I have long believed that no one is more capable of snobbery than the aspiring middle class, and as such I would advise any foreigner curious about the intricacies of our rigid social hierarchy to look no further than the Daily Mail.
Peruse today’s edition and, among the usual cancer scaremongering and hysteria about five year-olds being given sex lessons, you might spot Sarah Vine’s attempt to rally the housewives of middle England against Justine Miliband on the basis of her starkly austere kitchen. She is, you see, one of those uppity north London feminists whose eschewing of chintz brings down moral judgment on her character. Being myself a near neighbour of the Milibands (though admittedly one whose rubbish-strewn garden is currently occupied by a purple fridge), as well as a rampant feminist with little interest in the aesthetics of her kitchen, I sympathise. But kitchens aside, I’m much more interested in another preoccupation of that venerable media institution; one which reveals far more subtle prejudices related to our class system: it’s Ladies’ Day.
Newspapers love Ladies’ Day because it provides them with an excuse to print pictures of attractive working-class women in gigantic hats and knicker-skimming dresses, for no other reason than to provide readers with the gratifying, almost masturbatory, combination of an ogle and a sense of superiority. It all serves to remind us how rare it is that you see a photograph of a woman in a newspaper who isn’t a murder victim, a member of the royal family, or semi-naked.
Ladies’ Day coverage ticks two of those boxes, as evidenced by the “bizarre moment” (their words, not mine) when the worlds of glamour model Katie Price and the Duchess of Cornwall, who was dressed much like a 19th-century Russian governess, briefly collided as they were photographed together at Cheltenham.
Why should we care? I hear Guardian readers cry. You might think that the only quality Katie Price and Camilla Parker Bowles share is the fact of being famous for doing absolutely nothing, but you’d be wrong: Katie Price has built an empire, Camilla’s appropriated one. At the very least, the comments on articles such as these provide good entertainment.
“Tom Parker Bowles is the epitome of a florid, fat, chinless wonder. Completely mediocre at best in every way but mummy’s connections have bought him an easy life, wealth, cushy job and an attractive wife,” reads one. “When you’re pictured drinking prosecco out of the bottle in a car park you know it’s time to go home,” says another (au contraire, I would argue that the night was only just getting started). Ladies’ Day allows miserable spectators to judge its participants from the comfort of their own homes, when in actual fact none of these people would know a good night out if it danced to Sweet Caroline on a table in front of them with its flange out while clutching a bottle of blue WKD. In other words, class-conscious people overly concerned with appearances are missing out on a hell of a lot of fun.
Undoubtedly the London-centricity of the media machine plays a part.
For those of us who spent our teenage years stumbling coatless down provincial high streets, bare legs generously coated with fake tan, handbags stashed behind the fag machine and bottles of Aldi Badger’s Creek wine hidden in a bush in Wetherspoons car park, the dressed-down capital can come as quite a shock. Shortly after moving here a friend from Essex wondered aloud why it is that Londoners deliberately dress as though they have crawled out of a bin. I used to rock a beehive that would make a drag queen do a double-take, but London soon stamped it out of me. Now, if I go “out-out” it is usually by accident, in the clothes I’ve been wearing all day, with my Sainsbury’s shopping stashed in the corner of the nightclub. But any British girl knows that the getting ready is the fun part.
One of my closest friends is a regular at Ladies’ Day at Aintree, and she took some time out before “doing an appendix” to tell me about it from a hospital storeroom. There’s a snobbery about Ladies’ Day, she says, and it’s always portrayed in the media as much worse than it actually is. There’s undoubtedly a condescension there, a sense that it’s tacky women trying to ape the upper classes and missing the mark; but, she says, this ignores its tongue-in-cheek nature. Plus, it’s the only time you can wear an outfit that ridiculous without ruining a friend’s wedding, and as such your ensemble will take months of preparation.
That Ladies’ Day continues to hold such fascination says much about our class system. People like to look down on the women of Britain, with their drinking and their miniskirts and their refusal to adhere to society’s expectations of them to be ladylike. But what they miss is that this is a national female solidarity movement. Much like your average Saturday night out, Ladies’ Day isn’t about pleasing men, but about girls having a good time, and that is in actual fact quite a powerful statement. Sarah Vine and her kitchen-obsessed cronies would hate to admit it, but they’d have much to learn from night at the Raz.
