At the other: seamed stockings (ruler straight) good fabrics, nipped-in waists and pinstripe suits.
They looked fantastic: we looked like people in 2008 on a bank holiday day trip. In other words, we looked rubbish.
We had our excuses – we were people in 2008 on a bank holiday day trip, and dressed for the train journey and the weather but clearly, in the style stakes, we were more Kerry Katona than Joanna Lumley.
It hurt. What had seemed reasonably smart and practical suddenly looked like a whole heap of cheap, ugly clothes. Supermarket socks versus a seamed, silk stocking, anyone?
It was the destination that was our undoing, that pointed out, at our expense, how well people dressed in their leisure time in decades gone by, and how badly we dress now.
We were at Carnforth railway station, famous for only one thing – being the place where the film Brief Encounter was filmed in the 1940s.
The film is a love story, of the type that seems a museum piece now: middle aged, middle class couple fall in love during her weekly shopping and cinema trips to town.
But they are both already married and both already have two children – hers conveniently cared for by a housekeeper most of the time – so they put duty before love and part.
The film is also a love story about the British railway system of old, within which most of the action takes place – it's all thundering steam trains, old fashioned carriages full of smart ladies and their parcels.
And a refreshment room that became so famous as a result of the film that it has now been recreated at Carnforth Station in all its austere, wartime glory.
There's the curved wooden bar with its old-fashioned cake stand and beer pumps, just as it is in the film.
It's marvellous, though there are two disappointments: that the stove in the middle of the room is entirely fake, and that the oh-so-refined Myrtle isn't serving, as in the film.
But Brief Encounter is also a love story about clothes, gorgeous little hats, fur stoles, beautiful gloves, neat suits, all good enough to eat.
And at Carnforth Station on Monday, decorating the austere refreshment room just as it should have been, were a group of people in original 1940s clothing.
This was a time before dressing down for leisure was invented, so everyone was in their formal best. The men wore suits and trilbies and carried umbrellas, some of them even carried those little brown cases into which sandwiches were placed during an era when the idea of a male handbag would have made strong men faint.
But it was the women who made we supermarket sock wearers want to cry. One was pure Celia Johnson in her tailored skirt suit completed with pearls at her throat, little hat jauntily perched and neat, high-heeled brogues.
The figure-hugging tweed jacket with its narrow back and tight arms forced her to sit up straight so that she ate her toasted teacake and sipped her tea with total aplomb while we slumped and slurped in our outfits built for comfort.
Another was more Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver, wearing a floral dress and carrying a straw basket for her parcels. So much more stylish than a carrier bag, so much more eco-friendly. The basket cried out to me. It said here was a woman who spent her days buying little bits of this and that from her high street butchers and bakers. I wanted one – but it definitely wouldn't work with the supermarket socks.
These people accepted compliments on their outfits graciously, they knew they were walking adverts for a time when clothes were not so plentiful, but better made, a time when showing a bit of backbone was made easier by a good solid seam to keep the spine ramrod straight.
From a world where clothes are so cheap and cheaply made as to be practically disposable, where children in Third World countries labour to give us our wardrobes of shapeless T-shirts and tracksuit trousers, that doesn't look like a bad idea – so much more stylish in so many ways.