it doesn't prove that we _should_ not care about appearance or that "not caring" would be a consequence of eliminating class society. i don't think you're saying this, but too often people seem to think that, by resisting hegemonic norms of beauty, etc., then they are somehow participating in the elimination of class society or, at least, that there's a great deal at stake if we don't try.
i agree that these are socially, historically constituted standards. what i'm not comfortable with is the implication that over those 1000s of years of which you speak there were no attempts to adorn oneself and that those attempts were simply about class society. i'm pretty sure you don't mean this, though, do you?
all we really know is that hegemonic norms of beauty and attractiveness have accompanied class society and that those norms have often been defined by an elite. we don't really know if the desire to adorn oneself or to make one's surrounding and self as nice looking as possible is caused by class society.
and, even if it is, do we want to give it up? is it necessary to give it up, as long as those norms don't have any meaning--in the way some of us tried to argue it ought to be with sexual difference? "Yes, that's nice, you have a bigger penis than I do and you liked to be called a man. Next."
we can probably say that inequalities of income, welath, well-being, status, etc. have been reproduced, aided and abetted by hegemonic norms of beauty. those who fail to meet them have been sanctioned, particularly if those norms appear to be something one can actually _change_, an idea that becomes very powerful in the context of a society that assumes that status position is one's personal responsibility.
(My students from well-to-do NE backgrounds could tell me the difference between white trash and hick, identifying them by clothes, music, cars, food. they also marked differences between the morally superior hick who works hard and has proper moral values as opposed to the white trash who is a failure because s/he wants to remain poor. As others have pointed out, working class whiteness has been racialized, at first in attempts to show that they had different body types (bow legs, sway back, etc) and facial features (buck teeth, crooked teeth), as well as by defining what they wear, their comportment, hairstyles, complexions, posture, and diction as disposable attributes. Those who didn't shed them or try to shed them as best as possible are seen as responsible for their poverty.
we can also observe, perhaps arguably, that hegemonic beauty norms become detached from more stable, more monolithic religio-political systems with the rise of mass communication. today, hegemonic standards of beauty operate in a cultural-political terrain that is more fluid and dynamic, less under direct control of elites. this opens up fissures where people can carve out spaces for defining alternative standards by which to measure oneself--to resist dominant hegemonic beauty norms. that doesn't make the resistant norms any less normative or any less about the socio-historical constitution of style, taste, beauty.
as Hilary (IIRC) points out, these "rebellious" rejections of hegemonic standards of beauty become another aesthetic where "the natural look" becomes beautiful and the "make up look" becomes ugly and sometimes it signifies a certain cultural-political orientation.
Kelley