Female Class Rules
Too much jewellery (especially gold jewellery, and necklaces spelling out one’s name or initials), too much make-up, over-coiffed hair, fussy-dressy clothes, shiny tights and uncomfortably tight, very high-heeled shoes are all lower-class hallmarks, particularly when worn for relatively casual occasions. Deep, over-baked tans are also regarded as vulgar by the higher social ranks. As with furniture and home-decoration, too much twee, laboured matching of clothes or accessories is also a lower-class signal, particularly if the scheme involves a bright colour – say, a navy dress with red trim, red belt, red shoes, a red bag and a red hat (take off two more class points if any of these items are shiny as well as red). This kind of overdressing is often seen at working-class weddings or other special occasions. The same over-careful matching but with a more muted ‘accent’ colour, such as cream, would be lower-middle class; reducing the number of matched accessories to just two or three might raise the whole outfit to middle-middle status – but it would still be an ‘outfit’, still too fussy and Sunday-best, still too obviously dressed-up for the upper-middles.
For the crucial distinction between lower/middle-middle and upper-middle dress, think Margaret Thatcher (careful, stiff, smart, bright-blue suits; shiny blouses; matching shoes and bags; coiffed helmet of hair) versus Shirley Williams (worn, rumpled, thrown-together – but good quality – tweedy skirts and cardigans; dull, sludgy colours; nothing matching; messy, unstyled hair)59. This is not to say that any sort of scruffiness is ‘posh’, or that any attempt at dressing up is automatically lower-class. An upper-middle or upper class woman will not wear Waynetta Slob leggings and a grubby velour sweatshirt to go out to lunch at a smart restaurant – but she will turn up in something fairly simple and understated, without lots of heavy-handed matching and effortful accessorizing. Her hair may be casually ‘unstyled’, but it will not be greasy, or display several inches of dark roots straggling into a brassy-blonde dye with a half-grown-out perm.
Among adult English females, the amount of flesh on display can also be a class indicator. As a rule, the amount of visible cleavage is inversely correlated with position on the social scale – the more cleavage revealed by a garment, the lower the social class of its wearer (a daytime garment, that is – party dresses and ball gowns can be more revealing). For the middle-aged and over, the same rule applies to upper arms. And skimpy, skin-tight clothes clinging to bulges of fat are also lower class. The higher ranks have bulges too, but they hide them under looser or more substantial clothing.
The class rules on legs are rather less clear-cut, as there are two more factors to complicate the issue, namely: fashion and the quality of the legs in question. Lower-working-class females (and nouveaux-riches of working-class origin) tend to wear short skirts, when they are in fashion and often when they are not, regardless of whether they have good enough legs, while ‘respectable’ upper-working, lower-middle and middle-middle women do not display much leg, even when both fashion and leg-quality would allow it. Among the higher social ranks, the more youthful and fashionable women may wear shorter hemlines, but only if they have very good legs. The upper-middle and upper classes regard thick legs – and in particular thick ankles – as not only unattractive, but also, worse, working class. The myth that all upper-class females have elegant legs and slim ankles is perpetuated by the fact that those with thick ones usually take care to hide them.
So, if you see an English woman with thick legs in a short skirt, she is probably working class; but a woman with elegant legs in a short skirt could be from either the bottom or the top of the social scale. You will have to look for other clues, in the details described above such as cleavage-display, visible bulginess, make-up, matching, shininess, fussiness, jewellery, hairstyle and shoes. All of these indicators can be used in judging work-clothes – suits and so on – as well as casual dress. English dress codes and sartorial class-indicators may have become somewhat less formal and obvious since the 1950s, but to say that it is no longer possible to judge class from dress is just nonsense. It is more difficult, certainly, but there are still plenty of clues – particularly once one has grasped the difference between higher-class and lower-class notions of smartness, and, perhaps even more importantly, between higher-class and lower-class types of scruffiness.
