Erm, was Jade Goody hated by everyone for being 'eccentric'?

Here was me thinking it was because she was a pig ignorant racist bully....

Judging from the picture, she was pretty thick.

Well, maybe NF/BNP leaders or high ranking members but she was definitely general member/supporter material.

The NF/BNP is full of easily lead dolts and bullies.

Yes. Apologies for the slight derailment. As you were chaps.

The English smell.

I posted this over on the Macaroni thread but it deserves to be added here too

"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,

Then I said::

In fact Ribeiro's quote is describing something as close as you can get to sprezzatura without being Italian nobility.

The old signifiers have pretty much been eroded, what in the last 25 years or so? You use to be able to tell a certain Home Counties Tory back-bencher by his blue T&A shirt and bright yellow tie. You don't see that sported much these days. Cameron could sport a red tie with impunity. Once someone's sport of choice could be a good indicator of class, but that's well and truly gone.

Tribes may well be a better word for the softening of class based on cultural norms.

BBC English and public school accents have also been challenged, not always successfully IMO, when you get hard inner-city accents which by definition are leaden, grating, lacking finesse and conjuring up images of people dragged-up rather than brought up. Regional accents are fine, the soft Liverpudlian twang as was spoken by The Beatles in the 60s conquered the world, but when you get the cockney of Janet Street Porter, it's ugly.

I don't think the Brits have boxed themselves in sartorially, they are in a state of flux though, and all the old rules cannot be trusted to deliver a signifier of meaning or status.