The generosity is from you; because you share knowledge, which very few of us would have, apart from your recondite learning and your willingness to let us have it too. I am afraid that my own researches are selfishly confined to what is of immediate use to me - but your wit and wisdom and learning are much appreciated, since they broaden this whole subject of elegance and style out into a truly historical context.
NJS
Elegance and Politics
I have just perused some old posts and this thread reminded me of an article published in Spectator (Issue: 15 September 2007). Part of the text is reproduced below and gives the initial question posed in this thread a positive answer: yes, for worse.
The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it
Peter Oborne
"Before the emergence of the Political Class, the conventional mode of leadership was based on a vestigial idea of gentlemanly conduct. The style had been laid down by the Duke of Wellington in the early 19th century, both as a leader of men on the battlefield and later as Prime Minister and national icon. It was based on understatement, sobriety both in personal conduct and in speech, self-sacrifice, restraint. Wellington eschewed displays of private emotion, downplayed his personal achievements, and showed a studied indifference to public opinion." (...)
“The British Establishment is supposed to have been notoriously prescriptive in matters of dress. However, the sumptuary laws of the Political Class are no more relaxed, and in certain intriguing respects even more formal, than the conventions formerly observed by members of the Establishment. Our political leaders continue to wear suits (and women members of the Political Class almost universally wear the same workplace uniform as high-level business executives). Furthermore, they are notably more smartly turned out than the pre-Political Class generation of leaders. It is only necessary to compare Gordon Brown to Harold Wilson, or David Cameron to Edward Heath, to see that party leaders in the era of the Political Class take far more trouble about personal appearance than the earlier generation. This point becomes clearer still when one examines casual dress. The Political Class, even when not at work, finds it hard to relinquish official sartorial codes.” (...)
“But note this: Gordon Brown has normally chosen to wear a dark suits when receiving visitors at home over the weekend or even relaxing in front of the TV in the evenings, but he is notorious for not dressing up in formal clothing for great public events such as the Mansion House speech. Here Brown is displaying the duality that lies at the heart of the Political Class method of expressive public behaviour. On the one hand it is in rebellion against established customs, traditions and modes of social control which challenge its own dominance. On the other hand, by adopting its own very severe dress code, it is showing an awareness of the need to assert its own authority, and distinguish itself against the ambient population. This Political Class insistence on the dark suit, the daily uniform of corporate life in the Western, capitalist world, gives away its preference for conformity, homogeneity, and control.”
The cover to this edition of Spectator - it must be mentioned - illustrates nicely the point at issue here. The full text is available at:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine ... d-it.thtml
The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it
Peter Oborne
"Before the emergence of the Political Class, the conventional mode of leadership was based on a vestigial idea of gentlemanly conduct. The style had been laid down by the Duke of Wellington in the early 19th century, both as a leader of men on the battlefield and later as Prime Minister and national icon. It was based on understatement, sobriety both in personal conduct and in speech, self-sacrifice, restraint. Wellington eschewed displays of private emotion, downplayed his personal achievements, and showed a studied indifference to public opinion." (...)
“The British Establishment is supposed to have been notoriously prescriptive in matters of dress. However, the sumptuary laws of the Political Class are no more relaxed, and in certain intriguing respects even more formal, than the conventions formerly observed by members of the Establishment. Our political leaders continue to wear suits (and women members of the Political Class almost universally wear the same workplace uniform as high-level business executives). Furthermore, they are notably more smartly turned out than the pre-Political Class generation of leaders. It is only necessary to compare Gordon Brown to Harold Wilson, or David Cameron to Edward Heath, to see that party leaders in the era of the Political Class take far more trouble about personal appearance than the earlier generation. This point becomes clearer still when one examines casual dress. The Political Class, even when not at work, finds it hard to relinquish official sartorial codes.” (...)
