Class (35 page)

14   APPEARANCE

CLOTHES

Whenas in Crimplene my Julia says cheerio.

In the past fifteen years we’ve been through a complete sartorial revolution. There was the self-expressionism of the late ’sixties when everyone did their own thing, followed by unisex and jeans for all classes and all sexes, followed by the punk revolt of the late ’seventies. And now, as Christopher Sykes has pointed out, after the age of turmoil an age of conservative consolidation has set in. As a result it is almost impossible to tell what class the young are from their appearance.

On the one hand you have the tear-away from Eton wearing polyester trousers and shirts with key motifs to irritate the establishment, on the other the working-class undergraduate, determined to identify himself with the establishment, who smothers himself in college regalia. The hacking jacket has just about filtered down the class system to Sharon Definitely-Disgusting, while Fiona Stow-Crat turns up at a party with bright purple hair, wearing a leopardskin rayon jump suit and gold stiletto-heeled boots. Although the upper classes usually settle down sartorially with marriage, I did meet an extremely grand, much divorced old lady recently wearing orange satin drainpipes and a white T-shirt with ‘I AM A VIRGIN’ printed across the bust. Meanwhile the majority of parvenu Tory ladies in Weybridge, terrified of betraying their origins by putting a foot wrong, dress exactly like the Queen.

Recently I went to a lunch party in a middle-class house where some Americans had been invited to meet a duke’s daughter. The daughter of the house, herself apprehensive about meeting a member of the aristocracy, wore a tweed coat and skirt, flat shoes, a pale blue cashmere jersey and pearls. The duke’s daughter roared up on a motor bike wearing a leather skirt, fishnet stockings, a tight black sweater and punk eye make-up. The Americans, who arrived just after her, made a justifiable mistake.

One comfort is that even the grandest people worry about what to wear. That scourge of the middle classes, Nancy Mitford, was thrown into total panic by a last-minute invitation to dine with Edward VIII.

I was told a rather touching story by one of the Queen’s dressmakers. The Queen was visiting his shop and admired a very beautiful evening dress, glittering with crystal and rhinestones. When both the dressmaker and her lady-in-waiting urged her to buy it, she shook her head wistfully saying, wasn’t it a pity, but really she hadn’t got anywhere smart enough to wear it.

What she probably meant was that it was too ostentatious.

Traditionally the aristocracy survived because they were the wiliest of the tribe and knew when to lie low. Let the
nouveau riche
swagger around in their finery, showing off their wealth and getting their heads chopped off by royalty, or later by revolutionaries. Harry Stow-Crat’s ancestors were prepared to dress up in their robes when the King commanded it; otherwise they camouflaged themselves and blended in with their surroundings. Thus today Harry is only copying his forebears when he wears a dark suit in the grey of London, and green, dung-coloured or brown clothes in the country. There was an additional reason for this. Harry’s ancestors lived on what they shot, hunted and fished. It is easier to land your prey, whether it be a girl in London or a salmon on the Tay, if you blend with your background.

If there is one single class indicator where clothes are concerned it is colour. The upper classes tend not to wear crude, garish, clashing colours. Not for them the da-glo oranges or reds, the jarring lime greens and citrus yellows, the royal blues, mauves and cyclamen pinks. One thinks of the aristocrat dismissing the rating officer, coming out shooting ‘in his dinky little blue suit’, or a friend who was witheringly written orf as ‘the sort of girl who wears shocking pink in the country’. Mrs Nouveau-Richards can pore over
The Tatler
and Jennifer’s Diary, and find out exactly when and in what styles different clothes should be worn, but while the photographs go on being printed in black and white she’ll never get the colours quite right.

Traditionally, too, because the upper classes believe in supporting their own industries, they regard anything that’s lived—wool, leather, silk, cotton—as all right, but anything man-made—crimplene, polyester or plastic—as decidedly vulgar.

At a meeting of the Historic Houses Association, Clive Jenkins and Lord Montagu, the departing president, wore identical clothes—dark blue suits, slightly lighter blue plain shirts, and dark blue ties with red spots; the difference was that Clive Jenkins was dressed in man-made fibres. He looked somehow much shinier and less substantial.

