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 Almost all of these will probably be out of date by the time you read this – some are already, in the current jargon, ‘so last week’, or even ‘so three minutes ago’ (these expressions themselves give an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

Food rules

In 1949, the Hungarian George Mikes famously declared that: ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England they have good table manners.’ Later, in 1977, he observed that our food had improved somewhat, while our table manners had deteriorated. He still did not, however, seem impressed by English food, and he acknowledged that our table manners were still ‘fairly decent’.

Nearly thirty years on, Mikes’s comments still reflect the general international opinion of English cooking, as the travel writer Paul Richardson discovered when he told foreign friends that he was going to spend eighteen months researching a book on British gastronomy. His Spanish, French and Italian friends, he says, informed him that there was no such thing as British gastronomy, as this would require a passionate love of food, which we clearly did not have. They implied ‘that our relationship with the food we ate was more or less a loveless marriage’.

Among the litany of complaints, which I have also heard from my own foreign friends and informants, was the fact that we regard good food as a privilege, not a right. We also have no proper regional cookery; families no longer eat together but instead consume junk food in front of the television; our diet consists mainly of salty or sweet snack foods – chips, crisps, chocolate bars, ready-meals, microwave pizzas and other rubbish. Even those with an interest in good food, and able to afford it, tend to have neither the time nor the energy to shop for and cook fresh ingredients in what other nations would regard as a normal or proper manner.

These criticisms are largely justified. But they are not the whole truth. The same goes for the opposite extreme – the current ‘Cool Britannia’ fashion for proclaiming that English cooking has in recent years improved out of all recognition, that London is the now the gastronomic capital of the world, that food is the new rock ‘n’ roll, that we have become a nation of gourmets and ‘foodies’, and so on.

I am not going to spend too much time here arguing about the quality of English cooking. My impression is that it is neither as awful as its detractors would have us believe, nor as stupendous as its recent champions have claimed. It is somewhere in between. Some of it is very good, some is quite inedible. On average, it’s probably about fair to middling. I am only interested in the quality of English food in so far as it reflects our relationship with food, the unwritten social rules governing our food-related behaviour, and what these tell us about our national identity. Every culture has its own distinctive food rules – both general rules about attitudes towards food and cooking, and specific rules about who may eat what, how much, when, where, with whom and in what manner – and one can learn a lot about a culture by studying its food rules. So, I am not interested in English food per se, but in the Englishness of English food rules.