“But note this: Gordon Brown has normally chosen to wear a dark suits when receiving visitors at home over the weekend or even relaxing in front of the TV in the evenings, but he is notorious for not dressing up in formal clothing for great public events such as the Mansion House speech. Here Brown is displaying the duality that lies at the heart of the Political Class method of expressive public behaviour. On the one hand it is in rebellion against established customs, traditions and modes of social control which challenge its own dominance. On the other hand, by adopting its own very severe dress code, it is showing an awareness of the need to assert its own authority, and distinguish itself against the ambient population. This Political Class insistence on the dark suit, the daily uniform of corporate life in the Western, capitalist world, gives away its preference for conformity, homogeneity, and control.”
The cover to this edition of Spectator - it must be mentioned - illustrates nicely the point at issue here. The full text is available at:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine ... d-it.thtml
Last edited by marcelo on Tue Jul 29, 2008 8:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
Marcelo, this article raises an interesting point which I have been ruminating upon lately. Politicians (and, to an extent, I would say upper middle-class society at large) seem to be struggling against formality and what they see as the 'ancien regime' or outdated customs, while at the same time adopting the sartorial hymn of the lounge suit and necktie as gospel, and wearing one from dawn until dusk, perhaps even to bed. It is a rather bizarre custom, I think, and one which I find to be somewhat contrived.
Pvpatty, there was a time, as emphasised in the aforementioned article, politicians – or at any rate men somehow involved in the exercise of political power – were taken as paragons of male elegance. To be elegant meant, to a large extent, to emulate those paragons. But endorsement of the idea that one should emulate another person, or that there are any paragons at all, of whatever sort, would strike most persons nowadays as lack of personality, as something to be frowned upon and refused, if one is to flourish as an individual . To be true to oneself – it has become our common ethos – means not to emulate anybody, to deny the very idea of excellence. Yet, the immediate consequence of the new ethos is not personal flourishing, but - in many ambit of our lives - downright decadence. Politicians, it seems to me, respond to the new ethos by refusing the formality which came to be associated with lack of personality, but, qua political leaders, they may still feel temped to cling to old patterns of behaviour which manifests themselves in the most graphic way in their sartorial options.
While this may be a little off topic, your comments about 'flourishing as an individual' remind me of a conversation I overheard on Tuesday at university that I must share. I was sitting on a computer, browsing away (on the LL), when a young lady and two other chaps came and sat down a few seats away from me, chatting about some sort of tutorial question (I guess that they must be studying psychology). Anyway, they started jibber-jabbering about this and that, but my ears opened when they began talking about mental illness in the military. The young lady, the quintissential anti-establishment type (nose rings, parachute pants, etc), began discussing with the other two about how being in a military environment at all, not necessarily in combat, causes mental distress. "It's the same as being in prison," she remarked, "they like tell you when to get up, what to do, even when to eat! It's like they don't care about what you think or your feelings at all."marcelo wrote:To be elegant meant, to a large extent, to emulate those paragons. But endorsement of the idea that one should emulate another person, or that there are any paragons at all, of whatever sort, would strike most persons nowadays as lack of personality, as something to be frowned upon and refused, if one is to flourish as an individual . To be true to oneself – it has become our common ethos – means not to emulate anybody, to deny the very idea of excellence. Yet, the immediate consequence of the new ethos is not personal flourishing, but - in many ambit of our lives - downright decadence.
The world has gone mad.
Marcelo, the paradox is that although people refuse models so they may assert their individuality, most have little to assert so they simply follow models of rebellion - not in spirit, but copying everything (speech, dress etc.) from the "new models". Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!
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storeynicholas
Back to this old thread, eh? Some members, in slightly outer south west London, will be appalled.....I think that there is a good deal in the observation above that there is an outward need, in the urban chattering classes, to be seen to reject the manners, modes and tastes of the ancien regime. I can adopt the term 'chattering classes' because I offend no one - as no one would admit membership - but, conveniently, we all know who they are! I am reminded of Soames Forsyte, in Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, having his topper knocked off by a rebellious crowd after WWI - and consequently moving then to a Homburg hat - almost as a disguise for what he was and what he had, to survive with it all intact. The perennial suit and tie which the modern equivalents wear is the clinging onto something. to mark them out to each other - as staid, conventional, plain and thrifty; neither modish nor old-fashioned; determined not to stand out and to keep on just like that, come rain, come shine, come boom, come bust - until retirment. On retirement they substitute fawn lambs' wool cardigans for the suit coats but keep the tie - which is, as ever, tied so that the thin end protrudes beneath the thick end and the knot is always off centre, around the collar and the shirt has, up very close, a barely perceptible small blue check. In a real sense, I used to like these people: they always were the backbone of the nation - but they seem to have changed - to have given in - even if they haven't quite given up; to have let go of the reins, somehow.
