I just passed a couple of missionaries in Salt Lake County this morning. One was in his standard white shirt and dark pants. The other one had on dark pants and an argyle sweater over his white shirt. Now, if this is P-Day, maybe I understand it. But it looked like they were on their way to something with scriptures in hand. Just an observation.

You should have stopped and asked them.

Maybe it was a missionary doing a split with a local member.

Nothing really new there. I served in Europe in the 80s and many of us wore sweaters over white shirts in spring and fall.

Actually, based on the MP, they can wear slacks and a conservative "sport coat". In most cases, that means the suit coat from another suit. Being young and lacking fashion sense, they mix and match with horrific results. Oh, and polish your damn shoes at least weekly, boys!

Ahh yes. Known as the "odd jacket". Takes skill to pull it off properly though. See Fred Astaire.

In England a good wool sweater or two was almost mandatory. They recommend a V-neck so they could see your tie. I got crew neck and went without a tie half the time. :-). I still have one of the nice ones I bought over there. I still wear it when I know I'll be out in cold weather for a long time.

Suit jackets were usually only worn on Sunday in my mission. (Usually with a sweater underneath as the chapels were cold).

They did outlaw waxed jackets however, which most of us ignored. I'm sorry dear MP, but you are riding around in your luxury car while I'm out in the weather on my bike. A waxed jacket/coat with rain-pants on was the warmest thing I could find. I wore the trenchcoat they insisted on us purchasing once... I froze my ass off.

My tie collection was also a bit wild. Psychedelic colors was the norm for me. :-)

It's not that unusual to see missionaries wearing a V-necked sweater and dress pants in the winter. If anything, the sweater keeps their white shirts dry if they have only bikes to get around in, regardless of weather.

I hope the dress codes remain strict. That way they're easier to spot from down the block, giving me time to cut back around the other way to avoid them.

OMG I never considered that. What if they eventually become super low key: Khakis with a custom white polo with a tiny moroni embroidered on the left chest...or somesuch.

I saw the exact same thing this morning, in Montebello, CA. I wanted to stop, but I was just two blocks from where I was heading and I figured if there was no one home at the residence, I'd have plenty of time to go back and approach the dudes.

One was in perfect Elder dress attire. And he had one of those "bike messenger" brief cases that my middle boy always preferred in school.

The other, who looked to be the same age, was in relaxed fit jeans, kind of washed out looking, with a dark blue t-shirt, with some kind of commercial looking logo on the front. His hair was cut missionary style, and he was clean shaven. And he was pale White, which makes it hard to think that he's a local. Locals are Brown...

So I am supporting the OP. Something is going on. This was in a residential area. No way should they have been on the streets in such contrasting garb. One supposes that this could be their P-day, but I cannot explain, based on what I know, why they'd be attired as they were, P-day or no P-day.

Also, just cuz there's space left in this post, La Saucie and I saw two Elders, properly attired, getting in line in front of the pharmacist's counter. One was as Mexican and me. The other was a very handsome Black kid. She had to drag me from the store because I wanted to go up and slobber my apostate drool all over them, especially the Black kid. I wanted to tell him how on my mission, had I knocked at his grandfather's door, I was taught to pretend I had the wrong address and not mention that I was sent by Jesus Christ to save his soul...

Maybe next time!

Damn you Saucie, stop trying to train the olddog. I know he's embarrassing but he's funny (from afar).

I relaxed my own dress code.

LDS Inc recommended that we buy and wear Forward Thrust brand dress / utility shoes. Those things are utter garbage and they are expensive. (EXPENSIVE)
They had a very thick sole on them, especially for a dress shoe. The thick sole was supposed to make them durable. A thick sole can be good. However, on these shoes the thick sole was so stiff that it would not flex as a person walked, even well past the point where they should have been broken in. The stiffness of the sole made walking in them absolutely miserable, and I had to do a lot of walking as a missionary. The stiffness meant that the shoe was very uncomfortable. The lack of flexibility also made the out board rear area of the sole scuff more and wear much faster than usual due. That concentrated wear in that spot fairly well negated the benefits of the sole being so thick.
Some of the wear patterns that various *elders* / missionaries developed on the soles of those shoes were absolutely ridiculous, and quite detrimental from an orthopedic standpoint.


I had a lace up pair. Of course they were low cut, which accentuated the uncomfortable blister inducing effects of the overly stiff sole.

I google them. I looked at pictures of them. It showed 5 sets of eyelets. I think mine had less than that. They were completely inadequate in that regard. The eyelets were very small diameter, so they would only take a very small diameter lace. The laces were made of a very stiff tough polymer weave in round profile that held up much better than cotton laces, but it was IMPOSSIBLE I mean IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to keep them tied up. I could only walk a couple hundred feet and they would untie themselves, even when I double knotted them very tightly. There was NOT enough length in the laces to go for a triple knot. After so much of that, I learned to hate those miserable shoes with a passion.

