Luella’s Guide to English Style

Top young fashion designer Luella Bartley celebrates English style and explains how to acquire it.

What makes English girls the coolest in the world? What is the English style which girls around the world try to emulate? In this book Luella Bartley – crowned Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards in 2008 – sets out to capture what it is that makes English girls just a little bit special.

First up are the clothes – Luella investigates the combination of smart and scruffy, classic and street-style, which ensures that English girls are always at the cutting edge of fashion. Then there are the icons – the English girl knows that Kate Moss and The Duchess of Devonshire both have a place in the style pantheon.

Luella explains the style tribes vying for the English girl’s allegiance, the social rituals she undergoes – from surfing in Cornwall to clubbing in Berlin – and the status symbols she marks herself out with. All this requires a lot of photographs, drawings, and, occasionally, diagrams.

But Luella’s Guide to English Style isn’t simply a book about fashion and style, it’s a work of social anthropology – delivered with a wink and a kiss on the cheek. Luella describes the English girl’s approach to love and shows how the English girl gets better with age.

With her background as London’s hippest designer and as an editor on Vogue and the London Evening Standard, Luella Bartley is brilliantly placed to map out English style and what it means for girls.