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 Ra.