Reading Hollywood: I read This ‘80s Handbook About Being Posh and Copying Princess Diana

The Sloane Ranger Handbook is for every rich Londoner with a shotgun and Hermes scarf.

My current background noise of choice is The Supersizers, a British comedic history programme from the late 2000s starring Sue Perkins and Giles Coren. In it, the TV presenter and food critic turned tedious broadsheet troll (and Victoria’s brother!) engage in culinary time travel. They dress in period clothing, whether it’s the eve of the French Revolution of 1980s London, and sample the food of the era. It usually means they eat lots of ridiculous dishes and then get hammered, and I love it. In the ‘80s episode, wherein they engage in the excesses of Thatcherism and new money, Sue dresses up as a Sloane Ranger. What’s that, you ask? Think of young Princess Diana or any character played by Lucy Punch. Imagine the British version of preppy but with more hunting, shooting, and fishing. For Sue, it was an excuse to wear a pie-collar shirt, drink massive quantities of Krug, and eat clotted cream. Sounds ideal, right? Well, of course I had to find out more about this era and it led me to the book that Sue used as her guide: The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook.

(Image via Amazon.)

In the 1980s, everyone copied everything Princess Diana did. She was a 19-year-old society girl who became the most famous person on the planet, and every aspect of her life was up for grabs, from her signature haircut to her knitted jumpers. This was the decade of excess, just before Thatcher's crushing of the working classes and manipulation of the Falklands war became too major to overlook. As often happens during periods of financial boom, cultural attention falls upon the upper classes and those of exceeding wealth. Americans had the preps, so Brits (read English) had Sloanes. The term originated from a 1975 article in Harpers & Queen, which delved into the social group. This, coupled with Diana Mania, left a gap in the market for a pithy explainer of the trend.

Enter Peter York and Ann Barr, society commentators and experts of the scene with their 1982 book, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. Nowadays, hard copies of this are a bit out of my price range but you can borrow it from archive.org and see the madness for yourself. It’s certainly a time capsule of a hyper-specific topic that is so not my thing.

The important thing to note from the offset is that you should never take this book that seriously. It has a subheader on the cover saying "the problem with Hampstead." Come on. Its tone is cheeky in the way that Tatler, the British high society and posh people magazine, is. It's insufferable but self-aware enough in that tone that you can't begrudge it, even if you're a hardcore leftie pleb like myself. Still, as a pop culture writer and documenter of social change, I can't help but be somewhat intrigued by how the British upper classes work. They do rule all and the ways they act and present themselves, often as a commodity for the likes of me, can be rather revealing. So, let me pretend to be a wannabe Sloane in training, eager to learn the ropes and don my Barbour jacket before I travel to the Cotswolds for my weekend getaway.