We live in casual times. Casual dress, casual conversation, casual relationships. It began as a trickle, turned into a flood, and now we're at the point we don't realise we're swimming.

In 2018, who wears a suit and tie? Perhaps the only suit-and-tie wearers — bankers, real estate agents, people involved in the law — are those trying to look like they're doing very important things with our money (or those trying to get a shorter sentence).

For every other male, wearing a tie means risking looking old-fashioned. Take me. I'm an artist. If I turned up to an opening or meeting in a tie, people would think it was part of a performance, with me playing the role of a "non-creative".

There is history to this. Associating casualness with creativity and freedom goes back to the 18th century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, father of the Romantic moment, rejected the "civilising", buttoned-up ambitions of those around him, becoming an early prototype for the stereotypical alternative cultural voice. But while famous for the phrase, "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains", when it came to his clothes Rousseau didn't rock the boat, and maintained a formal appearance.

So, it turns out, did pretty much every anti-establishment figure, right up to the late 1960s.

It was only that recently we began to see radical ideas translating to radical dress.

Look at photos of The Beatles, or The Rolling Stones. In 1963, every bandmember wears a suit and tie. By 1969, they're in casual clothes.

The reason for the change rests, in large part, with the 1968 uprisings that recently marked their 50th anniversary.

Across the Western world, these movements dedicated themselves to the uniquely modern ideas of universal freedom and liberty — concepts born in Rousseau's era. The result: protests, revolutions (good and bad), university overhauls and changes of government.

Liberation movements of the '60s were built on a deep suspicion of old hierarchical structures; systems that forced most of society to toil away while a privileged few enjoyed the fruits of that labour.

But cultural mores were also attacked. Existing social structures involved an unquestioned arrangement of daily activities, with accompanying dress codes, up to and including dressing for dinner. Getting rid of these formalities was part of the attempt to rid society of an ingrained inequality.

Then there's America. In theory, the United States was founded on a rejection of old-world European structures: degustation menus and carefully organised dining etiquette came out of Europe; Americans invented the burger and courtesy napkins.

You could argue that to be American is to be informal. You could also say the same about Australia. As recently as the early 2000s, an American would be most likely to wear a suit to a funeral or wedding, as would an Aussie male.

Even weddings are no longer a fortress of formality. ( ABC Life: Hayden Daniel )

This is no longer a rule set in stone. Recently, I went to a wedding where a couple of men turned up in T-shirts. Minimal questions were asked. There was even some jealously from fellow invitees.

The institution of marriage has made a comeback in Australia, but weddings are optional. Many couples choose to drop by the marriage registry, then move on to a party (not a reception), possibly at a bar. Similarly, funerals are often now referred to as "celebrations" of the deceased's life, and are deliberately informal, often to match the informality of the person being mourned (sorry, celebrated).

In the book Nobrow, John Seabrook charts the merging of high and low culture in 1990s USA. He records the adoption of a "marketplace of culture", where citizens — consumers — get to choose what's important, instead of being told.

At the same time, the White House was adopting a new kind of politics that relied heavily on opinion polls, attempting, in Seabrook's words, to "match consumption to production: to figure out what the public wanted and then give it to them".

If Jerry Seinfeld wanted to eat cereal for dinner, then all power to him.

The pursuit of comfort, the auxiliary of happiness, is after all, part of the American Dream.

So is dressing, acting and thinking casual an assertion of egalitarian values, or consumerist gullibility? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe it's just more comfortable. Certainly, the formalities it rejects are fading into the distance.

The other night I started watching a new science-fiction series and recognised a glaring error: every male character was in a suit. I turned it off. The future may be uniform, but that uniform will not be formal: all you need to do is look around you.

Nicholas Selenitsch is an artist and a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.