It’s Friday evening in Parsons Green and I’m standing in a pub garden populated by men in padded gilets. I’ve been deployed here on assignment and, just as I begin to duly take notes (“sighthounds”, “Barbours”, “too many signet rings”), a group of women in their 20s squeeze onto a neighbouring table with a bucket of house white and several thick-stemmed wine glasses. I quickly learn that they’re regulars here at The White Horse (known locally as The Sloaney Pony), and have been since the moment they turned 18.
“This is where our parents used to hang out,” one says with the voice of a young Joanna Lumley. “Everyone you speak to tonight will have a house in the countryside.” I nod knowingly. Does that set the tone for what they wear? “Well, you won’t see anyone flexing their wealth with, like, designer belts here,” another of the group answers. She is proudly dressed in her mother’s cashmere crewneck and charity shop jeans.
Within the hour, and another bucket of white wine later, I am encircled by a new generation of Sloane Rangers whose style – close to 50 years after the term first emerged (along with a young Lady Diana Spencer in pie-crust shirts and pearls) – is once again inspiring how we dress. So why is it that for autumn/winter ’24, amid the current political shift, the fusty wardrobes of Britain’s upper class have become so chic?
Rewind to 1975, and it was journalists Ann Barr and Peter York who first identified the Sloane Ranger, which would later inform The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) – a seminal work of social observation in which the duo laid bare the shopping and drinking rituals of a riotous, tweedy class of Brits. Their natural habitat? Knightsbridge, South Kensington, Chelsea and various shires. The Handbook was a huge success – and, crucially, highly amusing. A brief sample of Barr and York’s maxims: it’s common to say the word “common”; one should cry at carols, but never at funerals; life’s small events should be exaggerated (the fridge breaking down is a “major disaster”), while its big events should be understated (crashing the Volvo estate is a “spot of bother”). The Henrys and Carolines of southwest London, detailed in the Handbook, had old-fashioned tastes in food, interiors and clothes – a reflection of their plummy upbringings. Think wax jackets, riding macs, woollen reefers and loden overcoats – all, incidentally, styles that prospered in the a/w ’24 collections in all sorts of muddy, country colours. There is certainly no garment that better captures this season’s gin-in-a-Thermos mood than the coat. See: Chloé’s cape-topped trench coats, Max Mara’s snuggly borgs, Prada’s buttoned-up lodens and Bottega Veneta’s cocoon-sleeved peacoats.
Laura Andraschko, one of London’s most incisive designers, who originally hails from Berlin but now lives in Notting Hill, showed equestrian jackets with cartoonish pagoda shoulders, Wellington boots and “My Boyfriend Went To Eton” slogan tees as part of her spring/summer 25 collection. The presentation, staged at a riding centre in west London, was unequivocally titled Sloane Ranger.
“It felt important to explore and critique this group given the current socio-economic climate and to challenge the perceptions of class, privilege and elitism,” the 27-year-old says. Fair point. Though I wonder if the broader proliferation of Sloane-adjacent styles on this season’s catwalks might have less to do with the hierarchies of dress and more to do with the qualities associated with traditional British clothing. “Made to last, both in style (never high fashion, thus never out of fashion) and in material,” as Barr and York outlined. “Tweeds, wools, silks, cottons; natural and dateless fibres.”
Which explains the attire of my fellow pub-goers. It could also be the prologue to Daniel Lee’s a/w ’24 collection at Burberry. “We began in the archives and the mills of Lochcarron and Donegal,” the designer explained in the show notes. “I wanted to take a traditional approach to fabric and how each piece is made.” Enter moleskin trench coats, sherpa-lined barn jackets and baggy off-green parkas worn on the runway by the likes of Edie Campbell and Maya Wigram, and styled with tartan scarves, shin-length skirts and knee-high gumboots, as if dressing came with the express purpose of bundling labradors into the back of a Vauxhall Astra on an exeat weekend in the Highlands. Or, in the case of Silvia Venturini Fendi over in Milan, corgis. The designer described her autumn men’s show – in which she anchored monogrammed wax jackets and fisherman coats to pleated skorts, hiking socks and leather Wellies – as having “a Balmoral look”. And at the time of writing Mrs Prada had just unveiled Miu Miu’s Miu Balmoral, a series of pop-up stores inspired by British style, described by the house as “conservative and rebellious, versatile and individual”.
“It goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Britain was known for producing tailored woollens and tweeds for classic field sports,” fashion historian Liz Tregenza says. “Those designs were exported internationally as being quintessentially British, elements of which come back time and time again.” True: growing up in west London there were few things I aspired to more than being cast in one of Jack Wills’s seasonal “handbooks”, circa 2009, filled with shoots resembling decadent countryside parties. More recently, Vogue has reported on the revival of rugby polos, boat shoes and love-them-or-loathe-them red socks. We could call it “timeless”, I suppose, but perhaps “edgeless” is more fitting? The notion of heritage does feel smoothly enticing at a moment when so many trends feel disposable.
Also, the new-era appeal of the retro Sloane overcoat isn’t a case of wanting to look posh. It’s a desire for a braced-for-anything attitude which the rained-on Sloanes do so well. “Caroline,” the Handbook reads, “still believes in the Good Coat.” I like that. Because who among us hasn’t longed for a coat that can withstand both the elements and the passage of time? A Good Coat feels important when the months turns crisp. I have personal fantasies of sloping around the city in a Good Coat of my own – a murky olive, wax-cotton bomber from Miu Miu’s most recent collection – that I hope will see me through several winters in scores of pub gardens, splitting bottles of cheap white wine. Just perhaps not at The White Horse in Parsons Green.
