Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Ironically, this desperate desire to fit in and conform can often, particularly among the most fashion-conscious, lead to the most dramatic and ludicrous of our sartorial mistakes. Edina, the ridiculously overdressed character in the television sit-com Absolutely Fabulous, is a caricature of a certain type of English fashion-victim. She combines a burning need to be fashionable with a typically English lack of any natural taste or sense of style – decking herself out indiscriminately in all of the most outrageous of the latest designer catwalk creations, and invariably ending up looking like an over-decorated Christmas tree. Edina is a caricature, a deliberate comic exaggeration, but the caricature is based on features and behaviours that are all too familiar and recognisable among English females. There are plenty of Edinas among our pop-stars and other celebrities, and you can see down-market, chain-store versions of Edina-like bad taste walking around on every high street.

  Women of most other nations can watch Absolutely Fabulous and just laugh at Edina’s absurd outfits. English women may laugh at Edina, but we also wince with vicarious embarrassment, and our amusement is tinged with a little frisson of fear, a little anxiety about our own fashion-victim errors of judgement. Edina’s mistakes may be more extreme than most, but English women do seem to be particularly susceptible to the more preposterous products of designers’ fevered imaginations: almost every English female had a ludicrous puffball skirt in her wardrobe in the 1980s; we wear micro-minis every time they come into fashion, whether we have the legs for them or not; ditto thigh-boots, leg-warmers, hot pants, bra-tops and other inventions that are unflattering on all but the skinniest, and often look remarkably silly even on them.

  At night, English town-centre bars and night-clubs are full of herds of young women wearing very little clothing at all, and certainly leaving little or nothing to the imagination. You could be forgiven for thinking that the women displaying their legs, bellies and bosoms in these tight, shiny micro-garments are trying very hard to ‘stand out’ and be noticeable – until you notice that they are all ‘standing out’ in exactly the same hooker-like manner, that they are all trying very hard to conform and blend in, that this is in fact yet another uniform. To wear a less embarrassingly revealing outfit would be drawing attention to oneself, and therefore deeply embarrassing.

  Of course, we are not alone in conforming to the fashion norms of our social group – I stated at the beginning of this chapter that affiliation signals are one of the primary functions of dress in all cultures. It’s just that most other cultures manage to signal their tribal affiliations in a more aesthetically pleasing manner. We are not entirely alone in our aesthetic inadequacies – our American and Australian cousins can be equally tasteless – but my female friends, acquaintances and informants from around the world tend to be particularly scornful about English women’s sartorial awkwardness and incompetence. On one occasion, when I protested that singling us out in this way was a bit unfair, a rather grand French lady replied, ‘It is perfectly fair. One does not expect much from the colonies, but you English are supposed to be civilised Europeans. You really should know better. Paris is, what, an hour away?’ She lifted an immaculate eyebrow, shrugged her elegant shoulders and sniffed delicately, meaning, presumably, that if we could not be bothered to learn from our neighbours and betters, we were beneath her notice. I wouldn’t have minded so much, but this impromptu interview took place at Royal Ascot, in the Royal bloody Enclosure, no less, with all of us Englishwomen (even undercover social scientists) in our very smartest frocks and hats. And I’d been especially proud of my pink mini-dress and pink shoes with amusing snaffle-shaped buckles on them – a little horsey reference (footnote, even) that had struck me as charmingly witty for a day at the races, but now, under the withering gaze of Madame Style-Police, seemed rather silly and childish, a typically English attempt to make a joke out of everything.

  Dress is essentially a form of communication – one could even call it a social skill – so perhaps it should not be surprising to find that the socially challenged English are not terribly good at it. We have difficulties with most other aspects of communication, particularly when there are no clear, formal rules to follow. Perhaps the loss of our old 1950s rigid dress codes has had the same effect as the decline of ‘How do you do?’ as the standard greeting. In the absence of the formal ‘How do you do?’ exchange, we never know quite what to say, and our attempts at informal greetings are awkward, clumsy, inelegant and embarrassing. In the same way, the decline of formal dress codes – now regarded by many, like the ‘How do you do?’ ritual, as stuffy and old-fashioned – means that we never know quite what to wear, and our informal dress has become as embarrassingly awkward as our greetings.

  We do not like formality; we object to being dictated to by prissy little rules and regulations – but we lack the natural grace and social ease to cope with informality. We are like rebellious teenagers whose parents complain, with some justification, that they want to be treated like adults and given the freedom to make their own choices and decisions, but do not have the sense or maturity to handle such freedom, and when granted it just make a big mess of things and get into trouble.

