field or sitting in church.
As one user mentioned already, it was important to look as respectable as possible for one's family, business, and reputation. So we can think of it as most men having a suit of "church" clothes as their baseline dress, but they could remove or modify this suit for labor or weather. For example, a farmer could wear his shirt, trousers, coat, vest, and hat to church. However, in his field, it's likely he would have removed his coat and vest in favor of an apron, work vest, or over shirt. This way he is protecting his one or two sets of undergarments with a work garment or, vice versa, preserving his best clothing by removing it to work in shirtsleeves or a specific work garment.
This was more true in the 18th century and before, but by the end of the 19th century we would begin to see technological advances in farming and textile production that would allow most adults to separate work and dress garments.
Let's look at a few examples: A New England farmer in 1775 would likely have a set of clothes including a shirt, waistcoat(vest), coat, breeches (knee length pants), stockings, tricorn hat, and shoes. Additionally he would possibly own a cheap overshirt and wide brim hat specifically for work. If the farmer were to go town to sell goods he would probably look like This . However if he was working in his field he would look more like This .
So here you can see the suit of relatively nice clothing the living historian is wearing shares the same basic elements as the farmer in the drawing. In the drawing, the farmer has removed his coat to stay cool and preserve it while donning an apron to help protect his breeches and waistcoat. This same logic can be applied to any profession involving labor or dirt all the way to the 1950s.
In the mid 19th century, miners and other laborers began wearing a cotton/wool blend called jeans cloth (later refined and known as denim) over their regular clothing, a practice which continued for over a century until we started wearing denim as work clothing instead of over clothing. You can read more more about that in my bibliography below.
In the 18th and 19th century, men's clothing was treated differently as well. Shirts were considered a sort of undergarment and it was a bit taboo to wear a shirt without a vest or overshirt in polite company. Think of it like how modern underwear must be covered by shorts or pants; shirts had to be covered in a similar fashion. This taboo would continue to be strictly observed on more respectable occasions such as going to religious service, court proceedings, dinners, theatre, etc. However, it would not be uncommon to see a laborer in the street in nothing but shirtslevees just as you may see a farmer stripped down to only a shirt and trousers. It was acceptable work wear; but when one was not working, one was expected to be dressed.
In one great example photo we can see union soldiers digging a siege trench in a most likely staged scene. Here we can see the soldiers who are meant to be actively digging have stripped down to their shirt sleeves while the men defending the work party remain in full uniform.
Likewise these Telegraph workers are in mostly shirts and vests even in this staged photo.
Simply put, our ancestors weren't stubbornly impractical people. They were expected to dress well, and that's the cultural perception we have of them. But, in reality, they weren't stupid. They dressed according to the task, removing unnecessary clothing while maintaining cultural expectations.
People in the 18th and 19th centuries would find a farmer working in a 3 piece suit just as confusing back then as we would today.
More primary source photos of old timey work clothes:
1860's Dock workers <---The man standing in the far left of this photo as well as the man next to him both seem to be wearing a federal contract shirt made for the Union Army.
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V&A Museum. (2022). "A Brief History of Men's underwear" Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Fitzgerald, B. (2015). "Denim: A History of Jeans and American Culture." Rivet Magazine, Sourcingjournal.com.
Harley, C. Knick. “Cotton Textile Prices and the Industrial Revolution.” The Economic History Review 51, no. 1 (1998): 49–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2599692.