The upper classes, as Michael Fish has said, also believe it is morally wrong to buy more clothes than you have to. So as clothes have to last they have to be conservative and of decent stuff. It is a point of pride for Harry at forty to be able to get into the same coat and trousers he wore at Eton.

The higher up the social scale you go, the taller and more finely boned people tend to be, because of diet, work patterns and extra vitamins over the years. Harry has no bum, Caroline no bum or bust; both are tall and thin, so their clothes, which have the advantage of being very well cut, tend to look good on them, and set them apart. Leanness, as Mrs Gaskell pointed out, is a great aid to gentility. Even if Georgie horrifies his father by buying an orf-the-peg suit, his etiolated figure and self-confidence will allow him to get away with it. Aristocrats, even if they live in London and have little opportunity to take exercise, seldom allow themselves to put on weight.

Harry Stow-Crat is therefore very conservative in his dress. But from the way he describes what he’s wearing— ‘black tie’ for a dinner party, ‘white tie’ for an official occasion, or a ‘morning coat’ for a wedding—you’d think he was going about half-naked. One aristocrat I know got caught out very badly in this way. He was going to spend a weekend at a very grand house in the country and asked his batman to pack his dinner jacket. It was only when he was dressing for dinner that he discovered his batman had taken him at his word and only put in the coat. In the end he was reduced to borrowing a pair of trousers from his host, which were midnight blue, half his size, and about three times too large in the waist. No one made any comment at dinner or afterwards.

Harry Stow-Crat’s dinner jacket is almost green with age. He would never call it a ‘dinner suit’ or have one in midnight blue, particularly in terylene with braiding. Georgie, however, might wear a different-coloured velvet tie, but not a waterfall of duck-egg blue frills like Jison Richards.

Harry, as we have said, would wear a dark suit in London, but he wouldn’t call it a ‘lounge suit’ or a ‘three-piece suit’ or a ‘business suit’. The buttons on the sleeve would undo, and there would be a real button-hole for a carnation in the lapel, which he could do up in bad weather on a button hidden under the lapel on the other side. He might still wear fly buttons rather than zips, to protect his member for carrying on the line, but Georgie would probably have a zip, just as he might easily wear a leather belt to hold up his trousers. Harry would wear braces, which he would take off before removing his coat. His shirts would be striped, checked, or plain coloured, and never have pictures or initials on them—initials on clothes are considered very vulgar. Harry would never wear a striped tie with a dark suit, but he might wear a Guards tie with a tweed coat in the country. Georgie probably wouldn’t bother to wear a tie at all, but it is interesting to observe that when the tieless fashion was at its height in the late ’seventies, girls started one-upping each other by wearing the old school, club and regimental ties their fathers and brothers had jettisoned.

Harry would wear one ‘han’k’rchif’ (not ‘hand-ker-cheef’) in his trouser pocket and another in his breast pocket—not up his sleeve. But it would not match his tie, and it would be casually arranged just to show a tip of a corner and a bit of fold. It would not be folded across in a white rectangle as though, as someone bitchily said, ‘You’d forgotten to post your pools coupon’ (although Prince Philip wears it this way), nor in a neat right angle, nor in a made-up mountain range on a piece of cardboard like Bryan Teale. Mr Definitely-Disgusting wears a handkerchief on his head at the seaside.

Pottering about at home, Harry would probably wear old corduroy (pronounced ‘cord’roy’) or whipcord trousers, and a tweed jacket, which he would refer to as a tweed coat, or, as he called it at Eton, a ‘change coat’. He would never use the expression ‘sports jacket’. He would call a blazer a boating jacket and tells Georgie he would have been thrown out of the Guards for saying ‘blazer’. He might occasionally wear a polo-neck sweater, but never in pastel colours or in white, and always in wool. He would call it a ‘polo-neck jersey’ because the upper classes think the words ‘jumper’, ‘sweater’, ‘pullover’, ‘slipover’, ‘woolie’ and particularly ‘cardi’ extremely vulgar. He would never wear a mackintosh in London, nor call it a ‘raincoat’ or, even worse, a ‘showerproof’. He would never carry an umbrella in the country (only vicars are allowed this privilege) except at point-to-points or anywhere where women might be dressed up and need cover—on the moors they can drown. The umbrella would be black and without a tassel. He would wear gum boots in green or black, but never call them ‘wellington boots’ or, even worse, ‘wellies’. If he wore an overcoat he would refer to it as a ‘coat’, or a ‘covert coat’ (pronounced ‘cover’ to fox the unwary).

