'...one of my studs has got down a hole in the wall and I can't find my spare one. Could you possibly lend me one? It's only an ordinary gold one.' ....He hunted in a box and found a stud which was just sufficiently unlike...to make that young gentlemen conscious of it for the whole evening.
Studs shut men’s formal dress shirts for evening wear, instead of buttons, thus making for one of the quiet ways that a man could dress up with gold. This hapless young man appears in The Brandons published 1939. He is hopelessly in love with the young widow Mrs. Brandon, so his worries over clothing are even greater on that account. These wealthy English people move in circles where everyone changes their clothes for dinner--”dresses for dinner”-- and then servants came with the meal to the table. I realized you can only change for dinner easily if you are expecting someone else to make it and bring it out.
Angela Thirkell wrote novels from the 1930s through the 1950s. This one doesn’t have a lot of comments on clothing, it does give a good idea of how the upper-classes dealt with getting dressed. Or as we academics say, their clothing strategies.