The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The First Guide to What Really Matters in Life

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The list of Sloaney jobs for men, seemed to confirm our private definition—that Sloanes were the loyal and devout second bananas of the Establishment; they were the useful people who carried on the great upper middle-class love affair with the toffs and the most assimilated plutocrats. The people who went to Cirencester Agricultural College and then ran great toff’s estates for them, the merchant bankers in The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism (Philip Augar described the end of all that in his 2008 book on the fate of the British merchant banks). And they were the wine merchants and smart estate agents, the army officers, the intake of “nice” law firms of the Farrers and Withers kind. All, as Galsworthy had said of the Forsytes, pretty much indistinguishable from the top toffs to an outsider’s eye. Things got a bit more cushy in the early 1980s. By then, belatedly, there was a four-door option, along with power steering and even an automatic gearbox. And then the Sloane peepers could be made to widen enviously with editions aimed at him, created with Daks on Piccadilly, and her, thanks to a tie-up with Vogue magazine.

These two fashionable sets may have been separated by 250 years, but each captured a unique moment in history – and style.You’d see them on the Tube – all in the same Gucci and Hermès kit – and fantasise about introducing them to each other: ‘Caroline, meet Caroline.’ I was working with girls like that in my proper job as a Boy Executive in Belgravia too.

The costumes are among the show’s greatest delights. Moments into the first episode, we understand their importance when Lady Violet (played by Ruth Gemmell) trills, “Your dresses have arrived!”, prompting her daughters to stampede from one drawing room to another to examine their ensembles for an audience with the Queen. “This one is quite ravishing,” Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) declares of a white satin gown with an empire waist, puff-sleeves and delicate gold embroidery. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Two years ago, over coffee in a literary agent’s Soho office, I was asked if I would be interested in collaborating with the style-writer Peter York on a new version of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. (Not much of a boast, I realise.) Aside from the scant appeal of working on a retread, I remembered all too clearly how the original book fell on my generation of privately educated undergraduates in the early 1980s like an asteroid from space, releasing a virulent pathogen.

Wikipedia citation

York describes the Sloane look as "middle-aged fashion for young people", a description that could apply to many clothes seen in today's fashion magazines. There are primly sweet blouses and strings of pearls from Chanel; striped tops with matching skirt of sensible length from Ralph Lauren and Miu Miu; rugby shirts by Clements Ribeiro; matching shoes and handbags from Louis Vuitton; and as for the floaty floral skirt falling below the knee, twinned with flat shoes, we are positively spoilt for choice - Alberta Ferretti, Marc Jacobs and Prada have all turned their hands to this most archetypal Sloane girl item of clothing. Meanwhile, fashion goes all horsey over at Chloe and Fake London has Pony Club-style rosettes, making the wearer look as though she has just returned from her local point-to-point. But hindsight suggests the early 80s were the beginning of the end for trad Sloanes. The going became altogether tougher for them as the 80s toughs got going. Over the following 30 years, two new overlapping power groups developed in Britain, groups which demoted true-believer Sloanes from that second social tier to the status of a residual, rather exotic, middle-class sub-group (or a tribe of unicorns). Or, to use the proper language, “Sloanes were part of the trend towards increasingly downward social mobility of the last 20 years.” And by 2000, the second great wave was underway. London was becoming the first international city of the global super-rich. Since then, London’s prime and “super-prime” property—particularly the best, biggest houses and flats in Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Mayfair and the top slice of Chelsea—were bought out by an extraordinary mixture of Russian oligarchs, Middle Easterners, new petrodollar types from Nigeria, Indians, Malaysians and, latterly, Chinese. These were people with money that dwarfed those 80s and 90s American bankers. People with hundreds of millions. People with billions. Driving up the prices of London property and driving all but the richest, most adaptable Sloanes further south and north—and some out of London altogether.