Designer labels aren't enough. In some circles, status is revealed by the kind of hairdo and makeup one wears.

Fergie Flops at the Palace," screams a Newsweek headline. Sarah Ferguson, the flamboyant commoner who became the Duchess of York when she wed Prince Andrew, may soon be out of a job because she didn't make a convincing royal. She was done in by her manners, her weight, her clothes, even her haircut.

What a shame. The duchess job has a lot of perks: not only Prince Charming but a sizable allowance, family jewels, and an estate decorated by the British designer of choice. The catch is, you're expected to look and act the part, not stand out like a sore thumb reminding everyone that the pearls you came with were from a shop on Sloane Street rather than inherited from Queen Victoria.

Alas, no matter how Fergie tried, she couldn't master the Windsor deportment, grooming, and dress codes. She was always a bit too flashy. Decolletage too deep. Thighs too fat. Outfits too overdone. Fergie had the common touch, but couldn't come close to Princess Diana's innate air of refinement. It's like comparing Sally Struthers with Audrey Hepburn.

Compounding the problem, historian David Starkey told Newsweek, is that the new crop of princesses are "modeling their patterns of love, marriage and sex on ... ordinary people."

Enough with the euphemisms. Why won't, anyone say it? Fergie not only looks middle-class, she acts middle-class.

While American politicians campaign by saying what they will do for the middle class, class is a word that makes Americans squirm. I' d like to have a stick of gum (just kidding) for every American who insists that class doesn't matter. If that were true, why do so many of us walk through life like Olympic judges, giving out 2.ls and 4.7s for hair color and then deducting points for "tacky" displays like pearlized lipstick, iridescent eye shadow, and body jewelry as soon as too many of the "wrong people" co-opt the stuff! The only thing tackier is appearing too concerned about tackiness, which brands one "a striver."

"One of the great taboos of the twentieth century is judging by appearances," says British design guru Stephen Bayley, author of Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. "Yet it is an irresistible temptation and unbelievably accurate." Because a look is a way of belonging, it's also useful for excluding, Bayley points out, recalling a friend who vowed he'd never trust a man who didn't wear laces in his shoes. "It's a fundamental social survival ritual to get the measure of the person you've encountered," he adds. "In social intercourse, people are desperate to trade up rather than down."

And so everyone plays the rating game. We are constantly giving people the quick once-over-making inferences and classifying them by their noses, nails, fitness and fatness, posture, teeth, grooming, hair texture and volume. The process is more an intuitive art than a science. "I just dropped off Jackie 0.," says a New York car-service driver. "She's very low-key. A classy woman looks right. You just know it."

The British, rigid in their class structure, can peg people blindfolded. "As soon as you open your mouth, you can be placed by social class," says Bayley, demonstrating the virtually imperceptible difference in the upper-class and upper-middle-class pronunciations of "Covent Garden."

Americans, on the other hand, rate achievement higher than ancestry and breeding. We give more weight to a person's taste and style in body maintenance, grooming, and manner. "The same dress Jackie has on ain't classy on some bimbo," says Bill Blass. "It has to do with the individual who wears it."

A major component of a woman's status is her body: a class emblem, a legible sign that can be read by those who know the vernacular.

"The body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste," says French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, a book based on studies correlating French taste with social-class membership in everything from music to food to body care. (The book is studded with trivia that would make great dinner-party conversation. For example, a preference for fish is upper-class because it requires chewing delicately in the front of the mouth.) Hair, makeup, body shape—even the body shape one aspires to (why else do people talk so much about their diets?)—are class markers, says Bourdieu, and he has the statistics to prove it.

Waist measurement "rises sharply as one moves down the social hierarchy," Bourdieu writes. "Working-class women...have less interest in their bodies...set less store by beauty and systematically devote less time, money, and interest to all personal care" than women in other classes.

Bourdieu wasn't the first to link appearance and class.

When British sociologist Bryan Turner said, "Our body maintenance creates social bonds, expresses social relations and reaffirms or denies them," he probably didn't have Tammy Faye Bakker in mind, but you'd have to be symbol illiterate not to read meaning into the millimeter of difference between the thickness of Tammy Faye's eyeliner and Diane Sawyer's or the eighth-of-an-inch difference between Cher's one-time claws and Paloma Picasso's short red nails ("the chic-est," says Donna Karan).

Nails can really nail a person, but their meaning is always being refined. Long nails used to say "lady of leisure." Now, says one image consultant, pityingly, "they're for lower-echelon women who wish they didn't have to work." Or for older upper-class women who haven't gotten the message.

Hair speaks volumes (and has since time immemorial)—not only about origins but also about membership, aspirations, and the money one has to spend on achieving and maintaining a higher status. In the eighteenth century, the taller a woman's hair, the higher her status.

Today, "the taller your hair, the more you're not in the executive office," observes Sandy Martin. Martin is the executive assistant to a high-level woman at one of Wall Street's top investment banking houses. She's also from Staten Island and counts herself among the group that was stereotyped—deliciously or degradingly, depending on one's political correctness—in the 1988 film Working Girl. (Fittingly, I talked to Martin and her friend Millie Rafael, another executive assistant, during their commute home on the Staten Island Ferry.)

Although they were much more understated than the secretaries in the film, they did not dispute the truth in the initial portrayal of the film's gum-chewing heroine, Tess (Melanie Griffith), with her high heels, too-short skirt, huge pouch bag, exaggerated makeup, and Big Hair—a look that has become the cliched embodiment of working-class taste, a class stigma.

What they did dispute was Tess's ability to master the appearance code of the executive suite—"simple, elegant, impeccable"—spelled out by her well-bred boss, played by Sigourney Weaver. With uncommon insight, Tess realizes she must get "serious hair to be taken seriously" and listens to diction tapes. In short order, she has her boss's job and man.

Martin and Rafael have no quarrel with the taste chasm portrayed in Working Girl. "In our firm," they say, "all the executive women look like Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver. They're soft-spoken. They don't wear makeup and don't need it. They wear classic bobs. They get frequent haircuts. They dress in the nicest clothes—simple. Their clothes don't crease. They all have nice silk scarves. They don't wear furs. They wear plain wedding bands. Their watches are classic: Movado, Concord. No gold Rolexes. Their watch straps are black lizard. No nail polish. They don't wear high heels. Their shoes are good, Ferragamo—you can tell by the metal trim. They carry little handbags. When they go to lunch, they'll just take a wallet, it's a good one. They don't run errands on their lunch hour. Instead, they'll go to a health club. They're all thin. The youngest ones are little twigs. They eat yogurt, salads, and fresh fruit and drink bottled water. Lots of water."

If the symbols are so easily understood, why don't the real-life executive secretaries imitate them? To get that thin it would take six months at La Costa and be too expensive," says Martin, who carries a Liz Claiborne handbag and is one of the few women on the ferry not wearing sneakers for her commute. Besides, the most important differences go beyond hairstyles or handbags, she says without animosity. "It's in their genes. They're part of a different world. They're not stuck-up. But there's a line between them and us." says Marlin, groping for words. "There are class differences." For every step up the social ladder, a higher degree of finesse is required. The Staten Island Ferry is oceans away from the uptight social swim at Le Cirque, where the uniform is an expensive body, a daily comb-out, professionally applied makeup, a Chanel suit, a chain-strap bag, and a general patina. In this crowd where everyone is upper-class, some are more esteemed than others. Beauty or good looks have gotten many women to this social level, but mastery of the self-presentation codes—being appropriately glamorous but not tastelessly ostentatious—is considered proof that one belongs. Few newcomers can make the grade without a retinue of coaches-personal shoppers, makeup artists, hairstylists, plastic surgeons, speech instructors, and etiquette advisers—plus suitable role models. Ex-flight attendant Susan Gutfreund, who married John Gutfreund, the former Salomon Brothers CEO, has had as her mentor for years Jayne Wrightsman, a onetime perfume saleswoman who achieved status by becoming an expert on fine French furniture and inheriting a large legacy from her husband Charles, an oil mogul.

"When a woman marries up, or when she perceives herself stepping up the social ladder and therefore requiring a classier act, she refines her image considerably," says Pablo Manzoni, a New York makeup artist who has been called on to polish the brass of many a trophy wife. "There is a strong desire to be extremely refined, to acquire the class to go with her new social station."

The initiate's first concern is "the size of her body," says Manzoni. "So the first stop is usually a spa. Then a personal trainer and a faithful exercise program are required. But there is only so much exercise one can do—so those with the means consider liposuction, which," he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially, "almost everyone I know has done. Once the image of your body has been improved so you can be very fashionable and can look absolutely wonderful in your clothes, you can accessorize that body to make it classier." The hair's style, cut, and color must be reconsidered, he says. "It's not easy to be a redhead" (as Fergie learned). "Blond is even harder," he says. Aside from Princess Grace, C. Z. Guest, the model Vendela, Blaine Trump, and a handful of others, "you cannot name a blond woman of class." Certainly not Madonna, "a very cheap, gorgeous bombshell," says Manzoni.

Whatever the hair color, "a recognizable hairstyle is a winning proposition," says Manzoni. "When you see a certain hairdo in a photo or across the room, it can only be Pat Buckley or Blaine Trump. One must work on everything that is close to the face, from the blouse color to the bulkiness of the jewelry.

"The makeup change," says Manzoni, "is the most subtle because it deals with smaller details—the tweezing and grooming of the brows, the way they are brushed with brow gel. In applying mascara, one needs to pay attention to separating the lashes so they don't look gloppy, but, instead, elegant and flirty. The shadow becomes more demure. The woman begins to read that frosteds are for show girls, so she goes to neutrals, pastels, beiges, earth tones that make her feel less made-up. The concession she can always make is the lipstick. She may go for the full mouth—maybe injecting the lips with something—which is so appealing to a man. It says 'kiss me.'"

Of course, the right look is just a status claim, not proof status. Certain women, says Manzoni, are hollow creations of makeup and hairdo efforts. He proposes a simple test for true class: Douse them with water and see who would survive. "Sophia Loren would. Not Ivana Trump. If you want," he says, "I'll get the bucket."