Young Fogey Envy

Any English Major worth his or her salt feels that life, or at least fashion, was so much better Between the Wars.  That is, WWI and WWII.  That's why watching Poirot and Marple eats up so much of an English Major's study time.  Murder plots be damned.  Impeccably cut suits, motoring caps, scarlet nails, Marceled peroxide hair and stockings are the reasons we watch.

 Edward VIII - more Sloane Ranger than Fogey, but still looks great

The clothing style in question, for men at least, is the Young Fogey style.  This is a very buttoned-down look with waistcoats, tweed, argyle-patterned socks, and three-piece suits.  Virginia Woolf famously described T.S. Eliot as someone who'd wear a four-piece suit.  The English Major loves this look because it is a) associated with literary greatness and b) worn with careless confidence.  A Young Fogey will walk around campus, hands in pockets, smoking a pipe and peering up at the foliage in an extremely casual manner.  He may be composing a new poem.  He may be mentally calculating how many places he needs at table for a dinner he's throwing for chums later.  They'll all take turns reciting poems backwards, for all we know.  He literally does not care what anyone thinks of him.  A Young Fogey makes life and majoring in English cool.

The young T.S.  

 The Young Fogey was resurrected and solidified as a Look in Oxbridge among the bright young things of the 1980s.  Check out the young A.N. Wilson.  I get a little swoony when I see this picture because he reminds me of yet another man in similar Young Fogey style, Anthony Howell as Detective Inspector Paul Milner.

Basket on a bicycle - only a Fogey could get away with it

Fogey-ish scarf and tie but given to unfogey-ish pursuits like investigating murders

The reason Young Fogeys get away with their look is because they are utterly and unshakably confident, a quality the English Major admires and envies.  Especially the American English Major.  What may fly in Britain will only be laughed at here, unless you have the confidence of a Sebastian Flyte and especially an Anthony Blanche.  All the upper-class characters in Brideshead are true badass mothers.

Also, we love the fact that Young Fogeys must have a very, very posh accent.  As Stephen Fry noted in The Liar, a public school accent pronunciation would render "toast" as "taste."  All vowels become close-mid front unrounded vowels.  "I seh, Chehles, do mehnd where you're gehing", and similar.