Dud, you need any muscle, on your side, my friend, just ask.

British style genius: The Tailored Look

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/bnY3zvMMGVQ/?fr=rec1

Hmmmmm - 'The English Look'... We keep seeing a load of freaks on this thread. I'd like to offer that the true English look is far quieter than all this tat. The DOW also didn't remotely have an English look.

This is all Vaudeville. Costume. Dress up.

Where is the true English look? Dowdy, shabby, wonderful.

That lovely woodlouse style that we all grew up with. Unassuming, quiet, subfusc.

There's too much brash crap on this thread. England isn't like that. 

I was in my bookshop the other day and a copy of 'I am Dandy' came in - Not one Dandy in the whole book. Mainly it was a collection of pictures of what looked like a bunch of rather sickly Queers. It's OK, I can use these terms. I'm allowed.

My point is that they weren't real Dandies and most pics on this thread don't represent real English style either.

Real English style begins with dandruff, or scurf if you are posh. Then come the knackered shoes. Nasal hair should also feature. And the English smile - Crooked, Yellow and Memorable. Let's really celebrate England if we're going to bother at all.

This chap (Sir Les) has got it all!

/\ Much truth there.

All I'd say is that 'The English Look' seems to be imported elsewhere far more than it's ever exported from our damp little island. Does that make any kind of sense ?

Real English style isn't smart... Because the English quite simply just aren't all that smart. There is a Disney English look that has spread around the globe however.  Nothing wrong with that. But it isn't the England of the English that you are buying when you dress in all your wonderful glory.

The English also often smell.

I wouldn't live anywhere else.

What the point of this exercise is, is to see if we can extract a common theme in the English approach dress, and if so, what are they and are they peculiar to the English.

That we are talking about a certain kind of dress, in our case classic dress is a given.

Well there will always be what the mainstream of a culture do and what more outlandish members do. Then, there will just be those that do the mainstream...better. I mentioned Sting in Quadrophenia and isn't this illustrative? basically, he was a character who did everything Mod unique and better but still very much a member of the tribe. A sort of Mod Champion; an Achilles in tailored clothing.

Been away, awhile, surfing but I came across this recently:

‘I suppose that I am a snob. But my defence is that it is greatly over-rated as a vice. I see every reason to admire beauty, brains and even breeding – but for breeding, education will really do just as well – after all where did our great upper-middle class come from – ‘the Forsytes’ - their ancestors were largely villeins, serfs and churls, just like most people’s. Then an ambitious peasant broke out into trade, joined a guild, prospered and imagined a dynasty. He built a house and planted a garden and long-lived trees to mature a century on; he bought land and married a bit above himself and engendered fine, robust children, with sharp senses, steely nerves and true and kindly hearts. The sons went into the older professions, the Bar and the Church or into the navy or the army and some went out to win and rule the Empire. The children and the children’s children married better still, and the fortitude which made them rise kept them there and they truly became the backbone of England and the hub of Empire. But much more than any of that: the determined pattern that they set, to break the chains of bondage and forge their own destinies, became the world’s desire. The recognition of this fact brought our monarchy back from the brink with the Restoration in 1660 and ensured that no amount of revolutionary zeal could ever since get another grip on our English souls.’

Discuss - or not - as your whimsy takes you...