Critically adapting the principle of multum in parvo, we may say that the indices of a national culture's health appear as expressively in the mundane, symptomatic detail as in its official image or its major overt preoccupations. Juvenal identified the public's taste for 'bread and circuses' as a sign of Rome's decline, and we might argue the same of Britain's current addiction to cheap, exploitative entertainment. Yet with our eyes on that spectacular phenomenon, we may overlook other disturbing evidence. How many men, for example, now wear the traditional 'knife-edge' crease in their trousers, that visible emblem of personal discipline and ordered regularity? All-conquering denim (which, one gathers, it is de rigueur not to iron) has laid siege to the trouser-crease, demolished its citadel and isolated its surviving adherents. We do not speak of the 'stay-pressed' trouser, that upstart preference of the idle and indiscriminate.
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