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

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Ann was not domesticated – she looked down on those who were – and her tiny top-floor flat in Notting Hill was chaotic, ruled by her parrot Turkey, who flew freely about, depositing mess, clawing her way through papers, gnawing at boxes and plastic, and sharing Ann’s food.

The Official Preppy Handbookhad come out in 1980, and did its own job of identifying the schools, jobs, northeastern suburbs, Jeep wranglers, Upper East Side watering holes, and uniforms of a certain group of monied, East Coast Wasps. Fake London's designer, Desiree Mejer, insists that her rosettes have no connotations of "poshness": "At Fake, we specialise in everything British and we just thought the rosettes were a major part of this Britishness. Actually, sitting room still sounds too cringingly grand, so depending on who’s at the door and the levels of my social anxiety that day, I’ll refer to the living room, the front room or – imagine! It is notable that few British designers have partaken in this Sloane revival, leaving it instead to the Americans (Marc Jacobs), French (Karl Lagerfeld) and Italians (Miuccia Prada).For several years they and their colleagues had been documenting a new breed of upper-middle class Londoner they dubbed the Sloane Ranger. Meanwhile, the trend for Sloane Ranger fashion has been raging – with tasselled, heeled and chunky penny loafers, as well as straight-leg jeans, thick cords and checked mini-skirts, all over the high street. Property development was another great engine of wealth, as we limbered up for the 80s boom—and the 1989/90 bust. British designers such as Steven Stokey-Daley and Grace Wales Bonner are also subverting these traditional aesthetics by taking classic tailoring and punching it up with sportswear to create a more youthful look. But perhaps the greatest similarity between both Sloane Ranger and Bridgerton fashion is how on-trend both styles of dress have become in recent years.

The country house costs enough as it is to maintain, repair and heat, so other purchases had to be workmanlike and last a very long time. Chamberlain disagrees, however, insisting: "It girls are much more mainstream, much more hip than the original Sloanes. Yet, as York says: “There’s nothing wrong in wanting to channel a bit of ’80s style – just don’t aspire to be a Hooray Henry.The awards ceremony is held at a large Georgian house in Cumbria over a weekend in May, when thousands of jars are laid out for visitors to inspect, the local sheep are dyed orange and the Japanese ambassador (marmalade is big in Japan) occasionally arrives in an orange Rolls-Royce. York agrees: “These days, you’ll find Sloanes anywhere, but they tend to hide under the guise of grooviness in edgy parts of town.

Diana-fever was then at its most doe-eyed and beguiling, and a whole host of young clones had begun congregating around SW7 ('Heaven') and the top end of the King’s Road in pleated skirts and Gucci loafers and Hermès scarves and Renault 5s and whippet-scented Barbours.

John Goldthorpe of Nuffield College, Oxford, has been the academic expert on social mobility since the 1960s (see box, p58). This is the handbook of the Sloane’s style… an invaluable reference for a lifetime of decisions about What Really Matters in Life. Bridgerton’s women wear thicker corsets and heavier drawers than any Austen character would have done. Shortly afterwards Ann’s father, who had been a captain in the Royal Artillery, was sent to Germany with the Control Commission, a body set up to manage local authority affairs in the country after the war. But they weren’t bothered by that in success-loving America, it was Britain’s culture of envy—and so forth.

There can be little doubt that the Hooray Henrys of 1980s Chelsea would have felt right at home in Regency England. Follow-up pieces were published and then came the book, a masterpiece of social observation that identified and exposed the codes, speech, manner and lifestyles of Rangerland’s Henrys and Carolines.

If, as I suspect, all Sloanes secretly desired the original Range Rover, an awful lot of them would have been diverted by the Land Rover Discovery of 1989. You can now hear the loud, confident tones of Tim Nice-But-Dim in far-flung reaches of London that the 1982 Sloane had never heard of, let alone hosted a dinner party in: Tooting, Balham, the Ealing end of Shepherd’s Bush, the breeding valleys of Clapham and points west. It may be closer to a historical soap opera than a traditional period drama, but Bridgerton does capture the rules “the right sort of people” were supposed to follow – and that includes when it came to getting dressed. But aspiration only took you so far – you could access the right look, but you’d have to put on the right accent.