One Direction and Class Part III: Some thoughts on how they've been presented
This is a follow-up of two previous posts where I discussed what we did and didn’t know about One Direction’s class background (particularly Harry & Louis’). It focuses on the probably more interesting questions of how their class-backgrounds were constructed and sold within Britain.
Five teenagers have just been put together in a band to perform on X-Factor, three are uncomplicatedly working-class and two are probably lower middle-class (I’m going to assume from here on out that the best guesses I made in my previous two posts are true), how did that become four working-class lads and the posh one?
If you’ve watched their season of the X-factor you probably know parts of the answer, although you may not have recognised it. Once you understand the class-signifiers it becomes incredibly clear that positioning yourself as working-class is an important part of winning the X-factor. The final four (besides One Direction) were: Rebecca Fegusson the lovely insecure single Mum from Liverpool, Matt Cardle the sincere builder from Essex, young Cher from the Midlands. If you don’t know the UK – all those areas are places with strong working-class associations (of very different types). But the place that the outsider can really see the importance of class is Katie Weissel, from North London. As you watch the show now it’s clear that you’re missing some stuff – that part of the story is playing out in the papers. The tabloids don’t like her – they don’t like someone that posh on X-factor (Katie Weissel is not wildly posh – but she has a slightly posh accent, comes from North London and is a woman. That’s more than enough for the Daily Mail and the Sun). The tabloids portrayed Katie as someone who thought she was better than other people – and that was deadly.
The X-factor winner is supposed to be of the people, not better than. In America, what works on reality TV is a story of overcoming hardship – of things being terrible and then rising above. That’s not necessary in Britain, what’s necessary in Britain is that no-one can suggest that you’re above yourself (this is particularly clear if you read Cher’s Wikipedia page – her Romani background wasn’t mentioned at all on X-factor).
There’s another side to it as well – a positive sort of identification. Liverpool has the strongest sense of class and place identification of anywhere in the UK, which is why Liverpool was emphasised particularly hard by Rebecca and her team (if you think you hate the Sun you have no idea. You cannot buy, sell or giveaway the Sun in Liverpool – and you haven’t been able to for 26 years, because of the way the Sun covered the Hillsborough disaster). Or when Wagner tries to put Cheryl Cole down for coming from a council estate – and she basically says “fuck you – yes I’m from a council estate and I’m not ashamed of it.” That plays well.
One Direction has an advantage in that sense: Ireland, Doncaster, Bradford and Wolverhampton (there isn’t much of a voting base in Holmes Chapel or Cheshire). But you can also see them playing it carefully – always grateful, always impressed – no-one can accuse them of thinking they’re better than the competition or their voters.
There’s a seriousness to this. For about thirty or forty years, from the Beatles till recently, music was an area of British society that was more open to working-class people. There were many entry paths to success in the music industry – and lot of those were open to working-class kids from around Britain. Over the last thirty years a lot of those paths have closed down and now working-class and lower-middle class kids in Wolverhampton, Bradford, Doncaster and Holmes Chapel are unlikely to see a way into the music industry apart from these glitzy, life-changing talent shows.
Because class isn’t just about money – it’s about connections – particularly in Britain, which is still basically quite small. An upper middle-class kid in Iowa might believe that the only way into the music industry is a glitzy talent show. An upper middle-class kid in Britain is likely to have some connections – their parents will have gone to university with someone who knows someone (look into Mumford and Sons background for a classic example).
This is why I keep saying – if either Harry or Louis were upper-middle-class there’s no way they’d be on X-factor. X-factor is a bad deal – you don’t make much money or have much control. X-Factor is for people who don’t see another way into the music industry. And we actually have a classic counter-example here – because Ed Sheeran also decided to start making music at 17. But his parents had connections into the art and music world. So rather than going on X-factor, he moved to London and gave it a go. That seemed possible to him and so he’s got a career with so much more freedom and ability to express himself (you may notice that this way where working-class people can get into the music industry only under the most exploitative conditions silences working-class voices and reproduces systems of exploitation. It is all Thatcher’s fault – and also Blair’s).
So there’s a reason that the largely working-class voters who pick the X-factor winner want it to be someone like them and therefore why contestants perform their ordinariness.
My impression (and I haven’t watched all the Xtra-factor stuff – I’d be really interested if people knew more) is that One Direction were generally being portrayed as five working-class lads during X-factor. There wasn’t a lot of “Harry is the posh one”.
Launching One Direction in the UK
In September 2011, One Direction were properly launched on Britain. While British audiences obviously knew who they were, this was when their images were made. Newly styled and fully media trained, the many interviews in September are an excellent way of understanding how their class images were emphasised in this period.