After about 9 months of that utter agony, I was longing for a better, more comfortable pair of shoes. I only made it that long with those miserable shoes because after my trainer, me and my new surf bum southern cal comp. had a car, and we spent a lot of time at the YMCA playing basketball, racquetball and working out. In the next area it was back to having to deal with those damn miserable shoes a lot more. I was looking at various shoes for replacements. I settled on a pair and I bought them.

The new shoes had a thick rubber sole on them, even thicker than the FT PsOS, but the rubber was much more (MUCH MORE) flexible. The soles were natural rubber color, that little detail really set off the mission leaders. The uppers were natural uncolored top cut leather. I might have died the uppers black but that would have made the color of the soles stand out even more. SO I put vegetable oil on the uppers which darkened them quite a bit and helped protect them from the wet conditions that I continually had to deal with. The new shoes had much larger diameter eyelets and much larger diameter laces. They had a long tongue and more sets of eyelets over the agonizing miserable dysfunctional set up on the FT shoes. I could actually keep the laces tied up. I could walk in comfort.
I loved my new shoes, but going by the way the mission leaders reacted to them, a person would have thought that I had been caught having sex with a prostitute and shooting up with heroine.

I paid 70 $ for the FT POS. I paid 13 $ for the much more functional new shoes.

I hated the Forward Thrust shoes so much that I was determined to destroy them. SO my plan was that I would alternate on a daily basis between wearing my new comfortable shoes and wearing the FT POS until they were destroyed and I was going to do everything I could to speed up that process. On the day that I was supposed to wear the FT shoes, I looked at them sitting in the bottom of the closet. I could not stand the thought of having to put the miserable things on and having to put up with them through out the day. I never wore those damn things again, in spite of the harassment that my leaders gave me over my non compliant to mission rules footwear.

...........at this point in my life, I can NOT comprehend the expansive amount of CRAP that I put up with in the mission and why I tolerated it.

Did any other RMs have a worn-out copy of "Dress for Success" in every apartment in their mission?

I did (in France) :)
I ignored it!

This the thing. My leaders were totally freaked out because my new shoes were not the right color and they did not look formal enough to suit them. However, it was acceptable to them for us, their sales representatives to be out riding on ten speed bicycles, in the snow and the rain at times, with our scriptures in a back pack, while selling their supposed most important message/ product ever. ANd now they make the elders wear Bike Helmets too, which is probably a good idea from a safety standpoint, HOWEVER, what we are talking about is DORK city in a formal dress context. I am curious to know if they still have a CRAP fit if the soles on your shoes are not the right color, or if they still recommend wearing those miserable POS from Hell Forward Thrust shoes?

Maybe if they dressed like normal people rather than funeral directors they would have more success!

In Russia, just after 9/11 we started out wearing suits, ties, name-tags etc. - the usual (we called it "pross")

However, by the end of my first service year, anti-american sentiment in Eastern Europe was getting out of control, Chechen jihadis were making threats on the daily and had managed an attack on innocents at a Moscow theater, and the "war on terror" was heating up.

The decision was made and the directive was given, that we missionaries should no longer wear suits, ties, name-tags or other clothing that would quickly identify us as odd, American, targeted foreigners.

Jeans, t-shirts, colored button-ups, sweaters, maybe slacks was the new dress code. Only dress up for Church on Sunday and other such meetings. We were encouraged to not wear the ties or nametags until arriving for the services.

As well, we would have random weeks of prohibited use of the Metro or other mass transportation (terrorist targets) and it was against mission rules to eat at "western establishments" like McDonalds or Pizza Hut (angry locals).

By the end of my servitude we missionaries were mostly doing outreach or service (free labor) as it was considered too risky to participate in the traditional proselytizing. Not to mention it was rarely, if ever, successful.

Never went full tracksuit but got pretty close to dressing like random college slackers. Relaxed indeed.

Not that any of this really kept us safer. Russians aren't dumb - most American 20-year-olds look and sound like Americans, regardless of what they are wearing.

Anyway, it has been my observation that a substantial number of Elders do mostly what they want to test the limits, especially towards the end of the two years

I am stunned that they (mission admin and church leaders)
actually pretended to care that much about your personal well being. In Utah, the deaths of missionaries are definitely heralded, and they are virtually celebrated as a completely worthwhile ode to utter devotion to THE (MORmON) church and THE MORmON cause.


Jeopardizing the lives of missionaries is an ongoing joke to LDS Inc executives, and a sacrifice that they are completely willing to accept, after all your death is no skin off of their pompous asses !!! Just as Gordon Hinckley has told us, there is no sacrifice too great for a faithFOOL latter day saint.
IF you are missionary, and you end up getting killed, do not worry about it, THE church will reap plenty of publicity from your premature death / untimely demise to make up for your absence later on when you are not available to do 6 more decades of volunteer service grinding away the rest of your life on the good MORmON member treadmill.