Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  94. A little spasm of ruthless honesty just propelled me to our own loo to check the current bogside reading matter. I found a paperback edition of Jane Austen’s letters and a mangled copy of the Times Literary Supplement. Oh dear. Could possibly be seen as a bit pretentious. I suppose it’s no use saying that both are gloriously bitchy and extremely funny. Perhaps I should be less quick to cast aspersions on other people’s bogside libraries. Maybe some people really do enjoy reading Habermas and Derrida on the loo. I take it all back.

  95. Apparently we read more newspapers than any other nation, except – surprise, surprise – the Japanese. What is it about small, overcrowded islands?

  96. To be fair to Baggini, he does acknowledge these nuances, and the complexities of English social class are difficult to convey in a catchy little formula like this. I’m not sure why I’m being so scrupulously fair, as Baggini reduces all of my careful analyses of our dysfunctional relationship with alcohol to an equally simplistic (and misleading) equation that I have never used.

  97. The internet is changing human social interaction in many other profound (and I believe largely beneficial) ways. As with mobile phones, we are using the internet to recreate more collectivist, ‘tribal’ social dynamics. But a book about Englishness is not the place to discuss these much wider sociocultural shifts, so I am trying to write another book about them.

  98. Daniel Miller makes this observation in his excellent ethnographic study of shoppers in North London – I was intrigued by it and subsequently ‘tested’ it in various semi-scientific ways in my own fieldwork.

  99. My research on shopping indicates a slight but significant recent shift, among younger males, towards a more female/feminine approach to shopping, and a similar shift among older females towards a more male/masculine approach – but, in general, the hunter/gatherer rules still apply.

  100. Another Danny Miller observation, again ‘tested’ and successfully ‘replicated’ in my fieldwork.

  101. Lest I be suspected of rather un-English humourless earnestness, I should add that I also joined a jokey organisation called SAVE, which stood for Students Against Virtually Everything.

  102. There are plenty of well-worn examples, but a reader sent me a more obscure book, The Little Londoner, published in 1901, in which the German author R. Kron observes that ‘London pubs are crowded with drunken men and women’ and ‘In no city in the world is drunkenness amongst the lower classes so obtrusive as in the British Metropolis’.

  DRESS CODES

  Before we can even begin to examine the rules of English dress, we need to be clear about a few cross-cultural universals. Apart from the obvious need for warmth in cold climates, and for protection from the elements, dress, in all cultures, is essentially about three things: sex differentiation, status signals and affiliation signals. Sex differentiation is usually the most obvious: even if a society shows very little variation in dress or personal adornment, there will always be at least some minor differences between male and female attire – differences that are often emphasised to make each sex more attractive to the other. By ‘status’ I mean social status or position in the broadest sense, and I am including age-differentiation in this category. Affiliation, to a tribe, clan, subculture, social or ‘lifestyle’ group, covers pretty much everything else.

  I’m sorry if this offends some fashion editors of glossy magazines, or their readers, who believe that dress is all about individual ‘self-expression’ or some such guff. What modern, Western, post-industrial cultures like to see as ‘style’ or ‘self-expression’ – or fashion itself, for that matter – is really just a glorified combination of sex-differentiation, status signals and affiliation signals. I have probably also offended those in these societies who insist that they have no interest in fashion, that their clothes do not make any social statements and that they dress purely for comfort, economy and practicality. Some people may indeed have no conscious interest in fashion, but even they cannot help choosing one cheap, comfortable and practical garment over another, so they are making sartorial social statements whether they like it or not. (And, besides, claiming to be above such trivialities as dress is in itself a socially significant proclamation, usually a rather loud one.)

