Watching the English

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 emphasized 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, sub-culture, 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 currently 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 cliches 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.' (This 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.) Finally, he 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.