WHO WOULD have imagined that sleek stretch limos could hurtle their way so quickly through the class system? Not very long ago they were associated with the outrageously well heeled. Now they are chiefly populated by gaggles of girls on hen nights, tanked up on cheap wine and greeting passers-by with lewd hand gestures. Stretch limos are an object lesson in the dangers of “proletarian drift”.

Proletarian drift describes the vulgarisation of once luxurious products and services as they slowly trickle their way down to the lower orders. The term was first coined — and promptly abbreviated to prole drift — by Paul Fussell, the curmudgeonly American cultural critic, in his 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.

A master of dyspeptic hauteur, Fussell railed against the tendency for any product or innovation to become tainted as soon as it began its descent into the grubby hands of the masses. Somewhat ahead of his time, Fussell argued that the education system was a perfect example of proletarian drift. A generation ago, he pointed out, it was only the rich or the very bright who went to university. With the steady expansion of higher education, however, it shed most of its exclusivity and its cachet.

The idea of proletarian drift has moved on since Fussell left it. Among fashion designers who want to retain the cachet of exclusivity, proletarian drift can now be a commercial liability. Much to the chagrin of haute couture, some of the most famous designer brands have quickly been colonised by the lower classes. Burberry, once the preserve of country-estate dwellers, is fast becoming the sine qua non of chav chic.

At its most nuanced, prole drift is as much about taste as it is about produce. Buffets, for example, were once the preserve of ritzy hotels and the enormously affluent. Nowadays, however, every half-built holiday resort hotel has its own buffet, and guests who arrive in the dining room are confronted with bowls of lank salad and greying potatoes. Hotels at the higher end of the market have, as a consequence, turned against them.

At its most poisonous and patrician, on the other hand, prole drift becomes an all-encompassing reference to everything that has become lowbrow or infra dig. But not everything that has drifted as far as the proles can reliably be scorned. After all, everything from the foreign package holiday to the washing machine started out as a luxury before it became democratically available. Proletarian drift is really a kind of status anxiety, felt most viscerally by those who know that their money is no longer enough to separate themselves from the crowd. Forced to muck in with the oiks in economy class, all one can do is to turn up one’s nose.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden