BY DANIEL JUPP
If I had money I’d dress like a Victorian or Edwardian all the time. I’m working class but I like all the style and elegance we lost. I can’t stand modern elites, I eat fast food every week, I think the working class are the only people, largely, maintaining any sanity, but I’d like to go back to everyone dressing for dinner.
When you had a special outfit just for dinner … now that’s civilisation.
The old elite were better than the new elite. They had class. Some were degenerate scum, but that wasn’t a requirement. And they didn’t pretend that they were the downtrodden ones, the victims, the suffering.
A culture that takes care about presenting itself with beauty, grace and elegance is a culture more inclined to the good, the wholesome and the just. Occultists used to say ‘as above, so below’. I say ‘as they present themselves, so they are’. Our modern culture delights in ugliness and considers the rancid to be sophistication. We see this in buildings, in clothing, in art, in music, everywhere.
The current idea that a cretin like Harry Styles dressed in a Little Bo Peep outfit is cool tells you what our culture has become.
This has taken a long time. We got to the middle of the 20th century and even someone like Frank Sinatra (a pretty unpleasant creep) still liked to dress well.
Sometimes the superficial matters because it constructs the world we experience. A bit like architectural politics. Old rules of how a man presents himself made for a more civilised society in general, even if it too had thugs and murderers. In everything from architecture to clothing, we adopted ugliness. Or rather, ugliness was sold to us, inside and out.
Recently I made the mistake of looking at some adverts for suits. Now it clutters my feed every day. But I do react a little like Prince George in Blackadder:
“WHAT a pair of trousers!”.
If only I had the money I’d be a bit of a dandy.
Or a chap.
A chubby, unattractive one, but at least I’d be trying.
In the culture wars, there is no superficial. Everything matters.
Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.