Yorkshire & Midlands Accents
I think one of the things that it’s hardest for people outside of Britain to understand is how closely class and region are associated. In particular, anyone with a Yorkshire or Midlands accent (Zayn & Louis and Liam respectively) will be seen as working-class. If you are, or you want to be seen as, middle-class the first thing you would do is lose or soften your accent. Their 2011 interview with Chris Moyles I think is really revealing about class positioning, because Moyles discusses class (and class signifiers) directly and repeatedly. Forty-two seconds into the interview he’s imitating Zayn’s accent and her returns to their accents throughout the interview, which I think gives a sense of how important accent is to positioning in British society (Moyles also comes from Yorkshire).
One of the best ways to get a sense of this is to watch British comedy. Part of a British comedy creating a persona is to position themselves in class-terms. Accents and regional identities are a huge part of how they do this. In particular, any comedian who has a strong accent from ‘up North’ uses that, and the working-class position it comes with, as part of their act. The one exception I can think of is Jon Richardson – a Northern comedian who is primarily presented as a competitive nerd on one of the show he’s on. Owen Jones, a left-wing commentator from Yorkshire and Manchester, regularly gets accused of ‘pretending to be working class’, because of his accent. Even though it’s his real accent and he’s always been clear about his actual family background.
Or to give another example, Matt Baker comes from Durham (which is coal country like Yorkshire, but further North). He doesn’t have nearly as much of an accent as any of the 1D boys. He’s a TV presenter who has worked doing the most soft-ball easy going type interviews. First he was on children’s TV, Countryfile (which is a rural show) and then he was on morning TV. One day, while interviewing the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron he said “One more question – how on earth do you sleep at night?” The Prime Minister stuttered about sleeping quite well, as if he didn’t understand the connotations and the clip went viral.
In the aftermath, when looking for an explanation why such a benign presenter had gone rogue – the explanation ‘well he’s from Durham’ was used again and again (here’s a report from a right-wing newspaper. Matt Baker does not come from a working-class coal-mining family – his parents ran a shop and then a farm. But his regional class identity is as important individual class identity in terms of how he’s seen (and in this case how he behaved). In the British context, it makes perfect sense that anyone from Durham would stick in a knife in a Conservative Prime Minister given half a chance (the same is true for Yorkshire and I remain disappointed in Zayn and Louis not taking advantage of the opportunities they had during filming ‘One Way or Another’).
The point of all this is that it was incredibly easy for 1DHQ to position Zayn, Louis and Liam as working-class and would have been very difficult for them to position them as anything else. If they had wanted to portray them as middle-class, for any reason, the first thing they probably would have done would have been accent training.
In that Chris Moyles interview he draws attention to the fact that Liam accent isn’t that strong. My ear for accents isn’t great – so I find when we get finally tuned I miss things entirely. I’d be interested in someone who was good with accents identifying how Liam’s changed. The point I would make is that Liam definitely still sounds working-class, but less strongly from the midlands – and that’s probably mostly about the difference between how the Midlands and Yorkshire are seen, but that is a guess.
Working-class lads made good
As well as being difficult to position Zayn, Louis and Liam as middle-class, there would have been very little point. There was real value to 1DHQ to being able to position them as working-class lads made good.
I think this can be particularly confusing to outsiders – because Britain is such a class-bound society and class matters so much – I think it’s easier to assume that it’s always better to be higher up the class-structure (particularly given an American view of class, which is much more centred on money. While that is definitely true in terms of opportunities and wellbeing and so on, it’s not as true in terms of the way people see you. It’s not a simple hierarchy, because the class system so structures people’s lives there’s a long history of working-class people being: “fuck you, middle-class and ruling-class culture aren’t better than ours.”
In terms of how you position your boyband – there is real power to the narrative they went with. “Working-class lads made good” has connections all the way back to the Beatles. It gives you a reason to root for them and support them; they seem like underdogs (and one of the key aspects of 1D’s marketing strategy has always been to make them seem vulnerable – no matter how wildly successful they are – they still desperately need fan help). You can see the ‘working-class lads made good’ narrative from the very first frames of ‘This is Us’.
By August 2011 1DHQ and Caroline had settled on the styling they would use for their first year as One Direction. Each boy had a ‘look’, which is conveniently (and weirdly since they’d well abandoned this styling by September 2013) outlined in the This is Us profiles Sony did of them.
To me (and I’m far from an expert on men’s clothing so I’m happy to be corrected), they don’t wear clothes that are directly coded working-class. Certainly blazer-wearing Harry, Suspenders wearing Louis, American-jacket wearing Zayn and all buttons done up plaid-shirt wearing Liam don’t look much like what 17-19 year-old working class lads would actually wear (or anyone would, but that is obviously the point). Niall and his hoodies (an article of clothing that had been rather a focus of anxiety over working-class young people in the UK during the previous decade) is nearer to what someone might wear – but they’re still incredibly bright.
