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 Almost all of these will probably be out of date by the time you read this – some are already, in the current jargon, �so last week’, or even �so three minutes ago’ (these expressions themselves give an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.

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