ANY MINUTE now my dirty, funny, druggy, shockingly honest novel is coming out in paperback and because I am a shameless whore prepared to do anything for publicity, I am going to tell you about one of the most painful and embarrassing periods covered in the book: my time as a Sloane Ranger.
It was in 1984 — my first term at Oxford — and I had suddenly become acutely aware of how socially unsmart I was. Being the minor public school-educated son of a Midlands nuts-and-bolts distributor just didn’t cut the mustard in a fancy-pants college such as Christ Church (my fellow undergraduates included a count, a viscount, dozens of hons and the King of Tunisia).
So to try to keep up I adopted a strangulated waf-waf accent and started dressing like the country squire I was not. The idea, I think, was that some Sebastian Flyte figure would adopt me as his Charles Ryder and take me to his stately home, where we would get drunk on gazelle-like wines. Then eventually I would get to sleep with his sister.
Luckily, there were lots of helpful clues in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, by Peter York and Ann Barr. It included tips as to how one should behave in an Oxbridge scenario (“silly stunts prove you’re the goods”, eg, racing supermarket trolleys around Tom Quad). And it told you what clothes to wear and where to get them: turned-up cords from Beale & Inman (Hackett was a second-hand clothes shop in those days); chunky brown brogues (I got mine from Alan McAfee: they made me look like Roger Hargreaves’s Mr Silly); a Viyella shirt (M&S would do); and a waxed Barbour jacket.
For wannabe Sloanes, the Barbour always presented the biggest problem. You see, for a Barbour to look authentically Sloane — faded, yellow-tinged, crinkly, crusty — it needs to have been mucking out stables, snagged on barbed wire and soaked in beer at point-to-points for at least a decade.
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If you buy one off the peg it is a dead giveaway because it is far too dark green and oil-impregnated. Even if you drive over them loads of times in your car, as I did, it still doesn’t look right.
The only person who can carry off such a thing successfully is someone so genuinely Sloane that he doesn’t care about being mistaken for a fake Sloane. Everyone knew I wasn’t, which is probably why, after a couple of years, I abandoned the whole image and tried to experiment with being a trendy, drug-taking person instead.
And now, it would seem, Sloane Rangerdom is dead and gone for ever. The final nail in its coffin — a mini scoop-ette this, which a proper journalist would have put right at the top, rather than buried in the middle — is that Peter Jones, the Chelsea department store on Sloane Square where the whole scene began, has quietly stopped selling Barbours.
Apparently the local smart set just don’t want them any more. I heard this from Clive Seabrook, the manager of Peter Jones’s enlarged and revamped menswear department, who explained to me that for possibly the first time in history, Chelsea man has begun to show an interest in fashion. So much so, indeed, that the store has started selling thongs for blokes.
Because Peter Jones customers are a particular breed — wealthy, conservative, fastidious, with an intense hatred of shopping more than is absolutely necessary — Seabrook has had to be careful not to frighten the horses. Though the store’s hitherto dismally staid menswear department is now almost 80 per cent bigger, and includes 50 new brands, including Ted Baker, Kenzo and Nicole Farhi, it still has a reserved, discreet, old-fartish feel. There is no music (for which, much thanks: the crappy pop blaring out in Selfridges is such a turn-off).
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There is a special “safe area” near the top of the lifts featuring Gant and Lacoste, the old favourites, designed to reassure old clients that things have not changed too much. And there are no obvious price tags because Chelsea types would feel insulted at the idea that cost could be a deterrent to buying anything.
“They will go up to a £179 Kenzo shirt and buy several of them without batting an eyelid,” Seabrook says. “Men don’t like to shop generally. Men around here detest it particularly. But they see Peter Jones as a corner shop that they can pop into and quickly bulk-buy what they need.”
His softly-softly-catchee-monkey methods seem to be working. Menswear sales are up by 88 per cent and, where before fathers would come in with their Identikit sons and buy the same old clothes year after year — Gant sailing clothes, mostly — they are now growing more experimental. “The secret is to take them out of their comfort zone,” Seabrook says. “Obviously, if they are absolutely insistent that they wear only blue, you can’t force them. But you can make a few suggestions.”
This is why the department is particularly big on what Seabrook calls “lifestyling” — where clothes are displayed in such a way as to make it blindingly obvious to a target group with no fashion sense which colours and tones work well together.
“So you might have a beige pair of trousers next to a khaki top. And you will have models dressed to show what a particular look is like.” Customers often buy the whole kit, exactly as shown. Chelsea man can be very literal.
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You are probably wishing that I had stuck with the stuff about me rather than digressing into fact-ridden stuff about Peter Jones.
But don’t worry: remember, you can find loads more of the former, plus lashings of swearing and quite rude sex, in Thinly Disguised Autobiography, available in paperback from July 2 (Picador, £7.99).