Deborah Hill Cone: It's more than just fashion - it's a statement

My anti-tattoo column last week got quite a swashbuckling response. Steve said: "I've always thought a tattoo was a marker on a person indicating a lack of capacity to imagine possible futures. That skull and crossbones so cool when 15 might one day be a liability."

The sheer number of responses made me wonder whether there was a bit more to this than superficial questions of taste. Aesthetics have been on my mind since seeing The September Issue last week, a documentary about Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue magazine, and genius creative director Grace Coddington.

The film comes at a time when it is becoming more acceptable for brainy people to admit to being interested in pursuits previously considered frippery. Especially if they take an anthropological approach to the significance of fishnets over stockings, say, the subtext of class markers in GHD-straightened hair, or why Angel perfume was such a hit pong. It has suddenly become received wisdom that when people make decisions about their clothes or their general get-up - like tattoos - they are saying something profound.

Jane Clifton led the trend, writing a scholarly column on makeup in the 1990s, while female High Court judges are frequently better dressed under their robes than so-called "fashionistas". God I hate that word.

And it is not just girls. An Oxford-educated friend of mine - Allan Botica - lent me a book about perfume by a scientist called Luca Turin who manages to be both very serious and very funny about smells. "Ralph Lauren's Intuition feels like people you want to like until they do the wrong thing halfway through the evening, like use the phrases 'passed away' or 'fast track'." Or about Oiro: "Third World air freshener for the price of a flight to where they would sell it for 25 cents." This sort of writing appreciates the nuances of class and status. Thus Gucci's Envy is a fragrance for a woman "at once seraphic and suburban, complete with the sort of suppressed anger that such a creature would feel at being reincarnated as a florist in eastern New Jersey".

If just a spritz of scent can say all that, a Celtic band or a tattooed anklet must be shouting something. Not sure what. Possibly that we are a nation of reverse snobs where everything lower-class is good and anything upper-class is bad.

It is part of our chippiness as a nation - our collective shoulder has a huge chip on it. (To start a fight, men used to put chips of wood on their shoulder and challenge others to "try to knock it off".) Not sure what this perceived grievance or sense of inferiority is about, but it manifests itself in the fetishisation of underdogs and everything attached to them, including tattoos.

Another correspondent, Robert, emailed me and said: "Unfortunately things do tend to revolve around or tend towards the lowest common denominator." You don't say.

deborah@coneandco.com