In genuinely tricky or borderline cases, where you cannot simply ‘sight-read’ the sartorial class-statements, you may have to focus on other aspects of dress, such as shopping habits and dress-talk, to determine an Englishwoman’s social position. Only the upper-middles and above, for example, will readily and cheerfully admit to buying clothes in charity shops. This rule is not so strictly observed among teenagers and twenty-somethings, as hunting for charity-shop bargains has become a fashionable pastime, endorsed by glossy magazines and working-class supermodels, and some lower-class young females have followed their example. But among older females, only those at either the higher end or the very bottom of the scale buy clothes from Oxfam, Cancer Research, Sue Ryder or Age Concern shops – and only those at the higher end want to tell you about it. An upper-middle female will proudly twirl and flounce a skirt at you, and announce gleefully that it was ‘Only four pounds fifty from Oxfam!’ – expecting you to admire her for being so clever, so thrifty, so charmingly eccentric, Bohemian and un-snobbish.
In some cases, she may be genuinely hard-up and, knowing that class in England is not judged on income, she won’t be ashamed to admit it. But upper-middle females will often buy clothes in charity shops and second-hand shops on principle (exactly what principle is not entirely clear), even when they can perfectly well afford new clothes. And boast about their purchases. But have a bit of compassion: this is the only chance these women get to break both the modesty rule and the money-talk taboo in the same breath – surely they can be forgiven for getting a bit overexcited? Their delight would, however, be incomprehensible to the women at the bottom of the social and income scales, who shop in charity shops out of dire necessity and get no social kudos or sense of pride from doing so – quite the opposite: many of them find it deeply shaming.
Although they are proud to shop in charity shops, the more class-anxious upper-middles are often reluctant to admit to buying clothes at certain high-street chains, such as Marks & Spencer (except for underwear and the odd plain t-shirt or man’s jumper), British Home Stores and Littlewoods (both no-go zones, even for knickers). If they do buy something more important, such as a jacket, from Marks & Spencer, they do not normally twirl and flaunt it and exclaim over how cheap it was, but if a friend admires the garment and asks where it is from, they say, ‘Would you believe M&S?!’ in a high-pitched, surprised tone, as though they don’t quite believe it themselves. The friend replies, ‘No! Really?!’ in the same tone. (Their teenage daughters might have much the same conversation about the cheaper high-street chains aimed at their age-group, such as New Look or Claire’s Accessories.)
Male Class Rules
One way or another, it is usually possible to gauge English women’s social class from their dress. Men, however, pose rather more of a problem for the class-spotter. There is far less variety in adult male clothing, particularly work-clothes, which means less choice, which means fewer opportunities to make either deliberate or inadvertent sartorial class-statements. The old blue-collar/white-collar distinction is no longer reliable. The decline of the manufacturing industry and the casual dress codes of many of the newer companies and industries mean that a suit per se no longer distinguishes the lower-middle from the working-class male. The young man going to work in jeans and a t-shirt could be a construction-site labourer, but he could equally be the managing director of an independent software company. Uniforms are more helpful, but not infallible. Yes, a shop assistant’s or bus driver’s uniform is probably a working-class indicator, but a barman’s or waiter’s is not, as middle-class students often take jobs in bars and restaurants. Generally, occupation is not a very reliable guide to social class, particularly in the ‘white-collar’ occupations: accountants, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers and estate agents can come from any social background. So, even if you could tell a man’s occupation from his dress, you would not necessarily be any the wiser regarding his class.
Although dress codes are now more relaxed in some occupations, the majority of ‘white-collar’ men still go to work in a suit – and at first glance, be-suited male commuters catching their trains in the morning all look pretty much alike. Well, to be honest, they all look pretty much alike at second and third glance as well. If I were a menswear expert, and could distinguish between an Armani suit and a Marks & Spencer’s one without grabbing the commuter by his collar and peering at the label, I would still only have information on the man’s income, not his social class. Class in England is no more determined by wealth than it is by occupation. I know that an upper-class English man, with sufficient money, is more likely to choose a tailor-made Jermyn Street suit than an Armani one – and that if he is broke he might prefer a charity-shop tailored suit to a new high-street-chain one – but this is not really a great deal of help to me as they all still just look like suits.