If Georgie wore just a shirt and trousers, he would take off his tie, undo the top button and roll his sleeves up to below the elbow. Mr D-D would do the same except that he’d roll the sleeve above the elbow. Bryan Teale would leave his tie on and his shirt sleeves buttoned up. (What does it matter if his cuffs get dirty? Jen can drip-dry them in a trice tonight.)

If Harry wore a signet ring, which would not be
de rigeur
as he doesn’t need status props, it would have a crest and be on the little finger of his left hand. Georgie might wear a wedding ring merely to irritate the upper-middles who all wear signet rings with crests on their little fingers and think it’s awful to have rings, particularly with initials, on any other fingers.

Harry would probably still decant his cigarettes into a cigarette case, although Georgie wouldn’t bother. Not long ago an officer in the Guards got bawled out for offering the Duke of Gloucester a cigarette in a packet. ‘You’re not in the garage now,’ said his Adjutant in a sarcastic aside.

Mr D-D smokes his Woodbines between finger and thum to eke them out, and curled in the palm of the hand to hide them from the foreman. Howard Weybridge and Colonel Upward smoke pipes; Mr Nouveau-Richards smokes very expensive cigars and leaves the label on, like a signet ring; Georgie Stow-Crat would certainly smoke in the street if he felt like it. His mother would not. Harry Stow-Crat keeps his money in a ‘notecase’, not a ‘wallet’.

Gideon Upward, trying to be trendy but slightly out of date, would still be squeezing himself into jeans. He might wear a blazer but not with a badge, more likely a corduroy or a velvet coat, or last year’s denim which Samantha bought him; it has four buttons and a high neck and makes him feel slightly silly. Since Zacharias and Thalia went to boarding school he can’t afford to buy suits, so all his Christmas presents are chosen by Samantha, usually sweaters from Marks and Spencer, in colours which suit her and which she wears during the week, so they have two bumps in the front when he puts them on at the weekend. He has reluctantly started to wear part-nylon socks, because Samantha shrinks his wool ones to Action Man size in a few weeks. He knows that shirt collars ought always to be worn inside a coat and a sweater, and he never wears a hat, although when he goes shooting occasionally his grander friends force him into a cap, saying, ‘You’ll be frightfully cold, Gideon.’

Howard Weybridge dresses straighter than straight, not unlike Colonel Upward. He wears regimental ties, golf-club ties, the Hurlingham Club tie and an old school tie if he’s got one. Occasionally he wears a paisley scarf, which he refers to as a ‘cravat’, with a brass scarf ring. At the pub he wears a very clean blazer with an Esher Rugby Club badge, and slightly too new cavalry-twill trousers, although the nearest he’s got to the cavalry is an hour’s horse ride through the pine trees in Oxshott woods. He has never gone in for wide trousers, but his suede ankle boots are slightly too ginger. When he goes to Twickerham he wears a sheepskin coat, often with brown fur, and an assortment of hats, Russian fur, flat caps, and deerstalkers.

A hat designed for shooting Scottish deer

Though Haywards be the only Heath he’s near

wrote Paul Jennings.

He wears huge riding macs, and his spectacles have no bottom rims to them. In bed he wears a red wool nightshirt from Bentalls, grandiosely called a ‘sleep coat’.

Mr. Nouveau-Richards wears too much jewellery—huge gold cuff-links, a large diamond ring and a huge gold watch. He likes wearing bow ties so he can show glittering studs on his shirts, but if he wears a tie he puts on a huge gold tie pin. In his early working-class days, like Mr Definitely-Disgusting, he wore a tie clip and sleeve garters. He wears a camelhair coat with a belt, and in the evening changes into a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, with his initials in gold on the breast pocket.