I haven’t really gone into the way that Zayn’s presentation was negotiating the interaction between race and class. At times there’s been an eagerness to associate him with white working-class people and culture (his Mum as the representative of his family, but also Perrie). But I do think it’s telling that his presentation is one that just makes very little sense to the British class system. American College jackets have no British class-system associations – and were a way, in the British context (although they would have served a very different function in America) of both de-classing and de-racing (I use that term rather than – white-washing – as I don’t think the styling necessarily presented him as white in the way it might in the US).
While their clothes aren’t supposed to directly make British audiences see them as working-class, I think there is an indirect class signifier in the way they dress. They are very much dressing up for the audience, particularly when they’re on stage. This is part of the working-class lads made good narrative – that they are performing for you (think of the early Beatles performing in suits and ties).
In particular, the key here is that they are seen to be dressing up for the audience (obviously every musician is dressing for the audience). If you compare them with Mumford and Sons – who is my random comparison as an actually posh band of the same period – their clothes aren’t that different – but the way they’re styled makes it clear that One Direction are dressing for you, while Mumford and Sons are not. Notice that (at this stage) their buttons are all done up and they look bright and put together – you’re supposed to believe that they’re doing that for you, the audience.
Why did One Direction want to come across as dressing up for a British audience? I think the class reasons (and there were multiple reasons, but this post is about class) can be seen in this truly disgusting Mirror interview from August 2011 (notice the slightly more casual version of their stage clothes they’re all wearing). The London riots had happened in the days before the interview and the interviewer bizarrely opens suggesting the main thing that stopped 1D from joining the looting is that they get free stuff anyway. Anxieties about working-class young people are basically a feature of societies with a working-class, but the interview gets a sense of how all pervasive those anxieties were. In this context, One Direction are compliant. They will dress nicely and be polite. They will answer whatever appalling questions the interviewers give them. They are not the dangerous scary working class young people who are wearing hoodies and stealing sneakers, but an antidote to that – an imaginary, compliant working-class group of young people. (At the same time, as NME guy on This is Us suggests, they also had to come across as ‘a little bit anarchic’. Being part of a boyband is all about negotiating contradictory requirements).
The final point about their styling is that Harry’s blazers and pocket squares are noticeably posher than the others’ outfits. Again Chris Moyles draws attention to this in his interview, and all the others talk about how Harry is and dresses posher than them
(Sorry for harking on about that one interview so much – but it is incredibly telling. He talks class and class signifiers for the first 17 minutes of the interview – and then turns to audience questions. There’s heaps more in that interview than what I’ve talked about. For example, Louis at that point described himself as not a Donny Rovers fan. How much of his hardcore Rovers fandom since then is conscious positioning to fandom to make him seem more from Doncaster? How much is it just a function of being away from home makes him identify from the area more strongly? What else is going on?)
The question for me isn’t about why they positioned Louis, Zayn, Liam and Niall. There are so many reasons to position a British boyband in general and the English three in particular, as working-class. It’s why they position Harry as ‘the posh one’. And they did, not just in their styling. In the Chris Moyles interview, when they’re talking about football Moyles pretends to be surprised that Harry likes football (because that’s largely, although not exclusively a working-class sport) and suggests he should be into rugby (which in England is a posh sport), Harry counters by suggesting he plays polo (which is a ridiculous ball game on horses) and Louis adds that Harry might play Lacrosse (a private school sport). They’re all playing around with class-images here, and consciously, but to play around with a class image it has to exist in the first place.
And I think the first answer to that – is that in 2011 and 2012 in the UK Harry Styles wasn’t being positioned as that posh. He was the poshest member of One Direction, but he was not positioned a ‘posh’ celebrity in the UK sense (now I think his “Harry Styles” superstardom has overshone whatever people ever knew about his class-background). There are heaps of posh celebrities in Britain – as well as celebrities that bring their poshness into their narrative. They went to private schools and elitist universities, have very different accents to Harry and they stay the hell away from reality TV. No-one in Britain would actually think that he played polo (which is some high-level aristocratic posh shit – probably even Jack Whitehall doesn’t play polo – although Cara Delevingne might have gone to a few matches).
I don’t know how much choice 1DHQ had in positioning Harry as a little posher than the others. As I’ve said repeatedly, audiences would respond differently to band members from Cheshire and band members from Yorkshire. One of the big questions that I have – is when were fans told the story about the band practicing in Harry’s stepdad’s bungalow. Was it on X-factor itself? Was it through social media? Or was that part of the story only made public later? (I’ve done some searches, fans clearly knew the story by September 2011 – but I don’t know when they learned it). If fans already knew that Harry’s step-Dad had a spare bungalow and he came from Cheshire, then positioning Harry as slightly posher than the others was probably the easiest choice (any time they spent trying to persuade the audience of otherwise – for example talking about the pub he used to live above – would take time away from the stories they were prioritising).
