A billboard advertising one of Kansas City’s most exclusive and expensive stores shows a young man with a knit watch cap, a pea jacket and a stubble of beard along with the message: “Clothing with an edge.” It struck me as curious that this shrine to elegance, sophistication and aristocratic taste would offer clothes that can be purchased in the cheapest discount bazaar. And I wondered: Have members of the underclass become the arbiters of style? Are there no longer any gentlemen to cater to, no dandies, no fops?

You wouldn’t be likely to encounter the fellow on the billboard at a polo match or at the country club sipping a whiskey sour after a round of golf. More likely, you’d see him peeling out of the parking lot in a battered pick-up truck with a deer rifle hanging from a rack and a bumper sticker with a suggestive comment about how steel workers or plumbers or pipefitters “do it.”

Is this the kind of customer the luxury store hopes to attract? For what? A welder’s cap, a pair of construction boots, a back brace for heavy lifting or an orange safety vest? The word “edge” suggests that he’s not to be messed with. A potential for violence lurks behind his eyes. He doesn’t get mad, he gets even. He lets the tire iron do his talking. Somehow, I find it hard to imagine him getting measured for a tux.

This is not to disparage manual laborers or to suggest that members of the “upper class” have any particular virtues. The billboard may indicate that class distinctions have vanished in America, which has to be a good thing. It just makes me wonder where we’re headed. We’ve come a long distance from the day when men shined their shoes and wore starched collars. We’ve come a long way in 50 years from Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in tails and patent leather pumps. Fred Astaire is unthinkable today. He’d be taken for a mad man and locked up.

We’ve been liberated from the straight jacket of formality and we ought to rejoice. But has something been lost? I remember a newspaper photo of men leaving the old ball park in Kansas City in the 50s, uniformly wearing white shirts, ties and fedoras. They weren’t members of the affluent elite. They were blue collar workers who took lunch buckets to work. Yet, they dressed up to go to the ball park. It was a special occasion and they wanted to look their best.

Today, it’s not unusual for people to attend church in their cutoff jeans and to take coffee in styrofoam cups into the pews. Men go to the ballpark in tank tops, their hairy armpits on display. Women expose their midriffs in public under the illusion that even a roll of blubber is beautiful to behold.

Many of the old ideas of manners and decorum were foolish. The Victorians were so obsessed with propriety that they covered piano legs with pantaloons. But according to intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, there may a connection between niceties and more important things.

“If the Victorians were concerned with the ‘small morals’ of life table manners, toilet habits, conventions of dress, appearance, conversation, greeting, and all the other ‘decencies’ of behavior it was because they saw them as the harbingers of morals writ large,” she wrote in “The De-moralization of Society,” adding that “the civilities of private life were the corollaries of civilized social life.”

Can anyone doubt that our liberation from social conventions has been accompanied by the rise of rude, inconsiderate and obnoxious behavior? Today, it’s taken for a sovereign right to violate the personal space of others by broadcasting inane cell phone conversations and loud, barbaric music in public. “Just do it,” is the Golden Rule today. Just do it and don’t worry about anyone but yourself.

The word “butt,” which was once considered unutterably crude, is now proudly proclaimed to advertise our most ignoble attribute. Comedians today rely on a single four letter word for half their laughs and audiences reward them with guffaws, as if they’d been treated to a sublime example of wit. Jenna Jamison is a “star” and the porn industry has its own academy awards. We’ve gone from “My Fair Lady” to “Urinetown” in a single generation.

Venturing down to the lower level of the fancy store to have a look at its “clothing with an edge,” I found paint-spattered jerseys, black gothic belts decorated with silver skulls, leather bracelets with metal studs that looked like bull dog collars, gym suits, pre-frayed jeans, army surplus camouflage jackets decorated with bat-winged skulls.

Talk about losing your way. What is the store doing but hastening its own extinction? Why not go down fighting, standing up for something such as classic style and good taste? But who stands for anything these days? Who has the courage to stick to his guns?

I think I know where we’re headed. The day is not far off when we communicate with one another by yawps, grunts, snorts and growls, when we move about on all fours, take our meals from troughs and attend great occasions such as weddings, funerals and ball games dressed in loin cloths and thongs.