Abstract : I will discuss the new ?subtle? version of Stiefel-Whitney classes introduced by Alexander Smirnov and me. In contrast to the classical classes of Delzant and Milnor, our classes see the powers of the fundamental ideal, as well as the Arason invariant and its higher analogues, and permit to describe the motives of the torsor and the highest Grassmannian associated to a quadratic form. I will consider in more details the relation of these classes to the J-invariant of quadrics. This invariant defined in terms of rationality of the Chow group elements of the highest Grassmannian contains the most basic qualitative information on a quadric.