  MAINSTREAM RULES AND TRIBAL UNIFORMS

  Our solution is to invent more rules. The rigid dress codes of the past have not given way to complete sartorial anarchy. Although fashion magazines regularly proclaim that ‘Nowadays, anything goes’, this is clearly not the case. What is now known as ‘mainstream’ dress certainly does not conform to the same kind of official, universal dress codes as in the pre-1960 eras – when, for example, all women were supposed to wear hats, gloves, skirts of a particular length and so on, with only relatively minor, and well-defined, class and subcultural variations. But there are broad-brush rules and fashion trends that most of us still obey: show a crowd-scene photograph from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, etc., and anyone can immediately identify, just from the clothing and hairstyles, the period in which it was taken. The same will no doubt be true of the current period, although as usual we imagine that this one is more bewilderingly anarchic and fast-changing than any previous time. Even a photograph featuring ‘retro’ fashions, recycling the style of, say, the 1970s in the 1990s, or the 1960s and 1980s in the year 2003, or the 1950s and 1970s again in 2011, the 1960s again in 2013, and so on, would not fool us, as these styles are never simply repeated ‘verbatim’, but always piecemeal, with many subtle changes, and different hairstyles and make-up. Look at a few crowd-pictures, or just flip through some family photo albums, and you realise not only that dress is far more rule-governed than you might have thought but also that you are probably far more aware of the detail and nuances of current dress codes than you imagined – even if you think you have no interest in fashion. You are obeying these rules unconsciously, whether you like it or not, and will, when future people see you in a photograph, be identifiable as an example of your time.

  Even if I showed you a photograph of a specific subcultural youth group, rather than a mainstream crowd, you would still, probably quite easily, identify the period in which that subculture was prominent. Which brings me to ‘tribal’ dress codes. English subcultures with different styles of dress from the mainstream majority are nothing new. In the mid-nineteenth century, the counter-culture Pre-Raphaelites influenced a style of ‘artistic’ dress – a sort of medieval-retro look, but with modern naturalistic touches – which in turn led to the droopy, ‘aesthetic’ subculture look of the late nineteenth century, and then the loose but more vivid ‘Bohemian’ styles of the early twentieth century. Teddy boys, students and arty types had their own distinctive styles in the 1950s; then there were the sharp mods and hard-looking rockers; then the softer, artistic-Bohemian look was reinvented by the hippies (not realising the whole thing had been done before) in the late 1960s and early 1970s; followed by the harsher punks, skinheads and Goths (this last still a fairly popular subculture genre) in the late 1970s and 1980s. Then in the 1990s we were back to the recurring
droopy-Bohemian-natural theme again with grunge, indies, crusties and eco-warriors, succeeded in the 2000s by the usual pendulum swing to a harder-edged style with newmetallers, gangsta-bling, ‘hoodies’ – and Goths reincarnated as slightly more punk-like emos. Although these harsher styles are still with us, the subculture fashion pendulum at least partly swung back to yet another reinvention of the softer Boho-ish look in the latter part of the decade – this time in the form of surfer/skater/festival styles, and the latest incarnations of indie (short for ‘independent’, although it is of course nothing of the sort).

  This potted summary is over-simplified, by no means exhaustive, and may well already be out of date by the time you read it, but my point is that we’ve always had subcultures, and they have always distinguished themselves from the mainstream, and from each other, by their dress codes – until their distinctive style of dress becomes mainstream and they are forced to think of a new one.

  The only significant change that I can see in recent times is an increase in the sheer number of different subcultural styles – an increase in tribalism, perhaps a reaction to the ‘globalisation’ affecting our mainstream culture. In the past, young English people looking for a sense of identity and a means of annoying their parents had a choice of just one or two, at the most three, counter-culture youth tribes; now there are at least half a dozen, each with its own sub-groups and splinter groups. Since the 1950s, all youth subculture styles have been closely identified with different types of music, almost all originally derived from American black music, usurped and modified by young whites. The current batch conforms largely to this pattern, with aficionados of garage (must be pronounced to rhyme with ‘marriage’, not ‘barrage’), R&B, hip-hop, drum&bass, techno, trance and house (and, more recently, dubstep, grime and grindie) each sporting marginally different clothing – the techno/house/trance groups being more smart-casual, the others more ‘gangsta’ and show-off glamorous, with designer labels and varying degrees of ‘bling’. I have already mentioned indie, a more middle-class (and increasingly mainstream) youth subculture, again with many sub-divisions (indie-pop, grunge, sadcore, shoegaze, math rock, indietronica, etc.), which favours angst-ridden lyrics, guitar-based music and a softer, more arty, Bohemian style of dress.

  The minor style distinctions differentiating many of these groups are subtle, and some may not be visible to the naked eye of an uninitiated observer, just as much of the music may sound alike to the untrained ear. As a member of one of these youth-tribes, however, you can not only see and hear important differences between, say, house, techno and trance, but also, within these categories, between sub-genres such as acid house, deep house, tech house, progressive house, hi-NRG, nu-NRG, old skool, Goa trance, psy trance, hardcore, happy hardcore, electro house, fidget house, psycho house, reg house, etc. You know, for example, that hard house and hi-NRG are particularly popular among gay men, and associated with a more flamboyant, body-conscious style of dress, but you can easily distinguish this type of glamour from the ostentatious, blingy variety associated with hip-hop. You can discuss the various sub-genres in a dialect utterly incomprehensible to outsiders, and read specialist magazines with reviews written in this private coded language, such as:

  Slam drop a looping tech-house mix and Unkle provide a more twisted beatz version.

