A man signals that he’s classy if, outdoors, he comes on in a tweed jacket, with vest or sweater (or two), shirt, tie, long wool scarf, and overcoat or raincoat. The tweed jacket is indispensable to the upper-middle-class trick of layering. Country leisure is what it implies, not daily wage slavery in the city. Thus the popularity among the upper-middle class (and the would-be upper-middle class, like members of Ivy university faculties) of the tweed jacket. Ultimately, the difference implies a difference between city and country, or labor and leisure, where country betokens not decrepit dairy farms and bad schools but estates and horse-leisure. Upper-middle clothes… lean to the soft, textured, wooly, nubby. “Class” includes an entire chapter devoted to the semiotics of dress, and he aims his wry wit at his own class as much as those above and below. Paul Fussell, author of the mordantly hilarious “ Class: A Guide Through The American Status System,” died Wednesday at the age of 88.
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