The bit of Islington you describe is a tiny fraction of the borough (literally one street!) and not representative at all. Like most parts of inner London of it is mostly estates, struggling/underfunded schools and hospitals and social problems and is from that point of view very similar to neighbouring boroughs like Hackney and Newham.
On the clothes thing, for working class people how you dress matters a lot and in my experience there has always been a strong culture of looking smart amongst working class men, although it's often far less important for women. Oddly, again in my experience, this is the opposite of how it works with the middle classes where the women are the ones who care about clothes and the men are the ones who by and large consider it a badge of pride in not caring about what clothes they wear.
Regarding Starmer, I think his main problem has been the same as Corbyn's and he has mostly just been uninspiring and shown a lack of leadership. He's really good at the lawyerly stuff like making Johnson look stupid at PMQs (which Miliband was also good at fwiw) but not much else. In retrospect, awful Centrist Dads like me were wrong to think that him being presentable and competent and not having Corbyn's obvious media and popularity problems would be enough to turn Labour's fortunes around.
So I am left with my original reaction of really not knowing what Labour can do next other than letting out a weary sigh when most of Labour go back to their default positions of blaming The Left! or The Right!