Jewellery and accessories are a better guide. Size is important. Large, bulky, ostentatious metal watches, especially gold ones, are a lower-class signal – even if they are frightfully expensive Rolexes (or those James-Bond-wannabe gadgetty ones that tell you what time it is in six countries and will work at the bottom of the sea and withstand a small nuclear attack). Upper-middles and above tend to wear more discreet watches, usually with a simple leather strap. A similar principle applies to cufflinks: big, flashy, show-off cufflinks are lower class; small, simple, unobtrusive ones are higher. Again, the cost of the items is irrelevant.
Any rings other than a plain wedding ring indicate that the wearer is probably no higher than middle-middle. Some upper-middle and upper-class males might wear a signet ring, engraved with their family crest, on the little finger of their left hand, but these are also often sported by pretentious middle-middles, so they are not a reliable guide. A signet ring with initials on it rather than a crest, and worn on any other finger, is lower middle. Ties are marginally more helpful. Very brash, garish colours and loud patterns (especially cartoony/jokey ones) are lower class; ties in a single, solid colour (particularly if pale, bright and/or shiny) are no higher than middle-middle; the upper-middles and above wear ties in relatively subdued, usually dark colours, with small, discreet patterns.
But I’ll come clean and admit that I rarely, if ever, manage to identify be-suited males’ class by dress alone: I have to cheat and look at their body language or their newspaper. (Whatever they are wearing, only working-class males sit on trains or buses with their legs wide apart; and most upper-middle-class males do not read the tabloids – or at least not in public.)
Casual clothes are a bit more revealing, in both the physical and class-indicator sense, than suits, as there is more variety and men have to exercise more choice. The trouble is that when allowed free rein to choose what to wear – without the rules and constraints of the suit – adult English men of all classes tend to dress rather badly. The vast majority have no natural sense of style, and indeed no wish to be stylishly dressed – quite the opposite: to describe a man as stylish, or even just well dressed, is to cast doubt upon his masculinity. A man who is too well dressed is automatically suspected of being gay. English men are concerned about being correctly or appropriately dressed, but this is because they do not want to stand out or draw attention to themselves. They just want to fit in, to blend, to look pretty much like any other unquestionably heterosexual male. The result is that they all look very much alike. When they are not wearing the work uniform of suit and tie, they all wear more or less the same undistinguishing and undistinguished dress-down uniform of jeans and t-shirt/sweatshirt or casual trousers and shirt/jumper.
Yes, I do realize that all t-shirts are not created equal, and that there are casual trousers and casual trousers. So it should be possible to spot class distinctions between different styles and fabrics and brands and so on. And it is possible. But it is not easy. (I’m not whining here – well, actually I am: I just want you to know that this has taken a lot of effort, not to mention a lot of funny looks from men who misinterpreted my attempts to scrutinize the label on the back of their trousers.)
The class rules of male casual dress are based on more or less the same basic principles as the female class rules, except that fussy overdressing is regarded as camp, rather than lower class. The shiny nylon versus natural-fibre principle applies to adult males as well as females, but it is much less useful as a class indicator because men of all classes tend to avoid obviously shiny man-made fibres as they are both effeminate and uncomfortable. And although the working-class male’s shirt might not be pure cotton, it is quite difficult to tell just by looking, and you can’t go around pinching men’s sleeves to check the quality of the fabric.
There is also the same inverse correlation between amounts of visible flesh and position on the social scale. Shirts unbuttoned to display an expanse of chest are lower class – the more buttons undone, the lower the class of the wearer (and if a chain or medallion round the neck is also revealed, take off another ten class points). Even amounts of arm on display can be significant. Among older males, the higher classes tend to prefer shirts to t-shirts, and would certainly never go out in just a vest or singlet, however hot the weather – these are strictly working-class garments: bare chests, anywhere other than a beach or swimming pool, are lower-working class.
