28 Oct 2026, 12:45 PM

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Thanks to Jilly Cooper, tartan and tweed, waxed jackets and wellies are a style vibe right nowBritish heritage, in fashion terms, is a country where it is permanently October. A conker-brown and pleasant land, if you will. Brand Britain in the style sense comes into its own in autumn: roaring fires, muddy lanes, damp dogs. Waxed jackets and chunky knits, tartan and tweed, jaunty scarves to banish draughts. Clothes for going on a hearty walk, but with a hip flask in your pocket. Fashion has been mining this seam since long before Brideshead Revisited made battered evening dresses and Oxford bags look romantic, and it keeps returning, because trad British style is satisfyingly utilitarian while also being loaded with enough backstory (class, history, eccentricity) to be intriguing and reinventable.Also: Rivals. It has taken considerable restraint for me not to mention Rivals in the whole of the first paragraph, because it is now a matter of mere weeks until we get our next Jilly Cooper fix and I, for one, cannot wait. Cannot wait for Cameron stalking the corridors in her foxy power suits, for Taggie in her cute jeans and jumpers, for Valerie in head-to-toe tweed and an aggressive amount of blusher. The success of Rivals has done for old-school British dressing what Emily in Paris did for the beret, only with better jokes and more adultery. Jolly hockey sticks style is the new French girl chic. This fantasy is homegrown, which makes it both more embarrassing and harder to resist. Just as Emily and her friends and frenemies are a camp send-up of fashionable Paris, Rivals is a fond, nostalgic semi-parody of the British wardrobe. The show’s costume designer, Ray Holman, has drawn on original 1980s pieces from Dunhill and Mulberry for inspiration. With Liberty fabrics, nods to polo uniforms and sturdy waxed coats, he has brought the Sloane ranger back into the fashion conversation for the first time in years. Continue reading...

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