Why do soap opera characters dress up and sitcom characters dress down?

I think the soap characters dress that way to try to make everything seem more “intense”.
You’re supposed to be more comfortable with the sitcom characters I think, so that you can see yourself in their situations, and get more laughs out of it. (Unless you dress very well at all times I guess.)

I think there is an obscure regulation somewhere in the FCC that says that the quality of dress across television must average out to a certain level. I don’t remember the exact level, but in any case, they generally use soap operas and sitcoms to balance the thing out.

It’s kind of like CAFE standards. I think there is a kind of dress standard exchange so that if a network has too many dressy shows, they can buy dress down credits from other networks. In fact, it is possible for individuals to play the dress down market. I, myself, have actually sold several dress down credits at reasonable prices.

It’s really great because I can show my wife that not only is wearing ratty t-shirts comfortable; it is also profitable. I suspect that there will soon be a gender dress down exchange because there is an unbalance in the level of dress between men and women; not to mention Walmart customers.

Soap opera characters are usually caricatures—they aren’t meant to be “real people”. They look too “perfect” to become appealing (though I don’t really find this attractive myself.) Theoretically, however, you should be able to relate to the characters that inhabit the sitcom worlds. So even if the plotline of a sitcom is cliche or a bit silly, you should be able to flip the channel and say “hey I know somebody like that” or “this character is just like me!”

@muppetish said it better than me when it came to soap opera characters.

I mean let’s be serious… how many people do you know that dress up for no occasion or change clothes so often?

The soap operas that I know and remember were mostly about high(er) class, rich families hence their dress, and sitcoms about middle or lower class families hence their dress?

Interesting observation. Maybe it has to do with target audiences. The target audience for daytime soaps is mostly housebound people (men and women) who don’t “get to” dress up, so a dressy show is an escape for them.

Likewise with (some, certainly not all) evening dramas is that the target audience might be required to conform to a dress code of some kind (school or business) during the day, and would like to escape by letting their hair down as some of the characters do.

I’m in agreement with @CWOTUS

Working people are at work during the bulk of the day so people and stories that they can relate to are on TV when they get home.