If you are wearing a shirt, the class divide seems to be at the elbow: on a warm day, lower-class men will roll their shirt-sleeves up to above the elbow, while the higher ranks will roll them to just below the elbow – unless they are engaged in some significant physical activity, such as gardening. The visible-flesh rule also applies to legs. Upper-middle and upper-class adult males are rarely seen in shorts unless they are playing sports, hill walking or perhaps gardening at home; middle-middles and lower-middles might wear shorts on holiday abroad; but only working-class males exhibit their legs in public in their home town.
As a general principle, winter or summer, higher-class males just seem to wear more clothes. More layers, more coats, more scarves and hats and gloves. They are somewhat more likely to carry umbrellas as well, but only in cities – there is an old unwritten taboo against gentlemen carrying an umbrella in the country, except at the races or other occasions where chivalry might require them to protect dressed-up ladies from the rain. So, an umbrella in the city can sometimes be a higher-class signal, but an umbrella on a country walk is lower class. Unless you are a vicar, that is: for some reason country clergymen are exempt from the no-umbrella rule.
Upper-class English males take the ‘don’t stand out’ rule to extremes, dressing to blend in not only with each other but also with their surroundings: tweedy greens and browns in the country; sombre greys and dark blue pinstripes in town – a sort of high-class camouflage. Wearing inappropriate ‘city’ clothes in the country, for both males and females, is a serious social solecism. In some very old and grand upper-class country circles, this taboo extends to the wearing of anything even remotely fashionable: the more frumpy and out-of-date you look, the higher your social status.
DRESS CODES AND ENGLISHNESS
Oh dear. Dress seems to be yet another thing that the English are not very good at, yet another important ‘life skill’ we have somehow failed to master. Unless we have strict rules to follow – either official uniforms or tribal-sub-culture uniforms – our sartorial statements tend to be at best inarticulate and at worst downright ungrammatical.
Of course, there are a few exceptions, a few English people who speak the language of dress with effortless fluency. But on average, as a nation, our grasp of this idiom is poor. More evidence, if any were needed, of the social dis-ease that seems to be the most distinctive of our national characteristics.
My attempt to dissect English dress codes has also helped me to ‘get inside’ a stereotype: that of English eccentricity. Under the microscope, our much-vaunted eccentricity is not quite as admirably individual, original and creative as we might wish. Most of what passes for English sartorial eccentricity turns out, on closer inspection, to be a rather sheep-like conformity. But still – we do at least appreciate and value originality, and we can take some pride in the collective eccentricity of our street-fashions.
We are at our best when we are ‘in uniform’ but rebelling just slightly against it, refusing to take ourselves too seriously, indulging that peculiarly English talent for self-deprecating humour. We may lack the sartorial fluency of other nations, and our dress sense may be laughable, but fortunately we have a sense of humour, so we can always laugh at ourselves.
56. Almost all of these will probably be out of date by the time you read this – some are already, in the current jargon, ‘so last week’, or even ‘so three minutes ago’ (these expressions themselves give an indication of how fast the music fashions change).
57. These are from the magazines Muzik and MixMag. The current music-based sub-cultures have a penchant for cutely misspelled words, wherever possible involving the letter ‘k’, as in Kamaflage, Nukleuz, old-skool, Muzik, etc. ‘Old-Skool’ means pre 1993/94, usually House. ‘Floors’ are people on the dance-floor, people who are into dancing. ‘Purist swots’ are anoraks, trainspotters, who instead of dancing to the music develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of every aspect of it, which they bore you with at every opportunity. ‘bpm’ is beats per minute. The rest is a bit of a mystery.
58. At least, this rule applies to punk and to the current black-American gangsta/hip-hop fashions, but a relatively high proportion of Goths are middle class, as were most grungers, so there are exceptions.
59. Apologies to those too young to remember Shirley Williams in her heyday, but I could not find a good contemporary example, as all female politicians now seem to dress in a rather lower/middle-middle manner – or at least I have seen none with Williams’s unmistakably high-class brand of unkemptness.
FOOD RULES
I
n 1949, the Hungarian George Mikes famously declared that: ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England they have good table manners.’ Later, in 1977, he observed that our food had improved somewhat, while our table manners had deteriorated. He still did not, however, seem impressed by English food, and he acknowledged that our table manners were still ‘fairly decent’.
