Class and Classy

“Classy.” It’s a word that drips with quiet smugness – used to describe things like string quartets, Georgian terraces, hand-carved bannisters and chandeliers the size of Yugoslavia. Say it in a soft voice and it conjures visions of candlelit refinement, silver cutlery, and a tasteful nude or two. But there’s a delicious irony lurking just beneath the polished veneer of good taste. Because most of what’s called “classy” was created not by the aristos, but by people they wouldn't have let through the tradesman’s entrance unless they were carrying it.

Let’s start with the obvious: the grand houses. Stately piles admired in coffee table books and plundered by Netflix for period dramas didn’t spring fully formed from the loins of dukes. They were dreamed up by architects – Wren, Soane, Pugin – men of obsessive brilliance who sweated every cornice, column and cloister. The gentry just pointed at a plot and said, “Make it impress the neighbours,” then disappeared on a Grand Tour while someone else worked out the drainage.

Those intricate bannisters and filigree gates that scream “old money”? Made by smiths with more artistry in their soot-covered fingers than the entire House of Lords. Furniture? Chippendale – not the oiled hunks in bowties, but the real one, a Yorkshire lad who invented posh taste for people too rich to develop their own. He made elegance from timber. They made heirlooms from his invoices.

And then there's the art. Ceiling frescoes. Portraits. Allegorical scenes full of cherubs flinging fruit about. Painted by men like Michelangelo, Velázquez, and Gainsborough – not to express themselves, mind you, but to flatter a patron with all the charm of a mouldy potato. These weren’t bohemian visionaries roaming freely through creativity. They were underpaid service providers with a brush and a deadline, politely stifling their creative instincts in exchange for room, board, and the vague promise of posthumous recognition.

Even music – that most refined of arts – was crafted by composers with the economic stability of a jugged hare. Haydn, Mozart, Bach – endlessly composing fugues for bored counts who’d nod off halfway through the andante. The music was sublime. The patrons were not.

And what did all this produce? A world in which the word “classy” clings, like a limpet, to the people who commissioned the thing – never those who made it. The actual taste – the structure, the form, the soul – came from below stairs. The credit, predictably, stayed upstairs.

Fast forward to now and you’d think things might have changed. But no – we’ve simply replaced powdered wigs with Patagonia gilets. Today’s “classy” is all clean lines, neutral palettes, and artfully distressed flooring. The modern gentry – hedge funders, oligarchs, tech bros called Zac – still can’t draw a straight line, but they’re more than happy to buy “bespoke” ones.

Take furniture. Reclaimed timber tables, brass inlays, Japanese joinery – all crafted by skilled hands in sheds, sold to people who think craftsmanship means it came with a little card explaining the tree it used to be. The artisan? Paid in exposure and lower back pain. The buyer? Proudly proclaims they support “local makers” – ideally ones based just out of sight.

Modern art? It now lives in freeports – temperature-controlled tax dodging bunkers where paintings by dead geniuses are hoarded as “assets.” No one sees them. That’s not taste. That’s cultural taxidermy.

Even classical music survives – but only just. Kept alive by grant money and grey-haired donors who insist on Beethoven, preferably with wine. School music departments have been gutted, and somewhere a would-be Britten is being told to take IT instead. Still, the wealthy swoon over a string quartet in a marquee, blissfully unaware that every note was arranged by someone who had to crowdfund their cello.

And then there’s fashion. Once tailored by master cutters in Soho, now mass-produced in Bangladesh and resold by brands who bang on about “heritage” while charging four figures for something that looks like a geography teacher’s pyjamas. “Classy” has become shorthand for anything expensive, quiet, beige, and utterly soulless – like the foyer of a boutique hotel or a Range Rover parked on a Cotswold lawn.

So let’s put it plainly: the word “classy” is a fraud. It was built on the backs of people with talent, skill, and little else – those who bent wood, forged iron, composed symphonies, and painted ceilings until their eyesight gave out. Meanwhile, the buyers preened, posed, and passed it all off as their own superior taste.

The next time someone gestures at a chandelier, an etching, or a £7,000 sideboard and sighs, “Isn’t it classy?” – remind them who really made it.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t their ancestors. It was someone cleverer, poorer, and probably dead by 40.