But I also think they made it work for them and maybe saw having Harry as slightly posher as an advantage. It helped with giving the boys easily tagged identities – which was obviously a clear part of their strategy. It might also have made some of the other stories they were trying to tell easier – for example – a working-class 17 year-old ‘going out’ with a 32 year-old is probably fundamentally more threatening than Harry Styles, the little bit posh one.
I want to push back a bit against the common fan response to learning about their actual backgrounds – which is to suggest that Harry’s slightly posher persona was him being put above the others, by 1DHQ. I can certainly see that it has functioned in that way in various times. But I don’t necessarily think that’s how it would have been received when the band was first launched. Remember in Britain the majority of people identify as working-class; to be working-class is to be normal and relateable.
I was planning to follow this up with some discussion about how they were presented and received in America. But this is already very long, and the more I wrote it – the more I realised I was the wrong person for that job. There is so much about the way Americans conceive of and discuss class that I straight up don’t understand. But I do want to briefly discuss some of the ways their class-images (particularly Harry & Louis’, because I do know more about them than the other three) have moved and been used over the years. This will be based on what I’ve seen from fan discussions and focused on America, in the same way the way that the fandom is.
In America (and in fandom), Harry’s current class image is very much the equivalent of an Upper Middle-class urban coastal liberal. This is very much a more recent development and not how he would have initially been launched or seen and in the UK. This is not at all the associations that were Holmes Chapel is rich rural and conservative. The UK equivalent of that sort of coastal liberal-class is a North London Guardian reader.
There’s also a disconnect with Louis (I genuinely don’t know how Liam, Niall and Zayn are seen in class terms within the fandom now – I’d love for people’s thoughts). Heaps of fans see him as not just working-class, but having lived an early life of actual deprivation. This becomes clear when people are shocked that he has a tidy house and reasonably normal consumer goods like a flat-screen TV. As far as I know (and I’ll confess to not having read the books – which is obviously a big part of 1D myth-making) – Louis has never described himself as going without. The only reference I can think of to the Tomlinson family not having something because of money is Jay’s recent facebook post about not buying 5 children overpriced motorway snacks on the way to the X-factor audition. Jay’s job isn’t any kind of fandom secret, it’s always been front and centre. Obviously partly this is the difference between British and America about what ‘working-class’ means, but I think there is more going on.
1DHQ has clearly been prepared to use popular understandings of their class positions in various ways. The most obvious is that both Harry’s urban-coastal-liberal persona and Louis’ super-working-class persona have been utilised to help maintain a het-image. Everything from supporting the Lesbian and Gay Swtichboard, to dancing with rainbow flags, even ‘not that important, can be presented as Harry being supportive and open-minded as appropriate to his persona. Whereas when Louis broke up with Eleanor, they continued to closet him by upping the trapping of working-class masculinity – most noticeably by providing him a group of working-class lads to party with at all times (gosh heteronormativity is weird – in order to persuade everyone Louis is gay they have to surround him with men at all times).
But I don’t think the current class images of Louis or Harry are entirely 1DHQ’s doing – they are at least partly fan created. The most obviouslexample of this is Kale-loving Harry. Fandom started going on about Harry & kale long before James Corden did. While Harry himself and the way Harry is sold is part of Harry the ‘healthy-eating’, kale-loving, upper-middle-class urban-liberal, that part of Harry’s persona has been magnified and emphasised by fans.
I wonder a lot about fans’ image of Louis. To be blunt, despite all evidence to the contrary, a lot of fans seem to believe that Louis family must be poor, because Jay has had lots of children with different men and had her first child at 19. Beyond that it seems like the construction of Louis as poor has two specific roles in fandom – one for his supporters and one from his detractors. I’ve definitely seen multiple posts positioning Louis as virtuous because of his imaginary deprived background. But it’s also a really common fandom trope to basically position him and his family as ‘white trash’.
I do think that fans have co-created the current class narratives around One Direction, co-created them with Harry, Louis, Niall, Zayn and Liam as people who have class-identities and with 1DHQ who is interested in projecting and using those identities.
I hope this post asks as many questions as it answers. There’s a lot I don’t know that fans who have been around longer would (I get the feeling that their images haven’t been stable, but have changed over time). I also think someone who had a better understanding of fandoms’ class image of Niall, Zayn and Liam would have a lot to add.
Why did they get Louis such a posh girlfriend (Eleanor absolutely oozes genuine poshness)? How did Americans read their class position when they were being introduced as squeaky-clean moppets in 2012? Why do fans see Louis as so deprived (is it really just misogynist ideas about Jay)? Why was Niall dressed so much more casually than the others – was that about class or other positioning? Why did Liam lose a bit, but just a bit, of his accent?
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