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It’s safe to come out: all of a sudden, being posh is cool again
Break out the rugby shirt and unfurl your red trousers – just be ironic about it
I don’t know if we can point the finger at Saltburn and the endless TikTok homages that Emerald Fennell’s film about a big house has spawned. I don’t know if it can be attributed to the rise of floppy-haired posh chefs such as Julius Roberts or floppy-haired comics like Henry Rowley. Is it because a Game of Thrones actress has been cavorting on shooting weekends with the Hon Peregrine Pearson? Or because one of the world’s hottest DJs is the Marlborough-educated son of a barrister? Look, even the new Vogue editor, Chioma Nnadi, was photographed in a rugby shirt when her job was announced. So what I’m quietly wondering is, is posh cool again? Is it safe to come out?
The thing is, posh people never really go away. They’re a bit like knotweed in that respect. But in the past few years, any posh person with an ounce of sense has tried to lie low. This isn’t an overwhelming number, true, but remember that even a posh person with the IQ of a wooden spatula probably went to a good school, and something must have sunk in. Not seemingly in Prince Harry’s case, admittedly. “You’ve got to try really hard to go to one of the best schools in the country and leave with a D in geography,” a friend in Harry’s year at Eton once remarked of his academic achievements, perhaps a mite unkindly. But maybe, in certain cases, if they didn’t leave with a perfect understanding of erosion and the development of glaciers, then they had at least developed a survival instinct.
However it was divined, in the past decade or so, a good number of them realised that the red trousers should be folded away and stashed at the back of the wardrobe. That they should stop calling their labradors problematic names because shouting “Inca!” in the park wasn’t a wholly contemporary look. That they should, at dinner parties, try to avoid opening every conversation with “Where did you go to school?” Class anger was on the rise, posh was suddenly the very least acceptable thing to be and Etonian actors kept insisting they were working-class in interviews because they had a grandmother who came from Wales. It was treacherous out there. The best thing to do was hunker down in your 17-bedroom house and throw another piece of old furniture on the fire.
Yet there seems to have been a sudden wind change in the past few months. Posh, or at least ironic posh, seems to be back. Encouraged. Fashionable, even.
You may have sat down with your family over Christmas and been appalled or amused, or both, by Saltburn – the film about a seemingly harddone-by Oxford student who gets invited to his posh friend’s pile for the summer. The internet, for weeks, has continued to squabble about whether the film lauded or castigated toffs. Either way, it’s been watched, discussed and copied on social media. It’s – loathsome word alert – zeitgeisty. Fans online have debated which of the lines dropped so icily by Rosamund Pike as Lady Elspeth Catton were their favourite; some have tried to recreate the final scene, in which one of the characters skips naked through the house; 22 years after its release, Sophie Elllis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” hit the top ten in the charts last month off the back of the film’s success. I cannot possibly go into a certain scene here because you may be eating, but the bath water bit has encouraged a line of merchandise readily available online, should you be interested.
It’s not just me who has observed this phenomenon. “The Return of Posh”, trumpets a coverline on the latest issue of Tatler, which, alright, is a bit like the Morning Star proclaiming that communism will be with us any day now. But they’ve offered various pieces of evidence. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton is back in the cabinet, for instance. Guy Ritchie’s new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is about a bunch of moustachioed toffs leaping around during the Second World War.
There’s a “toff lit” revival, Tatler points out, citing the recent publication of the Duke of Beaufort’s memoirs, the forthcoming novel from Plum Sykes, set in a cluster of Cotswold villages known as The Bottoms, and a new racy, lesbian Bridgerton-esque romp just published, More than a Best Friend, about two Victorian debutantes. Again, much like Saltburn, all of these are tongue-in-cheek. The characters are in on the joke because they’ve realised that the safest, most sensible position nowadays is to laugh at oneself along with everyone else. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, in other words.
It’s the James Blunt position, and what anyone posh with a sizeable social media following seems to have realised too. Take Henry Rowley, the aforementioned comedian (1.3 million followers on TikTok), who posts brilliantly sardonic videos parodying posh girls (among others) called Delicatessen and Minty. Then there’s Thomas Straker (2.3 million followers on Instagram), the controversial chef
The safest, most sensible position is to laugh at oneself… if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em
who uploads tweedy pictures of himself on the grouse moor and watching the cricket at Lord’s. Julius Roberts (734,000 followers on Instagram) cheerfully larks about on his farm with his goats, carrying root vegetables on his shoulders. And if you haven’t heard of Fred Again – full name Frederick John Philip Gibson – then your children almost certainly have. He’s the DJ who’s a son of a KC, and his success has various confused American fans online exclaiming sadly that they “can’t believe” their favourite electronic act is “descended from British Royalty”.
Essentially, there’s a revival happening because a new, more savvy generation of poshos have cunningly rebranded themselves and emerged laughing. Which is rough news if you’re a firebrand who has a dartboard of Tory faces and reads books about 1789 with a touch of wistfulness, but not the worst news for those of us who’ve worried for some time now that our names and accents make us targets for an egg in public. You could probably even unfurl the red trousers, so long as you wear them with a Saltburn T-shirt. Ironic, see.