Nearly thirty years on, Mikes’s comments still reflect the general international opinion of English cooking, as the travel writer Paul Richardson discovered when he told foreign friends that he was going to spend eighteen months researching a book on British gastronomy. His Spanish, French and Italian friends, he says, informed him that there was no such thing as British gastronomy, as this would require a passionate love of food, which we clearly did not have. They implied ‘that our relationship with the food we ate was more or less a loveless marriage’.
Among the litany of complaints, which I have also heard from my own foreign friends and informants, was the fact that we regard good food as a privilege, not a right. We also have no proper regional cookery; families no longer eat together but instead consume junk food in front of the television; our diet consists mainly of salty or sweet snack foods – chips, crisps, chocolate bars, ready-meals, microwave pizzas and other rubbish. Even those with an interest in good food, and able to afford it, tend to have neither the time nor the energy to shop for and cook fresh ingredients in what other nations would regard as a normal or proper manner.
These criticisms are largely justified. But they are not the whole truth. The same goes for the opposite extreme – the current ‘Cool Britannia’ fashion for proclaiming that English cooking has in recent years improved out of all recognition, that London is the now the gastronomic capital of the world, that food is the new rock ‘n’ roll, that we have become a nation of gourmets and ‘foodies’, and so on.
I am not going to spend too much time here arguing about the quality of English cooking. My impression is that it is neither as awful as its detractors would have us believe, nor as stupendous as its recent champions have claimed. It is somewhere in between. Some of it is very good, some is quite inedible. On average, it’s probably about fair to middling. I am only interested in the quality of English food in so far as it reflects our relationship with food, the unwritten social rules governing our food-related behaviour, and what these tell us about our national identity. Every culture has its own distinctive food rules – both general rules about attitudes towards food and cooking, and specific rules about who may eat what, how much, when, where, with whom and in what manner – and one can learn a lot about a culture by studying its food rules. So, I am not interested in English food per se, but in the Englishness of English food rules.
THE AMBIVALENCE RULE
‘Loveless marriage’ is not an entirely unfair description of the English relationship with food, although marriage is perhaps too strong a word: our relationship with food and cooking is more like a sort of uneasy, uncommitted cohabitation. It is ambivalent, often discordant, and highly fickle. There are moments of affection, and even of passion, but on the whole it is fair to say that we do not have the deep-seated, enduring, inborn love of food that is to be found among our European neighbours, and indeed in most other cultures. Food is just not given the same high priority in English life as it is elsewhere. Even the Americans, whose ‘generic’ (as opposed to ethnic) food is arguably no better than ours, still seem to care about it more, demanding hundreds of different flavours and combinations in each category of junk food, for example, whereas we will put up with just two or three.
In most other cultures, people who care about food, and enjoy cooking and talking about it, are not singled out, either sneeringly or admiringly, as ‘foodies’. Keen interest in food is the norm, not the exception: what the English call a ‘foodie’ would just be a normal person, exhibiting a standard, healthy, appropriate degree of focus on food. What we see as foodie obsession is in other cultures the default mode, not something unusual or even noticeable.
Among the English, such an intense interest in food is regarded by the majority as at best rather odd, and at worst somehow morally suspect – not quite proper, not quite right. In a man, foodie tendencies may be seen as unmanly, effeminate, possibly even casting doubt upon his sexual orientation. In this context, foodieness is roughly on a par with, say, an enthusiastic interest in fashion or soft furnishings. English male ‘celebrity’ chefs who appear on television tend to go out of their way to demonstrate their masculinity and heterosexuality: they use bloke-ish language and adopt a tough, macho demeanour; parade their passion for football; mention their wives, girlfriends or children (‘the wife’ and ‘the kids’ in bloke-speak); and dress as scruffily as possible. Jamie Oliver, the young TV chef who has done so much to make cooking a more attractive career choice for English boys, is a prime example of this ‘please note how heterosexual I am’ style, with his cool scooter, loud music, sexy model wife, Cockney brashness and laddish ‘Chuck in a bi’ o’ this an’ a bi’ o’ that and you’ll be awright, mate’ approach to cookery.