  The English have no ‘national costume’ – an omission noted and lamented by all those wringing their hands over our national identity crisis. Some such commentators then go about trying to understand English dress in what seems to me a most peculiar and irrational manner, in that they attempt to discover what English dress says about the English by scrutinising specific, stereotyped, ‘stage-English’ items of clothing, as though the secret of Englishness might somehow be hidden in the colour, the cut, the seams or the hems. Clive Aslet, for example, tells us that ‘The quintessential English garment must be the slurry-coloured waxed Barbour jacket.’ It is perhaps not surprising that the former editor of Country Life should choose this particular stereotype, but the fixation with clichés of English dress seems to be universal. Aslet then bemoans the decline in popularity of Harris tweed, which he claims reflects a decline in traditional ‘country’ values. When in doubt, he blames the weather: ‘The British generally have lacked style in summer clothes, largely because traditionally we have never had much of a summer.’ Harry Mount, in How England Made the English, also attributes our lamentable lack of taste in summer clothing to the English climate. At the first ray of unaccustomed summer sunshine, he observes, ‘the English think “God it’s hot. Let’s wear something special/ludicrous to celebrate, something that exposes as much skin as possible.”’ This typically English weather-moaning is amusing, but not terribly helpful as an explanation, as there are plenty of other countries with unimpressive summers where people still manage to dress much more stylishly than we do. And we do not exactly become paragons of stylish elegance during the autumn and winter either, despite long familiarity with cold, damp and grey skies. Finally, Aslet complains that we have become too informal, that ‘outside the military, the county set, the royal family and certain ceremonial occasions’ we no longer have any codes telling us how to dress.

  Others seem to give up the attempt to understand English dress before they’ve even started. Jeremy Paxman includes punk and street-fashion in his initial list of ‘Englishnesses’, but then avoids the dress issue, apart from the brief assertion that ‘There is no longer even any consensus on questions like dress, let alone any prescriptive rules.’ This notion that ‘there are no longer any rules’ is a typically English nostalgic complaint, and, on the part of those trying to explain Englishness, a bit of a typically English cop-out. But these plaintive comments are at least based on a very sound principle: that national identity is about rules, and lack of rules is symptomatic of loss of identity. The diagnostic criteria are correct, but both Aslet and Paxman have misidentified the symptom. There are still rules and codes of English dress, although they are not as formal or as clear-cut as they were fifty years ago. Some of the current unofficial, unwritten rules are even highly prescriptive. The most important rule, however, is a descriptive one – it could even be called a ‘meta-rule’, a rule about rules.

  THE RULES RULE

  The English have an uneasy, difficult and largely dysfunctional relationship with clothes, characterised primarily by a desperate need for rules, and a woeful inability to cope without them. This meta-rule helps to explain why the English have an international reputation for dressing in general very badly, but with specific areas (pockets, you might say) of excellence, such as high-class gentlemen’s tailoring, sporting and ‘country’ clothes, ceremonial costume and innovative street-fashion. In other words, we English are at our sartorial best when we have strict, formal rules and traditions to follow – when we are either literally or effectively ‘in uniform’. Left to our own devices, we flounder and fail, having little or no natural sense of style or elegance – suffering from, as George Orwell put it, an ‘almost general deadness to aesthetic issues’.

  Our need for rules
has been highlighted in recent years by the ‘Dress-down Friday’ or ‘Casual Friday’ custom imported from America, whereby companies allow their employees to wear their own choice of casual clothes to the office on Fridays, rather than the usual formal business suits. A number of English companies adopted this custom, but quite a few have been obliged to abandon it, as many of their more junior staff started turning up in ludicrously inappropriate clothes – tasteless outfits more suited to the beach or a night-club than to any normal office. Others just looked unacceptably scruffy. Clients were put off, colleagues were embarrassed, and in any case most of the senior management simply ignored the Casual Friday rule, choosing, perhaps wisely, to maintain their dignity by sticking to the normal business-suit uniform. This served only to emphasise hierarchical divisions within the business – quite the opposite of the chummy, democratising effect intended by the Casual Friday policy. In short, the experiment was not a great success.

