It’s not been long since the UK voted the Conservative party out of power, but private school chic is officially in. And these aren’t the cashmere drapings of quiet luxury or the understated tailoring of banker’s suits. Instead, think more along the lines of true landowning gentry-type attire: that’s top hats, jodhpurs and tailcoats aplenty.
This much was obvious at Celine, where Hedi Slimane proposed his interpretation of private school boy dressing for Homme SS25. The collection was titled ‘The Bright Young’, a reference to the early 20th century Bohemian aristocrats and socialites the Bright Young Things, whose decadent fancy dress parties and penchant for drug abuse made them a hot topic in the press. In a video shot at Holkham Hall, the 18th-century stately home in Norfolk, youthful looking men frolicked on the grounds wearing cricket jumpers and tailcoats, boaters and top hats. The soft, silvery hue of the film made them look like they’d just jumped out of a Kodak Brownie.
Hedi’s take on schoolboy dressing is in reaction to a trend happening in real time: English dandy chic. Hedi’s politics, we know, are not of the Tory ilk – having cancelled the AW23 Celine show in respect for the protests against police brutality in France, he is well attuned to the mood of the times. But the designer has long been fascinated by aristocratic codes. Back in in the late 1980s, during his time at École du Louvre, he penned an essay on the 18th-century phenomenon of Anglomania, when the fashionable upper classes dressed in imitation of the English gentry.
The same day the Celine show went live, Miu Miu announced ‘Miu Balmoral’, a series of stores opening across East Asia “inspired by the fearlessness of British style”, and named after the royal castle located in north-east Scotland. The announcement on Instagram was accompanied by models wearing waxed jackets, bodywarmers and slick sunglasses from their AW24 collection, pieces which would not be out of place at a round of clay pigeon shooting. In Derbyshire, until the beginning of October, Chatsworth House is playing host to an Erdem exhibition spotlighting Duchess Deborah, who provided the inspiration for the brand’s SS24 collection. Not forgetting Dior, who took over the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland last June to pay homage to traditional Scottish garments, as popularised by the Victorian aristocracy, for Cruise 2025.
The return of indie sleaze has ushered in a resurgence of skinny suits, shoulder-length hair and pointy winklepickers. Less discussed is how the original indie look was based on the English eccentricity of Carnaby street in the 1960s, a style that, in turn, drew much from the first official postwar subculture of the Teddy Boys: working class English youths who dressed in smart Edwardian garms as a middle finger to respectable society.
While avant-garde Belgian or Japanese brands have previously tended to be more popular on the resale market, art school boys with Beatles-style shag cuts are beginning to turn instead to these traditional, British-coded garments. Rare tweeds, leathers and military garb have replaced Raf to become the new grails, and suits are back with a vengeance.
As fourteen years of Tory rule finally come to a close, the time feels right to have fun with the trust-fund aristo look. After all, we may not be making it, but for now we can at the very least fake it.
Text: Eilidh Duffy