Collins is ready with examples:

"Do you want me to hold something?" he will inquire. "Are you cold?" "Would you like a biscuit?" Adrian Hallewell, a chauffeur in Yorkshire, who has known Bailey since he was a boy, told me, "He keeps a low profile, does he, Christopher."

It's interesting that Burberry chose Bailey — whose father was a carpenter, and whose mother worked as a window-dresser at Marks & Spencer — as its new creative director in 2001, at a time when the venerable English house was trying, artfully and carefully, to distance itself from the appropriation of its brand by a distinctly lower-class kind of customer.

In order to revive Burberry from a beside-the-point position as a legacy brand, then-C.E.O. Rose Marie Bravo made Burberry and its distinctive beige-and-red check ubiquitous — but the paradox of an upscale-but-instantly-recognizable brand is that if it becomes too popular, or suffers from the wrong kind of exposure, the hard-won "upscale" image can evaporate. (Louis Vuitton waged a long-term fight to win back its identification with exclusivity by ending department store sales in favor of only own-store retail in the 1980s, but some would argue that the company's famous monogram — or imitations of it — metastasized to a brand-harming extent during the recent economic boom.)

In England, Burberry had gone from outfitting royalty, military top brass, and explorers to being worn by reality television personalities and second-rate soap opera stars making their first public appearances following septum-repair surgeries. (That would be Danniella Westbrook, of EastEnders, pictured above in 2002 with her daughter.) It used to count Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton as customers; by 2002, it had Jade Goody and a contingent of xenophobic soccer hooligans who were particularly fond of a $90 plaid hat.

Burberry stopped making the hat. It also began to devote much of its energies to policing its brand — no more pet products "in the famous Burberry design," or "Chavalier" Vauxhall Chevaliers with customized Burberry paint jobs. (Incidentally, virtually every tacky-Burberry example Collins offers up, including the "Chavalier," Westbrook, and a photo of a woman with Burberry-check acrylic nails, was highlighted in a thoughtful post about the history of the brand and its increasing identification with "chav" and football culture on the blog Finally Woken last November.) After new C.E.O. Angela Ahrendts took over in 2006, she discontinued many licenses and product lines she felt did not represent that brand well, or distracted from its core luxury image: "Burberry used to do little bottles of whiskey," said Bailey, "We're not experts on whiskey, so why the hell would we do whiskey?" Burberry Prorsum, the high-end line founded under Bravo's watch, is now the company's moody torch-bearer. But Bailey, who is understandably sensitive to any accusation of classism in the company's repositioning, especially in the class-fraught British context, is hesitant to cast the change in terms of sidelining "undesirable" customers. "I think that probably a lot of it was counterfeit," says Bailey, of the various Burberry-ish clothing items the paparazzi snapped in the early 2000s. In fact, the designer counts spotting one of his authentic designs in "a kind of skanky pub" as a highlight of his career, so far:

Few things please Bailey more than encountering his work in the nooks and crannies of the British experience — a trenchcoat draped over a Westminster politician's arm, lining out; a checked scarf, worn as a hijab, in the immigration queue at Gatwick. A small triumph of his career was spotting a checked purse that he had designed tucked under a table at a bar in Yorkshire. "It was this kind of skanky pub, and all of a sudden I was like, 'It's actually amazing that this little baby thing that I work on with my gang goes out into the world and then finds its way back to my home town,' " he said. "You want to know the story behind it."

Before coming to Burberry, Bailey worked at Donna Karan, and for another great recent fashion revival case, Gucci under Tom Ford. Although he didn't take much from Ford's sexy Cosmo-cover-line aesthetic, Bailey undoubtedly experienced an object lesson in how to design a venerable house away from the brink of irrelevancy.

Like almost every luxury company known to man, Burberry is facing hard times right now because of the economic crisis; since last fall, the company has laid off employees, closed factories, and still saw a 2008 loss of $8 million. (Perhaps partly because, as Collins notes, the company moved into expensive new purpose-built headquarters in London last November.) Nonetheless, Burberry has fared well enough since listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2004. Today, the company made the news when it was forecast to crack the FTSE 100 by the end of this week. With the news that Jaeger-reviver Harold Tillman is buying the fusty, bankrupt British classic outerwear label Aquascutum — with plans for a grand shake-up in place, according to British Vogue — it's clear that there are plenty of others seeking to meet the same challenges Burberry faced so recently.

Check Mate: Burberry's Working-Class Hero [New Yorker]
Harold Tillman Acquires Acquascutum [Vogue UK]
Burberry To Check In To FTSE 100 [FT]
Thinking About Buying Burberry? [Finally Woken]

That was Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor who covered things like important cruise ship christenings for Gourmet, and who lives — of course — on the Upper East Side. Zweigenthal proudly tells the paper that she lifts weights and walks three miles every single day.

New York, which is already one of the thinner states in the country, is home to Manhattan, where overweight people comprise just 42% of the population. (The national average is 67%.) These data are, of course, derived from the Body Mass Index — and strangely, the fact that while obesity is a serious health problem, BMI is an unreliable indicator of a person's health, goes unmentioned in the Times story. In any case, the reason Manhattan is New York's thinnest county is undoubtedly because it is also one of the state's, and the country's, wealthiest places. In poorer neighborhoods of Manhattan, like Harlem, obesity rates and the prevalence of obesity-linked diseases, like Type 2 diabetes, are higher.

