She confirmed that the English are much more worried about our clothes and appearance than the affected-indifference rule allows us to admit. And her postbag indicates that our main concern is indeed about 'fitting in', being acceptably dressed and, above all, that perennial English preoccupation: avoiding embarrassment. Yes, we want to look attractive, to make the most of our physical assets and disguise our flaws, but we do not, like other nations, want to stand out or show off - quite the opposite: most of us are scared of any form of ostentation, or even of seeming to make too much effort, to care too obviously. We just want to fit in. The overwhelming majority of the questions addressed to Dear Annie are not about whether a certain garment or outfit is beautiful or glamorous, but whether it is socially acceptable, suitable, appropriate. 'It's all "Is it OK to wear X with Y?" "Can I wear such-and-such to a wedding?" "Is this suitable for the office?" "Is that too tarty?"' Annalisa told me. 'Up to the 1950s, there were lots of official rules about dress - there were uniforms, really - and the English dressed well. Since the 1960s, there have been fewer formal rules, and lots of confusion and embarrassment, and the English dress very badly, but there is still an obsession with etiquette. What they really want is more rules.'
Ironically, this desperate desire to fit in and conform can often, particularly among the most fashion-conscious, lead to the most dramatic and ludicrous of our sartorial mistakes. Edina, the ridiculously overdressed character in the television sit-com Absolutely Fabulous, is a caricature of a certain type of English fashion-victim. She combines a burning need to be fashionable with a typically English lack of any natural taste or sense of style - decking herself out indiscriminately in all the most outlandish of the latest designer catwalk creations, and invariably ending up looking like an over-decorated Christmas tree. Edina is a caricature, a deliberate comic exaggeration, but the caricature is based on features and behaviours that are all too familiar and recognizable among English females. There are plenty of Edinas among our pop-stars and other celebrities, and you can see down-market, chain-store versions of Edina-like bad taste walking around on every high street.
Women of most other nations can watch Absolutely Fabulous and just laugh at Edina's sartorial absurdities. English women may laugh at Edina, but we also wince with vicarious embarrassment, and our amusement is tinged with a little frisson of fear, a little anxiety about our own fashion-victim errors of judgement. Edina's mistakes may be more extreme than most, but English women do seem to be particularly susceptible to the more preposterous products of designers' fevered imaginations: almost every English female had a ludicrous puffball skirt in her wardrobe in the 1980s; we wear micro-minis every time they come into fashion, whether we have the legs for them or not; ditto thigh-boots, leg-warmers, hot pants and other inventions which are unflattering on all but the skinniest, and often look remarkably silly even on them.
We are not entirely alone in these unfortunate habits - our American and Australian cousins can be equally tasteless - but my female friends, acquaintances and informants from around the world tend to be particularly scornful about English women's sartorial awkwardness and incompetence. On one occasion, when I protested that singling us out in this way was a bit unfair, a rather grand French lady replied, 'It is perfectly fair. One does not expect much from the colonies, but you English are supposed to be civilized Europeans. You really should know better. Paris is what, an hour away?' She lifted an immaculate eyebrow, shrugged her elegant shoulders and sniffed delicately, meaning, presumably, that if we could not be bothered to learn from our neighbours and betters, we were beneath her notice. I wouldn't have minded so much, but this impromptu interview took place at Royal Ascot, in the Royal bloody Enclosure, no less, with all us Englishwomen (even undercover social scientists) in our very smartest frocks and hats. And I'd been especially proud of my pink mini-dress and pink shoes with amusing snaffle-shaped buckles on them - a little horsey reference (footnote, even) that had struck me as charmingly witty for a day at the races, but which now, under the withering gaze of Madame Style-Police, seemed rather silly and childish, a typically English attempt to make a joke out of everything.
Dress is essentially a form of communication - one could even call it a social skill - so perhaps it should not be surprising to find that the socially challenged English are not terribly good at it. We have difficulties with most other aspects of communication, particularly when there are no clear, formal rules to follow. Perhaps the loss of our old 1950s rigid dress codes has had the same effect as the decline of 'How do you do?' as the standard greeting. In the absence of the formal 'How do you do?' exchange, we never know quite what to say, and our attempts at informal greetings are awkward, clumsy, inelegant and embarrassing. In the same way, the decline of formal dress codes - now regarded by many, like the 'How do you do?' ritual, as stuffy and old-fashioned - means that we never know quite what to wear, and our informal dress has become as embarrassingly awkward as our greetings.
We do not like formality; we object to being dictated to by prissy little rules and regulations - but we lack the natural grace and social ease to cope with informality. We are like rebellious teenagers whose parents complain, with some justification, that they want to be treated like adults, and given the freedom to make their own choices and decisions, but do not have the sense or maturity to handle such freedom, and when granted it just make a big mess of things and get into trouble.
MAINSTREAM RULES AND TRIBAL UNIFORMS
Our solution is to invent more rules. The rigid dress codes of the past have not given way to complete sartorial anarchy. Although fashion magazines regularly proclaim that 'Nowadays, anything goes', this is clearly not the case. What is now known as 'mainstream' dress certainly does not conform to the same kind of official, universal dress codes of the pre-1960 eras - when, for example, all women were supposed to wear hats, gloves, skirts of a particular length and so on, with only relatively minor, and well-defined, class and sub-cultural variations. But there are broad-brush rules and fashion trends that most of us still obey: show a crowd-scene photograph from the 1960s, 70s, 80s or 90s, and anyone can immediately identify, just from the clothing and hairstyles, the decade in which it was taken. The same will no doubt be true of the current decade, although as usual we imagine that this one is more bewilderingly anarchic and fast-changing than any previous period. Even a photograph featuring 'retro' fashions, recycling the style of, say, the 1970s in the 1990s, or the 1960s and 1980s in the year 2003, would not fool us, as these styles are never simply repeated 'verbatim', but always piecemeal, with many subtle changes, and different hairstyles and make-up. Look at a few crowd-pictures, or just flip through some family photo albums, and you realise not only that dress is far more rule-governed than you might have thought but also that you are far more aware of the detail and nuances of current dress codes than you imagined - even if you think you have no interest in fashion. You are obeying these rules unconsciously, whether you like it or not, and will, when future people see you in a photograph, be identifiable as a typical example of your decade.