The upper class still exists but it keeps a closer guard on those who are permitted to observe and (perhaps paradoxically) cares a little less about the views of the hoi polloi - whose basic ideas proliferate and predominate so that popular heroes are now footballers and soap stars with whom the groudlings can identify without too much effort - and even emulate without too much effort. Actually, it isn't even that difficult to aspire to what they are, without too much effort. And what they are is rich: not necessarily educated (as that takes effort); not necessarily well mannered (because that takes effort); not necessarily anything, in fact, except rich and famous - some of these people are actually rich and famous for just being abusive and vulgar into a TV camera (which doesn't take much effort) and the TV camera then projects them through the medium of what a Rabi described once as "an open sewer through our living rooms" - TV. And so the message goes out that, if you want to be rich and famous, all that you have to do is swear and be vulgar and unpleasant on the telly and Bob's Your Uncle.
Long gone is the time when someone such as Lord Palmerston could possibly be the Darling of the People. Winston Churchill was probably the last aristocrat to wield real power as Prime Minister (and the first time he was not even elected to do it) - but he was an exceptional man for an extraordinary event - he always said destined for it. Alec Douglas Home was the very last (for a little while) to hold the office - but as he famously (maybe even proudly) said "I didn't do a damned thing". This class is not at bay - but rather - gone to earth - but they are still batting, but quietly though. And they really are still elegant - you see them, sometimes, beetling along - they walk and speak very fast because they cannot be seen to linger.
As for the peasants with pretensions, we just become nostalgic retrocentrics and go to live abroad.
NJS
The upper class still exists but it keeps a closer guard on those who are permitted to observe and (perhaps paradoxically) cares a little less about the views of the hoi polloi - whose basic ideas proliferate and predominate so that popular heroes are now footballers and soap stars with whom the groudlings can identify without too much effort - and even emulate without too much effort. Actually, it isn't even that difficult to aspire to what they are, without too much effort. And what they are is rich: not necessarily educated (as that takes effort); not necessarily well mannered (because that takes effort); not necessarily anything, in fact, except rich and famous - some of these people are actually rich and famous for just being abusive and vulgar into a TV camera (which doesn't take much effort) and the TV camera then projects them through the medium of what a Rabi described once as "an open sewer through our living rooms" - TV. And so the message goes out that, if you want to be rich and famous, all that you have to do is swear and be vulgar and unpleasant on the telly and Bob's Your Uncle.
Long gone is the time when someone such as Lord Palmerston could possibly be the Darling of the People. Winston Churchill was probably the last aristocrat to wield real power as Prime Minister (and the first time he was not even elected to do it) - but he was an exceptional man for an extraordinary event - he always said destined for it. Alec Douglas Home was the very last (for a little while) to hold the office - but as he famously (maybe even proudly) said "I didn't do a damned thing". This class is not at bay - but rather - gone to earth - but they are still batting, but quietly though. And they really are still elegant - you see them, sometimes, beetling along - they walk and speak very fast because they cannot be seen to linger.
As for the peasants with pretensions, we just become nostalgic retrocentrics and go to live abroad.
NJS
Amen, NJS.
I think the single largest change in society is the loss of responsability. The last century has seen many attempts to disprove man, trying to remove any significance to his actions, including Freud's psychological determinism, and Crick's chemical. Once you rule out an absolute moral aspect to our behaviour, you reduce humanity to an animal. Yet, as shown by the students on the train, Sartre et al. leave us wanting more, over-emphasising our 'personal choice', 'personal lives', and so on, because a loss of integrity and responsability ultimately leads us to places where we are simply not comfortable. Empiricalism can be useful, but on its own is a straightjacket (which mathematicians, after Gödel, know better than anyone).
