If you wear certain clothes and ALSO are a barrister I'm guessing you're middle class even if your father was a coal miner, in that sense we have more mobility than 100 years ago, but somehow if you come from a long line of earls you can CHOOSE to be a coal miner and Tatler might write a feature on your clever way of making coal mining seem so cool and upper-class.
This is GENIUS!! Spot on, CHJR :)
I'm really enjoying myself with extremely cheap clothes at the moment. I'm middle-aged, on benefits, living in Tinytown, Shireshire, and a fashion addict - therefore at complete liberty to devise an eclectic look using chain stores, ebay, and garments I make from random materials. It's the most fun I've had with clothes since I left uni! I do maintain a narrow wardrobe of 'uniforms', too, for the rare events when I need to fit in with some group. The only uniform I shan't attempt is upper-middle-to-landed. It's easy to do with cast-offs in a town like this, but that's the very reason I don't. I'm surrounded by people who keep horses and shoot their dinner; clothes can't make me fit in with that and I'd be a wazzock to try.
I found the class systems of Latin American cultures fairly easy to comprehend. It's old-fashioned colonial elitism, with the usual nods to the arts for the poor & the dark of skin. Pretty much like us, but skin colour correlates very closely to class thanks to the slave heritage. I was fascinated to find the actual ruling classes speaking a different version of the language amongst themselves: archaic forms, but not the forms currently spoken in Spain and Portugal. I think there are parallels among other cultures (and it may be coming back here? I wonder.)
It's great being a foreigner! Your class isn't immediately discernible, so you can move easily around the social tiers :)