What defines a person's position in social relations? I am afraid that even kindergarten children will give a "standard answer" without thinking: the size of official positions and the amount of wealth. However, according to paul fussell, a famous cultural critic and professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, it is a mixture of a series of subtle and unconscious behavioral characteristics that determines a person's social status. In other words, a person's social status is determined by taste, cultivation and style. This "hierarchical standard" for measuring people is incompatible with the popular "social status view". Some people say that today's China is at the crossroads of social hierarchy: the myth of an equal society has been broken for decades, and people's view of social hierarchy has been rapidly updated. The most powerful factors driving this change are power and money. Grasping the size of power and money is redefining people's social status. So people don't understand: Is this the social ideal we want to achieve? In this context, after reading Paul's style, we may strongly feel another dimension of the author's efforts, that is, to provide a new observation basis for social classification. That is to say, in today's society, with the continuous improvement of people's quality of life and the obvious progress of social concepts, social grades should not be simply divided by standards such as power and powerlessness, wealth and no money, and property and no property. As we all know, discussing people's rank or position in society is not an easy topic. Who is tall and who is low? How to identify and what are the criteria for identification? Stylistically, Paul did not answer these questions through academic and social research, but bypassed the theoretical debate and analyzed and judged people's social class from the characteristics of people's clothing, food, housing, transportation and daily speech. In the book, the author uses a lot of irony, narrates humor and humor, and observes and shows all aspects of American social life to the maximum extent, which is impossible without keen insight and social criticism. Therefore, this book is not an academic research monograph on social status, but a guide to observe the representation of social class. Another major feature of this book is that every reader can't help thinking about the life of himself and the people around him during the reading process, and then testing the social class of himself and others according to the characteristics of words and deeds put forward by the author, or feeling satisfied, or (more often) ashamed and ashamed, and even feeling a little inexplicable anger, because you find that what you have been pursuing is actually tasteless, and you are a person with no style. In particular, it will be embarrassing to find that many people around you are not as classy and tasteful as you thought before. Therefore, every time this book is published not only in the United States, but also in China, the evaluation is always different. On the one hand, it received rave reviews, on the other hand, it was severely criticized. But after reading this book, I always feel that although forssell discussed the hierarchical phenomenon in American society in the late 1970s, with the acceleration of global economic integration, especially the deepening of the cultural influence of the United States on other countries in the world, the phenomenon of "people are divided into nine classes" described in the book seems to have found a sad counterpart in China at present. In other words, if the social stratum that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States is a mirror, many people around us can see from it that they are vulgar and ugly, and thus begin to pay attention to cultivating taste and lifestyle. Of course, it is very difficult to change people's social status evaluation criteria, not to mention that we have a tradition of worshipping power and money since ancient times. So, after reading Style, my girlfriends said that Paul said a bunch of correct nonsense. Although there is a sense of melancholy and ridicule, it can inspire us to deeply reflect on some previous practices of pursuing power and money for the so-called status rise, not to mention that taste and style can be shaped by everyone. □ Zhao Qijin