Even casual Las Vegas likes to dress up for Easter

For generations churchgoers across the country have dusted off the snow, shed their dark winter duds and welcomed the rebirth of Jesus with spring finery. But what about Las Vegas? Does anyone here dress up for Easter Sunday?

Local milliner Louisa Voisine said plenty of Las Vegas Valley women still make festive Easter attire a priority.

“The women who dress for Easter, they take it very seriously, and they put money into it and a lot of thought,” Voisine said. “And they start early because they’re not just dressing themselves. If that woman is going to dress and she has a family, she’s going to dress her whole family.”

Fashion scholar Deirdre Clemente, associate director of public history at UNLV and author of “Dress Casual: How College Kids Redefined American Style,” said special occasions and holidays continue to inspire scaled-up fashion.

“Sure, we love yoga pants and New Balance tennis shoes, but dressing up for special occasions is still a primary part of our public persona,” she said in an email. “The human need to adorn ourselves for life’s biggest events or yearly rituals is fundamental to almost every society across time and place. What has changed in 20th century America — particularly in the last 50 years — is the degree to which we dress up. The standard of dressing up now means a button-down, collar shirt and khakis. In the ’40s that was casual wear.”

Clemente said another factor to consider is the origin of the phrase dressing up.

“Dressing up means dressing to the social standards of the class above you,” she said. “These days, socioeconomic class is not necessarily correlated to the way one dresses. Think about Steve Jobs in a T-shirt and wrinkled jeans.”

Today’s casual wear packed with shorts, jeans and T-shirts is the standard most Sundays at South Hills Church Community, 9220 Manhattan Road in Henderson.

“Typically we are come-as-you-are,” said Janice Yurek, the church’s community life coordinator. “But they step up their game on Easter. I love to stand outside and do the greeting on Easter Sunday to watch all of the little girls come in with their Easter dresses.”

Even the church’s egg hunt the week before Easter attracts girls in dresses and hats.

“Little boys dress up, too.” Yurek added. “The younger ones are in the little newsboy caps and shorts. As they get a little older, it might not be as cutesy, but older boys dress up, too.”

Clemente said traditional Easter fashion trends were tied to seasons.

“For nearly 100 years, Easter was a marker of seasonal change, and that directly correlated to dress,” she said. “You put away your velvet dress and you pulled out your white shoes. … I remember as a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, sitting with my Aunt Maggie and going through my winter clothes, packing them up for next year and pulling out my spring garments.”

Clemente said the fashion “rules” of the East Coast never carried the same weight in the West, where women wore pants sooner, and ties and suits for men were never standard dress in many workplaces.

“Much of this change was centered around California, which had both a thriving fashion production industry and the cultural muscle to define new norms in terms of behavior and dress,” she said. “In Las Vegas, we have a casual dress culture and a year-round climate that eliminates the need to have distinct winter and summer wardrobes.”

A sense of distinct day and night clothing is also lacking in Las Vegas.

“Perhaps most noticeable to me as a historian of fashion, is the nightclub nature of many of the dresses worn to Mass,” Clemente said. “In Las Vegas, there are very faint lines between what can be worn when and where.”

Still for many, traditions in Easter dress persist.

“I was raised Roman Catholic, and I think as far as Catholicism the women and the little girls and even the men, they just enjoy dressing for Easter,” Voisine said. “It’s part of the tradition of Easter. It’s part of welcoming in spring. Easter to me, growing up, we got the new shoes, the little white gloves, the socks, the purse, the dress, and we got the hat. Some of my favorite pictures to this day of my sister and I are in our Easter bonnets.”

Cherie Lawlar, owner of SunDee Morning Hat Co. in Henderson, said Easter hats have always been big and are experiencing a resurgence as younger women such as Princess Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, embrace them.

“And they don’t just wear them to church, they do lunches and brunches and outings,” she said.