  A rich mix of textures that will satisfy floors and purist swots alike.

  For some acid mayhem, Massive Power reveals its Mr Spring influence in a spiralling 290bpm breakdown.104

  I noted in the 2004 edition of this book that many of these sub-genres of ‘house’, ‘trance’ etc. would probably be out of date by the time it was published, and indeed that some were already being described as ‘so last week’ (the expression itself an indication of how fast the music fashions change). Sure enough, some have either been superseded or ‘gone mainstream’, but as ‘house’ and some related genres are still very popular among clubbers, and this is still a good example of the variety of sub-divisions within youth music-based subcultural styles, I’ll let it stand.

  The Collective Distinctiveness Rule

  So you get to rebel against the mainstream culture, and proclaim your non-conformist individual identity, but with the comforting security of belonging to a structured, rule-governed social group, with shared tastes, values and jargon, and well-defined boundaries and behaviour codes. And no risk of mistakes or embarrassment because, unlike the mainstream culture where you only have rather vague guidelines, there are clear and precise instructions on what to wear. No wonder so many English teenagers choose this form of rebellion.

  The dress codes of youth subcultures are ‘codes’ in both senses of the word: rules, but also ciphers. The tribes’ sartorial statements, like the verbal ones in the reviews quoted above, are delivered in dialect, a private code that is difficult for outsiders to decipher. These coded dress codes are highly prescriptive – strict to a degree that would feel oppressive if these were rules imposed by parents or schools. Deviation from the uniform is not tolerated, as anyone who has tried to get into a popular subculture night-club wearing the wrong thing will know. And it’s not just what you wear but precisely how you wear it. If woolly hats are being worn pulled right down to the eyebrows and completely covering the ears, then that is how you wear your woolly hat. The fact that it makes you look like a six-year-old dressed by an over-anxious mother is neither here nor there. If hooded sweatshirts are worn zipped to the neck with the hoods up – again somehow looking curiously vulnerable and childlike – then that is how you wear your sweatshirt. If you are a Goth, you wear a lot of black clothes and dyed-black hair, with white make-up, heavy black eyeliner and dark lipstick. And long hair. Even with all the correct funereal fancy-dress and make-up, short hair will mark you out (at least in some goth circles) as a novice or ‘baby’ Goth. Either grow it quickly, buy a wig or get extensions.

  This is not to say that there is no variety or diversity or scope for individual self-expression within subcultural styles, just that such variation must remain within clearly defined boundaries: you can pick and choose, but you do so from a limited range of core themes. A Goth must be recognisably a Goth, and an emo identifiable as an emo, otherwise there is no point. Some members of youth subcultures have more insight into their own conformity than others. In his excellent study of the Goth subculture, Paul Hodkinson quotes an informant who responded to the question ‘What is the Goth scene all about?’ by declaring that it is about ‘having the absolute freedom to dress as you want and to express yourself as you want’. Hodkinson comments that ‘The ways in which subcultural participants choose to respond to direct questioning can sometimes result in debatable conclusions’ – which is a polite academic way of saying, ‘Yeah, right.’

  Another of his informants was more perceptive. Responding to a question about the importance of being ‘different’, she said, ‘Yeah, although you always say that, like, you’re all individuals, but everyone’s got the same boots on! Do you know what I mean? “Oh, aren’t we all individual with all our ripped fishnets and our New Rocks [a make of boot]?”’ And a third respondent gave a beautifully concise and endearingly honest explanation of the apparent contradiction: ‘It’s not like you’re a Goth because you want to stand out, but you do like sort of being different from everyone else, although when you’re with a load of Goths you blend in, but you’re all different, if you know what I mean, from everyone else.’

  This comment would seem to support my point about alleged English sartorial ‘eccentricity’ being something of a team effort, more often a matter of collective distinctiveness than individual originality. We want to be creative and different, but we’re squeamish about ‘standing out’, and we also want to fit in and belong – so let’s join a subculture and all be eccentric in the same way, together. That way, we get the best of both worlds: the excitement of rebellion and the comfort of conformity. A delightfully English compromise. And only a tiny bit hypocritical, really.

  HUMOUR R
ULES

  The coded language of subcultural dress statements is, like all English communication, infused with humour. I have already mentioned the role of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule (the First Commandment of English humour) in mainstream English attitudes to dress, but I was surprised to find that this rule was equally powerful and as strictly observed among youth subcultures.

  It is well known, after all, that young people, especially self-obsessed teenagers, are inclined to take themselves a bit too seriously. And given the immense social importance of dress in these youth tribes – clothing style being the primary means by which they distinguish themselves from the dreaded mainstream and from each other, the principal way in which they express their tribal affiliation and identity – they could be forgiven for taking their clothes and appearance very seriously indeed. I had fully expected these subcultures to be an exception to the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule and the irony rules. I assumed that members of youth tribes would be, understandably, unable or at least very reluctant to stand back and laugh at their cherished sartorial affiliation signals.