Maybe the fact that food choice — not to mention the choice to join a gym — is in America largely a function of social class and income level is what led reporter Anne Barnard to concentrate exclusively on interviewing skinny rich ninnies for this piece. We have:

• Brian Ermanski, a 28-year-old "slender yet muscular painter" who lives in SoHo and, from a bench outside the restaurant Balthazar, says things like, "It's probably more like 20 percent overweight down here." Ermanski smokes to stay thin.
• Manager of the Madison Avenue Intermix — a store which does not sell clothes above a size eight — Lynne Bacci, who works out "to fit into skinny jeans and tank tops."
• The aforementioned Zweigenthal, who continued, "If I feel fat, I can't enjoy eating. This is unhealthy — that if I gain a few pounds, I'm not happy — but it's the truth of me."
• Exhale Gym and Spa director Susan Tomback, who calls exercise for her clients "a lifestyle thing. It's like a club. They go to brunch afterwards at Sant Ambroeus." Sant Ambroeus is a restaurant whose brunch menu includes a filet of sea bream that costs $39. Exhale Gym and Spa is a gym and spa where membership can cost up to $285 a month.
• One denizen of the Upper East Side who says that she was raised to explicitly connect social class with weight. "My mom always says, 'The smaller the dress size, the bigger the apartment.'"

Then Barnard quotes a 52-year-old plumber from the Bronx named Chuck Ortiz, who, at 6' and 220 lbs, would be classified as just under obese according to the BMI. Ortiz, who eats a $5 chicken gyro for lunch, doesn't understand why wealthy New Yorkers pay for a gym "when there's a park right there."

That's the sort of outer borough logic that doesn't get much play in the land of lunches at Balthazar and $285/month "lifestyle" gyms and stores that abjure a size 10 dress.

Where Thin People Roam, And Sometimes Even Eat [NYTimes]
Top 10 Reasons BMI Is Bogus [NPR]

I suppose it was about time to read another one of these articles where some writer wrings his or her hands over Americans’ allegedly inconsistent commitment to fashionable dressing. The rhetoric in these trend pieces never changes: we are always and in perpetuity too fat, too lazy, and too dumb. (Although there was, always and in perpetuity, a mythical time in the not-too-distant past when every male citizen of every state wore a 40R jacket and every female citizen could rhapsodize extemporaneously about the superior hand of natural fibers.)

What I don’t understand is why writers like Reddy, and Lynn Hirshberg of the New York Times, who wrote one of these dismal pieces in 2007, consent so easily to playing the scold. Writes Reddy, “The stereotype of the ugly American has become intractable.”

If you ask citizens of other countries to paint a portrait of the average American tourist, it would look something like this: a loud, chubby sight-seer wearing a fanny pack, baseball cap, printed T shirt, jean shorts and sneakers.

I wonder, why do we care? And do these people not realize they have elasticized waistbands in France, too?

Reddy harks back to the age of Mad Men — a fictional, modern-made television series with a professionally styled wardrobe department — as evidence that we only recently forgot ourselves and embraced casualwear in the workplace. That Nicole Phelps, executive editor of Style.com, points out that real working women of the 1960s had to wear girdles more painful even than Spanx to fit the reigning professional silhouette of the era, doesn’t trouble Reddy, probably because he is a man.

Once upon a time, he continues,

Those with the means made a virtue of exuding relaxed elegance; they didn't try to overdo anything, but they saw no shame in appearing put together. It was an extension of what they believed in, a polished pragmatism that, today, has given way to self-indulgence.

Comfort has its place, of course, but if that becomes the guiding value in getting dressed—or anything else—then we've got a problem. This misplaced priority has arguably contributed to our current troubles with credit, education and productivity. Compared with our parents and grandparents, we've had it relatively easy. We've got cable TV, microwave popcorn and GPS. The world is at our command and we are at ease, but this kind of comfort breeds complacency—not to mention Velcro straps and elasticized waistbands.

You heard the man. Velcro and other signifiers of “self-indulgence” caused the credit crisis.

Hirshberg’s piece was not much better: “I have long believed that leisure wear is one of the great evils of our times,” she writes,

When a waistband can give and give, why should anyone stop eating? When a shirt does not need to be tucked in, who cares about the belly beneath?

Although the sizism of these kinds of pieces — specifically denied by both writers — is easily parsed from the continual references to "tent-size" shirts, "sloppiness," and “XXL polo shirts”, what’s also distressing is their classism. While dressing well needn’t be expensive, what these writers seem to be calling for isn’t merely fashion as fun self-expression, it’s fashion as a system of social representation — the idea that one ought to look good, so that one can be recognized by other good-looking people, and feel mutually reassured in one's tastes. And that kind of dress-as-shibboleth requires the sublimation of most of one’s ideas about clothes into the safe confines of designer labels. Reddy detests chubbiness; I don’t like his clubbiness. Or his condescension.

Inherent in these stories is the idea that a certain way of looking equates with a certain way of being. I love fashion; I love playing with ideas of representation and how we declare ourselves in the world. But I think that when you start alleging that fashion — or, worse, "taste" — has some kind of absolute, timeless value, you get into potentially dangerous moral (and extraordinarily boring sartorial) territory. Hirshberg’s story ends up reifying Italian President Silvio Berlusconi and former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as tidy dressers; it’s as though the fact that each is often in the public eye for corruption somehow makes their alleged fashion savvy more impressive.

Reddy thinks fashion in ’09 will take a turn towards his narrow definitions of “chic” with the coming of the Obamas. What I’d like to see from fashion in ’09 is fewer hectoring “trend” stories about lazy poor fat people and their lazy poor fat people habits. Comfort is not the enemy of style, and fat is not the enemy of fashion. Maybe we could just end the entire idea of fashion as a capital-F top-down regimented enterprise fit only for vetted experts. Then we could get back to wearing what we want, wearing what we think is fun, wearing what makes us feel good, wearing what reminds us of that one really great day when…and not being judged by mean writers for it.

Putting The Chic Back In Dressing [Newsweek]

Related: The Emperors' New Clothes? [NY Times]