  Other nations may have their flaws and foibles in matters of dress, but only among our colonial ‘descendants’, the Americans and Australians, is this deplorable absence of taste as marked or as widespread as it is in England. Ironically, given our supposed obsession with our weather and our pride in its changeable nature, even these sartorially undistinguished nations are rather better than us at dressing appropriately for different climatic conditions. We may spend inordinate amounts of time discussing weather forecasts, but we somehow never seem to be wearing the right clothes: for example, I have spent many rainy afternoons on the streets counting umbrellas, and calculated that only about 25 per cent of the population (mainly middle-aged or older) actually manage to arm themselves with this supposedly quintessentially English item, even when heavy rain has been forecast for days. These perverse habits give us a good excuse to moan and grumble about being too hot, cold or wet – and, incidentally, would seem to bear out my contention that our constant weather-speak is a social facilitator rather than evidence of a genuine obsession.

  THE ECCENTRIC-SHEEP RULE

  Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that I seem to be including ‘innovative street-fashion’ in the category of ‘uniform’ – and you might perhaps be questioning my judgement. Surely this is a contradiction? Surely the quirky, outlandish, subculture street-fashions – cockatoo-haired punks, Victorian-vampire Goths, scary-booted skinheads – for which the English are renowned are evidence of our eccentricity and originality, not conformist, conservative rule-following? The idea that English street-fashion is characterised by eccentricity and imaginative creativity has become a universally accepted ‘fact’ among fashion writers – not only in popular magazines but also in academic, scholarly works on English dress.103 Even the normally cynical Jeremy Paxman fails to question this stereotype, reiterating the widely accepted view that English street-fashions ‘all express a basic belief in the liberty of the individual’. But what most people think of as English eccentricity in dress is really the opposite: it is tribalism, a form of conformity, a uniform. Punks, Goths and so on may look outlandish, but this is everyone – or, rather, a well-defined group – all being outlandish in exactly the same way. There is nothing idiosyncratic or eccentric about English street-fashions: they are just subcultural affiliation signals.

  Design houses such as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen pick up on these street-fashion trends and interpret and glamorise them on the international catwalks, and everyone says, ‘Ooh, how eccentric, how English,’ but really there is nothing terribly eccentric about a diluted copy of a uniform. Street-fashions do not even function for very long as effective subcultural affiliation signals, as these styles invariably and rapidly become ‘mainstream’: no sooner do youth subcultures invent some daft new tribal costume than the avant-garde designers pick it up, then a somewhat more muted interpretation appears in the high-street shops and everyone is wearing a version of it, including one’s mother. This is infuriating for the young originators of these street-styles. English youth tribes spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid being ‘mainstream’ – a dirty word, used as an insult – but this does not make them eccentric, anarchic individualists: they are still conformist sheep, all disguised in the same wolf’s clothing.

  The most truly eccentric dresser in this country is the Queen, who pays no attention whatsoever to fashion, mainstream or otherwise, continuing to wear the same highly idiosyncratic style of clothing (a kind of modified 1950s-retro look, if you had to define it in fashion-speak, but very much her own personal taste) with no regard for anyone else’s opinion. Because she is the Queen, people call her style ‘classic’ and ‘timeless’ rather than eccentric or weird, politely overlooking the fact that absolutely no one else dresses in this peculiar way. Never mind the herds of street-sheep and their haute-couture imitators: the Queen is the best example of English sartorial eccentricity.

  Having said that, young English subcultural sheep do invent clothing styles that are significantly more wacky and outrageous than any other nations’ street-fashions – indeed, the rebellious youth of many other nations tend to imitate English street-fashions rather than going to the trouble of inventing their own. We may not be individually eccentric, apart from the Queen, but our youth subculture groups do have a sort of collective eccentricity, if that is not a contradiction in terms. At any rate, we appreciate originality, and we take pride in our reputation for eccentricity, however undeserved it may be.

  THE AFFECTED-INDIFFERENCE RULE

  This is partly because of another set of unwritten rules about dress, which derive in part from the humour rules that are so deeply ingrained in the English psyche. In particular, our attitude to dress is governed by the omnipresent Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Dress, like pretty much everything else, is not to be taken too seriously. It is not done to be too intensely interested in one’s clothes – or, rather, one should not be seen to be overly concerned about being fashionable or well dressed. We admire eccentricity, because genuine eccentricity means not caring a hoot about the opinion of others. This state of perfect indifference may never in fact be achieved, except perhaps among the clinically insane and some elderly aristocrats, but it is an ideal to which we all aspire. We make do with the next best thing: affected indifference – we pretend that we do not care very much about what we wear or how we look.

