Dress Code, Tolerance, Intolerance and Free Thought

Dress Codes have been a great tradition for at least three centuries in Europe, and black has prevailed from the conservative ultra-catholic elite of Spain to the protestant parish priests of Northern Europe. Housewives and nuns had to cover their heads with what we might now describe as chador in rural areas of Europe until lately.
Now, these dress codes did not prevent the development of free thought, free speech,
trade, constitutional law or democracy, and it can be taken for granted that those who helped shape the content of modernity (Hume, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire etc.) had no problem complying with the dress code of their time.

In recent times, nudity or relative nudity (depending on climatic conditions) have taken the lead in Western dress code. Within less than two generations,traditional dress and behavioural codes have been swept away. Is this proof of decadence and debauchery considered specific for Western societies as many religious authorities
claim?

Looking at what happened about 90 years ago in a tiny village called Ascona on the shores of Lago Maggiore (one of big alpine lakes of Northern Italy, the waters of which are shared by the Swiss Canton of Ticino and the Italian regions of Piemonte and Lombardy),we may reconsider the function of nudity for the development of modern societies.

During the first decade of the 20th century, the devotedly catholic citizens of Ascona saw the arrival of a bunch of young people from wealthy German and Belgian families who settled on a nearby hill called Monte Verità ("Hill of Truth"),
started to walk around stark naked and to talk about "return to nature" (according to what they interpreted as the teachings of Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau).
The Monte Verità colony was in fact a precursor of the Hippie movement in California , nearly sixty years later.

Thanks to the solid commercial talents of the Asconese, the initial clash of the cultures was followed by the development of Ascona into a tourist resort which it has remained since, being transformed slowly into a kind of "Swiss little Florida", with a population made up predominantly by elderly retired people from the German-speaking part of Switzerland and Germany. Nudity is no longer needed to maintain the attraction of the place.

Returning to the question of the importance of a dress code for culture in general, it is interesting to speculate if the strict dress code of the actual Iranian regime imposed predominantly on women - interestingly, men are encouraged to wear open shirts displaying their hairy chests without restriction - will in the long term enhance the development of free thought, free speech, free debate on controversial subjects, including the encouragement of scientific scrutiny of ascred scriptures
without risk of capital punishment, respect for the religious beliefs of others etc.etc.
If this speculation had a minimal chance of turning into reality, should then Western societies reconsider their own dress codes in order to restore the respect of the muslim world for their culture and thereby increase the chances for mutual respect and tolerance? Or should we staunchly refuse to cover the bellies of our female adolescents with a minimum of textile material, as proof of our freedom?
Would a reduction of large scale public nudity restore our self-confidence or would it be a sign of weakness in the intercultural debate on values?
Osservatore Profano has no answer to this question, and this is why it appears on this blog...