TORY CHIC: THE RETURN OF POSHNESS

Photo of amazing dark skin lady holding photo digicam in hands photographing, foreign sightseeing abroad wear yellow shirt trousers isolated purple color background

Three months ago, a new clothing store opened in downtown London’s Soho neighborhood. The new Barbour store appears out of place at first glance, just off Carnaby Street, next a fancy boutique with a T-shirt in the window stating “Fuck Off” in neatly sewn letters. As if in a regimental chapel, a massive fading union flag is hanging inside the doorway. Under the laundry racks are old metal jerrycans that appear to have come directly from a farmyard. Barbour’s distinctive coats hang in thick rows, tent-like and rigid, in muddy rural colors and with outdated, upper-class titles like the Bedale and the Beaufort. It’s difficult to imagine the shop surviving.

Despite the fact that it’s early on a cold weekday morning and several of the nearby stores aren’t even open yet, there’s already a continuous stream of Barbour customers. Some are what you’d expect: middle-aged, well-dressed folks with reddish Horse and Hound complexions. Others, however, are completely different.

A 30-year-old man with fashionably rolled-up pants, angular hair, and a manbag walks in. He browses the shelves before lingering over a rack of quilted country coats that seem like they belong on the Queen. “I think he wants that kind of old-style, boxy one,” a sales assistant says to another. The man stays for a few more minutes, but he doesn’t find what he’s searching for. Nonetheless, he can probably put up with the letdown.

“We opened in September and have already had to close for a week to restock,” a sales assistant said. “The heritage styles – the young people want them. They wear them really fitted. Small sizes.” She offers an inquisitive look: “It’s funny to see the Barbour become a fashion item. I always associate them with hunting and fishing.”

Maybe not for much longer. Barbours have grown so prominent in recent years in trendy districts of London, at music festivals, and among clothes-horse celebrities that there is even a half-mocking term for the appearance, citing the London borough where it is most common: “Hackney farmer.” The surge is even impacting sensible old John Lewis: nationwide sales of Barbours there are up more than 10% this year.

Poshness is also on the rise on television. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kirstie Allsopp, Thomasina Miers, and Valentine Warner – with their unapologetic private school vowels, patrician brusqueness or charm, and, in some cases, aristocratic backgrounds (Allsopp is actually The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp) – have become assets in what was previously dominated by self-made Britons and regional accents. “Kirstie and Hugh are posh. They know it, and we know it,” says Andrew Jackson, the Channel 4 commissioning editor. “Maybe in the past they would have hidden it. Television used to be about the middle class and the working class. But over the past two or three years [posh] presenters have become less ashamed.”

Then there’s the cuisine. The Sloane Ranger Handbook says, “A Sloane loves… bangers and mash, cauliflower cheese… shepherd’s pie… apple crumble… rack of lamb… porridge, kedgeree, kippers… kidneys… game…” There are several high-profile aristocratic companies for home consumption, such as Prince Charles’ Duchy Originals and Daylesford Organic, owned by Sir Anthony and Lady Carole Bamford. My otherwise perfect lefties confess to craving their class enemy’s biscuits.

Other straws in the wind include: surprise hit books by toffs, such as (Sir William Robert) Ferdinand Mount’s 2008 memoir Cold Cream; once-geezerish London hellraisers such as Damien Hirst and Alex James reinventing themselves as country landowners; and successful models with illustrious backgrounds, such as Kate Moss.

Meanwhile, the least subtle evidence yet that poshness has returned to the mainstream of British society has come from politics: the completely unaffected ascension of the most patrician generation of British politicians in half a century – David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, and Zac Goldsmith. So far, despite more explicit class attacks on them by top Labour politicians from Gordon Brown downwards, and despite the anti-elite environment generated by the crisis, there is no clear indication that these aristocratic Tories’ origins are decisively working against them.

Connecting cultural and consumer trends to political movements is an imprecise science, but the resurgence of poshness in all its expressions is likely to have the same fundamental foundation. The higher classes are currently seen as largely harmless by the majority of Britons. “Posh people are quite associated with environmentalism, with food and cooking,” cultural historian Joe Moran explains. “They are not the folk devils of our time: the bankers, the globalisers,” Porter claims. “Chinos, the super-boring suit – what people wear to EU and G20 meetings – that’s elite dress.”

In his book The Decline & Fall of the British Aristocracy, published over 20 years ago, historian David Cannadine provided a compelling account of how the economic, political, and social forces of the 20th century gradually reduced the power and influence of the British upper classes until they remained “only an infinitessimal part” of their former dominance. He did, however, also see their cultural influence’s unexpected tenacity. “These [posh] people, having owned and ruled half the world, have got some nifty stuff, so the modern consumer thinks, ‘Let’s not ignore it on politically symbolic grounds.’” Porter cites Burberry’s long-running glossy magazine advertising campaign, which features aristocratically-clad sons jumping around models. “In many areas of British life,” he wrote, “the aristocratic tone lingers on.”

Upper-class Britishness has always been embraced as genuine style abroad. Hooligans for Italian football wear Barbours. However, in Britain, poshness appears to be more appealing in some political contexts and across social strata less frequently. The nation was starting to shift to the right following the egalitarianism of the postwar decades in the mid-1970s, when York first saw Sloane Rangers and the British fashion line Mulberry successfully started marketing the “English hunting, shooting, and fishing look”. Weeks after Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, production on the enormously successful television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s nostalgic country home novel Brideshead Revisited began. This year, the film was extensively reworked for the big screen as well. In the early 1980s, as her power over Britain grew, Moran recalls a completely realized “return of the posh.”