british birds

English girls are infinitely cooler than everyone else, from Twiggy to Alexa Chung via Princess Margaret, the Spice Girls, Isabella Blow, Marianne Faithfull, Carey Mulligan, the Mitfords, Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood, Elastica...I could go on and on. Sloanes, Mods, the Royals, New Romantics, punks, art school hipsters, aristocrats: to me, English style sums up everything that I love about dressing - at once scruffy and prim; a bit posh but also a bit wrong. So, I was very excited when I first heard about Luella's book about English girls, and have waited a year or two for it to arrive - last week it did, and I've spent the weekend reading it. Like the Luella label itself (R.I.P), it's near perfect, with chapters dedicated to the best British birds, the seven stages of woman, the unique English attitude to love and sex, the tribes of Britannia (my favourite: the Sloanes, in their pie-crust blouses, Alice bands and blazers), and an exploration of the class system's influence on English style. She even dedicates chapters to the English bosom and the colour pink (it's not pretty, it's punk). The book looks and feels great too: heavy, cloth-bound and purposely a bit battered around the edges so as to look like it's been read and re-read for years - with a David Bowie quote embossed in gold lettering on the back.