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| Photo by Andrejs Pidjass (Nejron). |
"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education." —Paul Fussell
In 1983, the departed literary writer, cultural historian and scholar, published his book, Class, A Guide Through the American Status System. As New York Times writer, Bruce Weber described it: "Mr. Fussell brought an erudition, a gift for readable prose, a willingness to offend and, as many critics noted, a whiff of snobbery to subjects like class, clothing, the dumbing down of American culture and the literature of travel." He was unapologetic in his views and commentary, and completed a well-dissected analysis of the social classes within American society. What tell-tale signs differentiate us along this ladder, from top to bottom? Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from this groundbreaking (and rather humorous) book. It is a little dated, but much still rings true, denoting that most features of class defy time and generation.
On Appearance
"We don't have to go all the way with Raban to perceive that there is an elite look in this country. It requires women to be thin ... They wear superbly fitting dresses and expensive but always understated shoes and handbags, with very little jewelry. They wear scarves—these instantly betoken class, because they are useless except as a caste mark. Men should be thin. No jewelry at all. No cigarette case. Moderate-length hair, never dyed or tinted, which is a middle-class or high prole (short for proletariat) sign, as the practice of President Reagan indicates. Never a hairpiece, a prole usage ... Both women's and men's elite looks are achieved by a process of rejection—of the current, the showy, the superfluous. Thus the rejection of fat by the elite."
"When proles assemble to enjoy leisure, they seldom appear in clothing without words on it. As you move up the classes and the understatement principle begins to operate, the words gradually disappear, to be replaced, in the middle and upper middle classes, by mere emblems, like the Lacoste alligator. Once, ascending further, you've left all such trademarks behind, you may correctly infer that you are entering the purlieus of the upper class itself."
"This principle of not-too-neat is crucial in men's clothing. Too careful means low—at least middle-class, perhaps prole. 'Dear boy, you're almost too well dressed to be a gentleman,' Neil Mackwood, author of Debrett's In and Out (1980), imagines an upper-class person addressing someone in the middle class, as if the speaker were implying that the addressee is not a gent but a model, a floorwalker, or an actor."
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| Photo by Lev Dolgachov. |
On What You Drink
"There is hardly a richer single occasion for class revelation than the cocktail hour, since the choice of any drink, and the amount consumed, resonates with status meaning ... If the locution 'a Seven and Seven' is strange to you, if your nose wrinkles a bit at the idea of drinking a shot of Seagram's Seven Crown mixed with Seven-Up, you are safely at or near the top, or at least not deeply compromised by the sugar fixation at the bottom."
On the Automobile You Drive
"The automobile, like the all-important domestic façade, is another mechanism for outdoor class display. Or lack of display ... Class understatement describes the technique: if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem. You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth, or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty at best. But it should be boring. The next best thing is to have a 'good' car, like a Jaguar or BMW, but to be sure it's old and beat-up. You may not have a Rolls, a Cadillac, or a Mercedes. Especially a Mercedes, a car, Joseph Epstein reports in The American Scholar (Winter 1981-82), which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as 'a sign of high vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers.' The worst kind of upper-middle-class types own Mercedes, just as the best own elderly Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Chryslers, and perhaps jeeps and Land Rovers, the latter conveying the Preppy suggestion one of your residences is in a place so unpublic that the roads to it are not even passable by your ordinary vulgar automobile."
On How You Speak
"Regardless of the money you've inherited, the danger of your job, the place you live, the way you look, the shape and surface of your driveway, the items on your front porch and in your living room, the sweetness of your drinks, the time you eat dinner, the stuff you buy from mail-order catalogs, the place you went to school and your reverence for it, and the materials you read, your social class is still most clearly visible when you say things. 'One's speech is an unceasingly repeated public announcement about background and social standing,' says John Brooks, translating into modern American Ben Jonson's observation 'Language shows a man. Speak, that I may see thee' ... we now have something virtually unknown to Jonson, a sizable middle class desperate not to offend through language and thus addicted to such conspicuous class giveaways as euphemism, genteelism, and mock profanity."
On Where You Live
"Where then may a member of the top classes live in this country? New York first of all, of course. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Boston. Perhaps Cleveland. And deep in the countryside of Connecticut, New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. That's about it."
"Both Florida (except perhaps for Palm Beach) and Southern California (except perhaps for Pasadena) have been considered socially disastrous for years."
"It is said that experts on the subject regard Las Vegas as the 'world capital of tacky'."
The book, Class, is an absolute must read.