In fact, dress serves as the perfect example of this. When there are rules to our dress, it is by creative application and understanding stretching of the boundaries that we can express ourselves, while with no rules at all, far from being more free, we are left with no way to make a statement to others. The 'abolition of man' and general abandonment of ideas re-emphasised in society by the reformation do ultimately lead to disasters like existentialism and postmodernism, and, while the link is indirect enough to be rather dubious, trickle down into a general loss of standards, including sartorial.
This is all rather abstract, but it seems to me that the general mood of society is governed more by the perceptions people have of their actions, than by the laws governing those actions, so in reply to the original topic of the post (asking to what extent governments impact elegance), I would argue that the governments, not setting the large-scale views of society, are powerless to change our style of elegance (style being differentiated from the specific expression of that motivation, which changes considerably more rapidly than the underlying world-view).
While, in the long term, maintaining the old rules of elegance is realistically doomed, I feel most here are more concerned about preserving the underlying philosophy of care over our appearance, which the generation of extremes (overly 'conforming' politicians, and identically 'non-conforming' rebels) seems determined to remove. How though can we expect people to take pride or care in their dress if their moral sense for all actions is undermined, and they loose sight of any absolutes? This is a rather more expansive thought than the initial one perhaps, but the trickling-down effect of our general attitudes ultimately controls both our politics and our dress more than either influence each other.
The influence people like Churchill had a few generations ago was grounded in the attitude of respect which has now ebbed away; then, while many had moved away from the idea our ultimate accountability, most people (in very general terms) still accepted the idea that the expression of ourselves was somehow more than the current emphasis on 'respect', which really means putting a box around other people's ideas and not recognising that these may validly apply to oneself, which I feel is the antithesis of what I would consider respect: Man is not an island, and making the person purely personal destroys him. All is not lost though, since any revival and reformation in society would surely improve the way we dress...
In fact, dress serves as the perfect example of this. When there are rules to our dress, it is by creative application and understanding stretching of the boundaries that we can express ourselves, while with no rules at all, far from being more free, we are left with no way to make a statement to others. The 'abolition of man' and general abandonment of ideas re-emphasised in society by the reformation do ultimately lead to disasters like existentialism and postmodernism, and, while the link is indirect enough to be rather dubious, trickle down into a general loss of standards, including sartorial.
This is all rather abstract, but it seems to me that the general mood of society is governed more by the perceptions people have of their actions, than by the laws governing those actions, so in reply to the original topic of the post (asking to what extent governments impact elegance), I would argue that the governments, not setting the large-scale views of society, are powerless to change our style of elegance (style being differentiated from the specific expression of that motivation, which changes considerably more rapidly than the underlying world-view).
While, in the long term, maintaining the old rules of elegance is realistically doomed, I feel most here are more concerned about preserving the underlying philosophy of care over our appearance, which the generation of extremes (overly 'conforming' politicians, and identically 'non-conforming' rebels) seems determined to remove. How though can we expect people to take pride or care in their dress if their moral sense for all actions is undermined, and they loose sight of any absolutes? This is a rather more expansive thought than the initial one perhaps, but the trickling-down effect of our general attitudes ultimately controls both our politics and our dress more than either influence each other.
The influence people like Churchill had a few generations ago was grounded in the attitude of respect which has now ebbed away; then, while many had moved away from the idea our ultimate accountability, most people (in very general terms) still accepted the idea that the expression of ourselves was somehow more than the current emphasis on 'respect', which really means putting a box around other people's ideas and not recognising that these may validly apply to oneself, which I feel is the antithesis of what I would consider respect: Man is not an island, and making the person purely personal destroys him. All is not lost though, since any revival and reformation in society would surely improve the way we dress...
An insightful analysis, NCW.
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