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Are you fashion posh or posh posh?

Are you fashion posh or posh posh?

+ Kylie’s tits

Victoria Moss's avatar
Victoria Moss
Jun 09, 2025
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everything is content
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Are you fashion posh or posh posh?
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Celine Fall 2025 collection

Fashion trends are often discombobulating, but currently the social contract is being upended. Driving through Hackney, east London the other week and Mare street was teaming with young men with pastel coloured sweaters thrown jauntily over their shoulders, button down shirts tucked into their slim leg jeans and loafers on feet as if extras in a Richard Curtis wedding scene or young royals relaxing on a weekend exeat from Eton, in the Nineties.

“Do you think he’s actually posh or just dressing posh?” I wondered to my husband. “It’s very unclear” he said. In truth there are so many posh people in east London these days it’s often hard to place origins for anyone via their penchant for a polo shirt with a little horsey on it.

The casual accoutrements of the monied, traditionally high status order have been steadfastly co-opted by fashion over the past few years. So much so that Coco Gauff wore a full Miu Miu head to toe look on winning the French Open at the weekend. Truly a merging of minds and dress codes.

Coco Gauff in Miu Miu at the French Open

The first time designers plundered soft style, it was to ape the gritty, cultural resonance of subcultures, imitating streetwear in the form of oversized hoodies and tracksuits and bulky trainers, that allowed millionaires to cosplay being poor while still getting to wear Balenciaga.

Being rich was uncool, dressing like it even worse, and convoluted levels of irony in order to avoid looking flush were constructed. But subcultures have been killed off by sanctimonious internet group-think and the demonisation of the working classes into assuming all are chubby Reform voting Brexiteers, barely worthy of pity let alone imitation.

Poor people aren’t “liberal” enough to be relevant to the zeitgeist conversation anymore, goes the thinking. Thinness too, becomes the preserve of the wealthy, paying to pen-their weight into oblivion, the not-ugly-but-poor masses left to wait until the NHS can stomach coughing up to remove their excess.

And so fashion is back on more predictable, tidy terms, with obvious, status-laden, rich people style becoming covetable. As indeed have rich people themselves - witness the peak cultural levels of dissecting the mores of the monied - from Succession and White Lotus to Trump and Bezos. Will the billionaires save the world? No, but we’ll be too busy Google image searching their Loro Piana sweaters to care.

Having flooded and exhausted the market with its casuals-inspired casuals, fashion turned to its customers’ natural habitats, the tennis club, the yacht, the rugby pitch. Polo tops, crisp(in) blue shirts, cricket jumpers, boat shoes and sweaters worn across the shoulders have taken on a new, more everyman appeal, cited as basic essentials. In their mass adoption shedding the Sloane-y overtures which generally put more egalitarian-minded people off.

Alongside this, came a fetish for “club” wear, but less Fabric, more Kellerman’s. See the rise of Sporty & Rich and faux coat of arms insignia (duped everywhere from M&S to Joules) and influencers thirst-trapping their unpaid way around Oxfordshire’s swarm of country club style hotels.

Palace Skateboards rugby tops for the ladz

The vogue and popularity for neater off-duty wear is understandable. Hoodies aren’t ideal in an office, but a rugby or polo style top offers a level of corporate coalescence that won’t offend. Equally it fits into the post-pandemic (sorry for mentioning it) hangover of comfort above all else and a deliberate slant towards hybrid occasion-less dressing.

For versions less obvious, see Talia Byre, whose lamé gold and pink rugby shirts are just subversive enough, she also does a cracking poplin style. Palace Skateboards versions manage to skirt between street wear and posh-ism rather expertly, while for the keen workhouse-adjacent aesthete see Ella Griffee, a slow-fashion stalwart from Cornwall who produces 16 items a month by hand herself. Her corduroy rugby shirts, inspired by her father’s old tops, are quietly on point.

What you might wonder, are the actual old school posh club lot wearing? Well! A trip to Fulham’s prestigious river side members club offered riveting insight. It is a place where small children are dressed in tailoring and sixty something women play tennis in full whites and mini skirts; tote bags are Fortnum & Mason, Lulu Guinness for Waitrose. I also spotted a cloth bag printed with “I love farmers markets” in a pleasing coup of endearing self-assuredness; mummies are perfectly yummy in floral midis or cropped white jeans. Better yet, bedecked in pink gingham, bending down into the Yoyo pushed by baby dearest’s Filipino nanny. No one is fat.

The octogenarian patriarch is happily ensconced with his broadsheet of choice, wearing his old new Hackney uniform of beige chino, blue shirt, matching blue sock and blue sweater placed, yes, across the shoulders. Interestingly the middle aged member has moved on. Over his Sunday shirting he is in the hedge fund, tech-bro warmer of choice, a lightly padded slender-fitted gilet, albeit with a sockless, suede loafer.

Kylie’s tits!

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