Brown shoes in town
The only thing posher than knowing the rules, as Granny observed, is having the confidence to break them
After the First World War, when men were scarce, my great-aunt Josephine was lucky enough to find herself a handsome young suitor whose prospects were good and who loved her. Alas, one day, he made the mistake of visiting her in town, wearing a navy blue suit with brown shoes. The engagement was called off immediately and Josephine remained a spinster to her death. Almost a century on, the wrong shoes can still destroy a man’s dreams. In the City of London, the “no brown in town” rule retains such force that it is being used to weed out prospective employees.
A study released last week by the Social Mobility Commission reports that investment banks are less likely to hire men who wear brown shoes to a job interview. Other sartorial no-nos include failing to match the colour of your shoes to your belt and having a pocket on your shirt (pockets are for janitors). This isn’t really about clothes, of course: It’s about class. As the report says, bosses tend to look for “familiarity” when recruiting. They want someone who “fits”. In other words, someone from the dominant upper-middle-class tribe. Consciously or unconsciously, they discriminate on the basis of accent, dress and something they refer to as “polish”. Working-class graduates — not having been buffed to the required shine — don’t stand a chance.
As one City boss put it: “They don’t have a haircut, their suit’s always too big, they don’t know which tie to wear.” My heart aches for him, this archetypal young man with bad hair and a loud tie and cheap Burton trousers. To have your ambitions curtailed by something as trivial as the length of your sleeve, or whether you say “toilet”, not “lavatory”, is a singularly cruel, English caprice. Perhaps I feel it especially keenly because my own “polish” is hard-won. By any economic measure, my background is lower middle-class.
I grew up in a jerry-built 1930s terraced house in an unfashionable London suburb. My father, a writer, made it his goal to one day match the annual salary of a London bus driver: When that thrilling day came, in the 1980s, he took the whole family out to KFC to celebrate. But one of the curiosities of the English class system is that it is defined by style as much as money. Our house might have been small (“Oh, look at your adorable windows!” exclaimed a friend from Kensington. “They’re so teeny-tiny!”), but it had posh things in it: Good paintings, threadbare rugs, tottering piles of dusty books.
We also had my grandmother, the Edmund Hillary of the English class system. Although she was basically a peasant —the daughter of a tenant farmer — Granny had the social antennae of a dowager duchess.
The laws and by-laws of class hierarchy were an entertainment to her. Her favourite game was to sit me at the kitchen table with a typed-out list of U and Non-U words (“Spectacles/Glasses”, “Perfume/Scent”, “Napkin/Serviette”) and get me to circle all the “correct” words. This intensive training in snobbery had some unwelcome side-effects.
Once, a teacher at my primary school told me off for saying “What?” instead of “Pardon?” “My granny says it’s common to say pardon,” I replied. The look of confusion and dismay on her face still shames me. Granny’s sartorial rules were more idiosyncratic. She was so naturally stylish that she couldn’t understand anyone getting it wrong. There were prohibitions on anything beige, nylon, ill-fitting or impractical. But above all, it mustn’t be drab. Once, watching her neighbour walk by, she murmured: “How could I be friendly with somebody who wore a hat like that?” Wearing a metaphorical hat like that was the greatest fear of my childhood, so I paid far more attention to Granny’s lessons than to any others. As a result, I failed almost every exam I ever took. But it doesn’t matter because, these days, everyone assumes I went to Oxford and come from the landed gentry.
I can circulate confidently at the grandest parties. I have so much “polish” that I can even afford to tarnish it a bit. The only thing posher than knowing the rules, as Granny observed, is having the confidence to break them. Or, as Osbert Lancaster put it: “To hell with Nancy Mitford! What I always say is, if it’s me, it’s U!”
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2016
Jemima Lewis writes about Britain today, questioning social mores and the cult of celebrity.
