Why do North Americans like posh British things?
Behind our weird cultural fetish lies an uncomfortable truth: egalitarian individualism makes us feel like shit
A new bar recently opened in Toronto, and its theme is…being British.
But a specific flavour of British, of course. Just as Ali Wong makes a distinction between Fancy Asian and Jungle Asian, we can make a distinction between Fancy British1 and, say, Coal Mine British. This is no Firkin Pub; the theme here is “a house in London that you can’t afford”. Never mind that in actuality, this probably still includes any ~300 sqft basement flat on the border of Zone 4. No no. We’re talking about the type of household that commissions painted portraits from Austrian artists. We’re talking some straight up aristocratic British peerage shit.
I’ve always found it interesting that we in North America tend to find posh British-ness appealing. Everybody has that one friend who moved to the UK and magically picked up an accent after 2 months - yet somehow it’s always Received Pronuciation, and never, say, Cockney, or MLE2. There is a sketch where Borat visits Cambridge University, wreaking havoc amongst the supposedly finest lads in England. One young man is especially offended by his impropriety, going so far as to let us know that Cambridge is a “very serious university”. The real icing on the cake is that this particular fellow is…American:
This shouldn’t surprise us. The very country founded on a manifesto which states “all men are created equal” also has a media which thirstily fetishizes the British royal family. Yet we don’t ascribe the same “cachet” to other cultures with monarchical histories and complex birth-based class systems. I’m still waiting for someone to open a Saudi royal family themed restaurant, or a Hindu caste system themed speakeasy (“Brahmins only”!), but something tells me it’s not going to happen.
One of my friends has a theory for why this is the case. “Fancy British” is something which has ingrained itself deep enough into our mainstream culture that we may actually dare to imagine ourselves within it. This why stories like Kate’s and Meghan’s capture the imaginations of little girls all over America, even though plenty of other birth-based class narratives and mythologies abound. The likelihood that you’ll be inducted into the North Korean ruling family is not much lower than your likelihood of joining the British one. And yet Disney Princesses are a commercially viable brand, but Mattel is in no particular rush to release the Workers' Party of Korea Barbie. There is no DMZ-land at Disneyworld. Vogue has written plenty of articles about Kate’s fashion sense, but none at all about Kim Yo Jong’s adorable taste in headbands.
British royalty is a brand, and one that the family has shrewdly maintained and kept relevant long after monarchy lost its vogue over the last few centuries. Posh British accents, living room décor, dinnerware sets, and wedding regalia - these are not the reality for most North American lives, and yet they do not feel culturally foreign. There are no shortage of commercial actors who are chomping at the bit to sell us this aesthetic. Why else would the Duke And Duchess Of Sussex file trademark applications to sell “royal” socks and pens?
Marketing copy and aesthetics reveal the marketer’s beliefs about their target demographic’s deepest desires. The members lounge at the AGO serves tap water in ornate lowball glasses, while the plebe cafe 10 feet away uses plain-looking ones. Their drinkware buyer cleverly intuited that they could keep membership dues flowing by indulging a little fantasy of mine. Look, I have exchanged some disposable income for the entirely unnecessary privilege of sitting in a different room, drinking the exact same tap water out of a different glass. Surely this makes me a paragon of good taste, a patron of the arts, a real deep thinker. Never mind that I got here on the 505 streetcar, and will be going home to a 500sqft concrete box in the sky, to punch into my 9-5 on Monday morning. For just one moment, I get to pretend otherwise. One can imagine that elaborate crystal drinkware, leather couches, and waistcoat-clad bartenders serve much the same purpose at a cocktail bar whose theme is LARPing aristocratic Britain.
The aesthetic fantasy of royalty, aristocracy, or any other form of birth-based social class can be seen as a lazy and self-indulgent one. It is the wet dream that we may be able to consider ourselves special, worthy, sophisticated, respectable, and the center of everyone’s attention simply for being ourselves. This is in contrast with the painful philosophy of achievement or character-based self-worth that is inherent to an egalitarian society. If we are all born equal, then the only way for me to be “good” is to actually work for it. And damn, that sounds like a real pain in the ass. Much easier to just buy a fancy branded thing, to suggest that I, too, feel an affinity with these noble, fancy people.
In a weird role reversal, the Royal family has been trying to establish how much they can jive with the modern deconstructionist youth3 by doing things like commissioning Rothko-esque portraits. There is something utterly incongruous about wanting to keep one foot firmly planted in the social capital afforded by birth-based class, while also laying claim to the chaotic, shit-disturbing coolness of abstract expressionism - which is a largely American export. It’s no wonder that most papers can’t come up with a more articulate piece of criticism for the portrait than “hm, is it too red?”. They certainly don’t bother asking why a monarchy even exists and stays relevant in our current age. What does this say about us? Where does our hard-won, egalitarian, individualistic culture fall short? Why are the tabloids filling this gap with the inanities of wedding dresses, and haircuts, and petty gossip about a family halfway around the world?
American celebrity is a very different beast. Our hero worship revolves around people who rap about bruising her esophagus, or going up and down that pole, or people who kill themselves. These are nasty, unpleasant things. These are stories of our violence, our lust, our rage, our despair - our failings. If the basis of British aristocracy is the idea that a person may be born inherently noble, the basis of American celebrity lies in the unabashed recognition that we are all damned. We just happen to hold a place in our hearts - and our wallets - for artists who have the skill to articulate this clearly, and can somehow make us feel a little bit better about it.
We may claim to want freedom, but really, we like the idea that there ought to be constraints on our lives. We’d like to think that there is some ideal, noble version of ourselves that we are failing to live up to. It turns the desire for self-improvement from narcissistic aggrandizement into moral imperative.
Try to improve yourself in a society of equals, and people will ask, “who do you think you are?”. Behave in a way that society finds unbecoming, and people will shame you - but this shame is predicated on the idea that there is something you ought to become in the first place. That you were born for something more than this.
And as much as the most nihilistic, jaded, and self-destructive among us would like to deny it, that is something that we all desperately, desperately want to believe.
#146
Of course, Jungle British and Fancy British can absolutely overlap. I would kill to see a cocktail menu with drinks named after Rudyard Kipling poems (“I’ll have The White Man’s Burden, please”). But Toronto’s lefty clime does have limits, and even the poshest of aesthetics might not be enough to absolve printing this on a menu:
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Really, Jonathan Yeo missed a golden opportunity to superimpose Charles’ face onto this:
The American equivalent of the overlapping bar would have a drink called Tequila Mockingbird