Last edited by formby (2013-09-21 02:42:11)

"The quality of the fine woollen cloth, the slope of a pocket flap or coat revers, exactly the right colour for the gloves, the correct amount of shine on boots and shoes, and so on. It was an image of a well-dressed man who, while taking infinite pains about his appearance, affected indifference to it. This refined dandyism continued to be regarded as an essential strand of male Englishness."

Aileen Ribeiro, "On Englishness in dress" in The Englishness of English Dress,

I think you'll like the cricket quote I just posted on the English look thread.
A small sentence that says a lot about the english way and attitude to dress "correctness"

Interesting post.

About puritans and religious or state rants against personal vanity. There is nothing wrong with vanity except that it interferes with centralized bureaucracies. Which is why vanity is the heretic of the modern western state. 




I can personally attest that clothing and style sense makes people at once attracted to you and jealous of you. Clothing freaks people out and the only thing worse is when someone not only wears nice clothing but wears them well with originality and flair. I think this jealousy affects the middle aged the most who spend a lot of their talentless time trying to figure out why other people have things that they do not.

When I see a well dressed girl, i am impressed and usually she is an interesting person. It is not hard to be over attentive to the physical; what is hard is to attend to style in a manner which is very well done.  That's what people are impressed with or jealous of. that is what makes a person seem to have secret knowledge or talents. I think also it makes her a target, the fact that she is well dressed is an invitation to observer to vocally admire and to even get annoyed if the admirer is rebuffed.


One man's big question for me, the only time we were in a lone conversation, was how many suits I owned. Ask me if I give a damn how many of anything anyone owns? This particular man dresses so badly that you wouldn't even guess he spent a single thought about clothing. And yet, his one big question was how many suits did I own. People are unbelievable.


The USA is a bastion of incredible jealousy and keeping up with ones neighbors. Everyone wants their kids to get into the top 50 colleges and at the same time want you to tell them that their children's attendance at a crap school is "just as good".


The reward for being a sheep in any mass ideology which main purpose is to control people to serve the greater "good" rather than themselves is to allow the sheep to rend the occasional self serving wolf.