  The affected-indifference rule applies most strictly to English males, among whom any expression of interest in fashion or appearance is regarded as effeminate. And it doesn’t even have to be verbally expressed – any slight evidence of interest in dress, of taking a bit of care over one’s appearance, can cast doubt on one’s masculinity. Many English males almost feel obliged to dress badly, just to prove they are not homosexual.

  Younger males are, in fact, secretly highly concerned about conforming to the current street-fashions, sporting the required tribal affiliation-signals, but only their mothers, from whom they beg the money to purchase these items, know how deeply important this is to them. Females are generally less restricted by the affected indifference rule, although outside ‘fashionista’ circles, obsessive interest in fashion is frowned upon. Teenage girls are the only real exception to the rule: they are allowed to express their passionate interest in clothes and concerns about their appearance – at least among themselves: in the company of males, all English females tend to play down these anxieties, and avoid mentioning the hours they spend poring over fashion magazines and eagerly debating the merits of the latest trends.

  EMBARRASSMENT RULES

  I had a hunch that the rest of the English, even the males, share these concerns, and that observing the affected-indifference rule helps us to hide a deep-seated insecurity about dress, a desperate need to ‘fit in’ and an acute fear of embarrassment. My most perceptive informant on matters of dress was the fashion ‘agony-aunt’ Annalisa Barbieri, whose ‘Dear Annie’ column in the Independent on Sunday attracted hundreds of anxious letters every week from the sartorially challenged English. She had interviewed me a
few times for features she was writing on a variety of subjects, and when I found out that she was ‘Dear Annie’, I jumped at the chance to interrogate an expert on the real, usually hidden, dress concerns and problems of the English – particularly as her international background meant that she could compare these with other cultures’ preoccupations.

  She confirmed that the English are much more worried about our clothes and appearance than the affected-indifference rule allows us to admit. And her postbag indicates that our main concern is indeed about ‘fitting in’, being acceptably dressed and, above all, that perennial English preoccupation, avoiding embarrassment. Yes, we want to look attractive, to make the most of our physical assets and disguise our flaws, but we do not, like other nations, want to stand out or show off – quite the opposite: most of us are scared of any form of ostentation, or even of seeming to make too much effort, to care too obviously. We just want to fit in. The overwhelming majority of the questions addressed to Dear Annie are not about whether a certain garment or outfit is beautiful or glamorous, but whether it is socially acceptable, suitable, appropriate. ‘It’s all “Is it OK to wear X with Y?”; “Can I wear such-and-such to a wedding?”; “Is this suitable for the office?”; “Is that too tarty?”’ Annalisa told me. ‘Up to the 1950s, there were lots of official rules about dress – there were uniforms, really – and the English dressed well. Since the 1960s, there have been fewer formal rules, and lots of confusion and embarrassment, and the English dress very badly, but there is still an obsession with etiquette. What they really want is more rules.’

  It is worth noting in this context that the outlandish youth subculture styles for which we are renowned are worn only by a very small minority. The vast majority of English youth are not even collectively eccentric. After school each day, when they change out of their ‘oppressive’ school uniforms and are free to ‘express themselves’ in clothing of their own choice, they still all look virtually identical. At one girls’ boarding school I visited, for example, all the girls came to the cafeteria in the evening wearing exactly the same loose shirts or sweatshirts in the same muted colours, the same skinny jeans or matte leggings, and the same flat pumps. They all carried the exact same type of flower-patterned shoulder-bag, and all wore their hair roughly the same length, and either loose or tied back in the same casual, messy ponytail. The homogeneity was so striking that I asked the teachers if there were any rules about what the girls could wear when not in school uniform. No, they replied, there are no rules at all – they can wear whatever they choose. ‘So they choose another strict uniform,’ I laughed. The teachers seemed slightly surprised at my comment, but then looked around at all their identically clad pupils and laughed along with me. Of course, this ‘unofficial uniform’ varies from school to school – but every school has its unwritten dress code, which almost all pupils slavishly obey.