Foodieness is somewhat more acceptable among females, but it is still noticeable, still remarked upon – and in some circles regarded as pretentious. No-one wishes to be seen as too deeply fascinated by or passionate about food. Most of us are proud to claim that we ‘eat to live, rather than living to eat’ – unlike some of our neighbours, the French in particular, whose excellent cooking we enjoy and admire, but whose shameless devotion to food we rather despise, not realizing that the two might perhaps be connected.
ANTI-EARNESTNESS AND OBSCENITY RULES
Our ambivalence about food may be due in part to the influence of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Excessive zeal on any subject is embarrassing, and getting all earnest and emotional about something as trivial as food is, well, frankly rather silly.
But it seems to me that our uneasiness about food and foodieness involves something more than this. There is a hint here of a more general discomfort about sensual pleasures. Flaunting one’s passion for good food, and talking openly about the pleasure of eating it, is not embarrassing just because it is over-earnest but also because it is somehow a bit obscene.
It has been said that the English have a puritanical streak, but I’m not sure this is quite accurate. Sex, for example, is not regarded as sinful, but as private and personal and therefore a bit embarrassing. Jokes about sex, even quite explicit ones, are acceptable; earnest or fervent talk about the same intimate physical details is obscene. The sensual pleasures of eating, it seems to me, are in the same category – not exactly a taboo subject, but one that should only be talked about in a light-hearted, unserious, jokey manner.
Foodies (or foreigners) who dwell too lyrically, too erotically, on the delights of a perfectly executed, voluptuously creamy sauce bearnaise, will make us squirm, blush and look away. To avoid offending, all they need do is lighten up a bit, laugh at themselves, not take the whole thing quite so seriously. Without such ironic detachment, foodie-talk becomes a form of ‘gastro-porn’ (the term normally refers to lavishly illustrated foodie magazines and cookbooks, with detailed, mouth-watering descriptions of each luscious dish – but can equally be applied to over-enthusiastic foodie conversation).
TV-DINNER RULES
Although the idea that we are becoming a nation of discerning gastronomes is, I’m afraid, over-optimistic foodie propaganda – well, a gross exaggeration, anyway – interest in food and cooking has certainly increased in recent years. There is usually at least one food-related programme on every television channel, every day. Admittedly, some of the game-show-style programmes, in which chefs compete to cook a three-course meal in 20 minutes from five ingredients, are more entertainment than cookery – and my foreign informants found this approach to food either amusingly daft or shockingly irreverent. But there are plenty of genuinely informative cookery shows as well.
Whether this actually translates into much real cooking in English homes is a matter for some debate. It is probably true to say that many English people avidly watch the celebrity TV chefs preparing elaborate dishes from fresh, exotic ingredients, while their own plastic-packaged supermarket ready-meals circle sweatily for three minutes in the microwave. (I’ve often done exactly this myself.)
But there are exceptions – people who are genuinely inspired by these programmes, and rush out to buy the TV chefs’ cookbooks and try their recipes. And I’m not just talking about a middle-class, trendy-foodie elite. Delia Smith’s cookbooks are always at the top of the popular bestseller lists, and shopkeepers are frequently caught out by the ‘Delia Effect’, whereby any product she recommends on her evening television show – from the humble egg to a particular make of saucepan – will sell out in shops across the country the next day. A small but significant number of my working-class friends and informants have become much more enthusiastic and adventurous cooks as a result of watching television cookery programmes. A bus driver told me he was a ‘big fan’ of Gary Rhodes. ‘I love his recipes,’ he said. ‘I’d never even tried to cook fish before – not real fish, proper fresh fish. Now I can go to the fishmonger and get, oh, red snapper or whatever and make a really beautiful meal. I did roasted sea bass last weekend. It’s very pricey, is sea bass, but it’s worth it. Beautiful, it was.’
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