Check out the most f lattering trend for older women in years
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TRADITIONAL plaid once rarely seen outside a gentleman’s club has had a revival. Suddenly, the Prince of Wales check is the pattern of the season.
As with so many fashion comebacks, youthful millennials have — pass the sherry — attempted to reappropriate it.
The most micro of mini skirts, the tightest of leggings and tops with necklines so low they are practically at the waistline are some of the latest fashion examples of Prince of Wales (POW) check.
But, ladies, fear not. Because, as these pictures reveal, the return of the POW check is that rarest of style trends — one that flatters middleaged woman far more than any reed-thin twentysomething.
As Cara Delevingne, Cheryl Tweedy et al show, despite having enviable figures and youthful faces, some trends are just made for women of a certain vintage.
Why? Well, POW check is a fabric that’s at its best when combined with proper, precise tailoring — which makes it perfect for the neat coats, nipped-in skirts and carefully constructed trousers favoured by older women. More than this, though, it’s a material with real history and heritage. It’s a classic. No wonder it seems almost built for our bodies.
So it should come as little surprise to hear that M&S reports that its POW check coats have been flying off the shelves.
Zara, never one to miss a trend, has an astonishing 22 different versions of a POW check blazer in every style permutation, from single to double-breasted, cropped, oversized — and even one with faux fur spilling from the pockets. Meanwhile, designer versions from Gucci, Stella McCartney and Ellery have also been selling fast, despite price tags stretching over the £1,000 mark.
Celebrities have snapped up something in POW check to update their wardrobes — and, almost universally, it’s the youngsters who have been getting it wrong.
So what’s caused the sudden craze for a check that has been bobbing around Savile Row for the past 200 years? The revival began on the 2016 Balenciaga catwalk, in the form of exquisitely tailored jackets and coats with wide shoulders and nipped-in waists.
The baton was then passed to Prada, Gucci and Dior — and before you knew it, every fashion editor in town was wearing a double-breasted POW check jacket over jeans and T-shirt. Within weeks, the High Street had created its own cut-price versions.
Undoubtedly, part of the appeal lies in the long heritage of one of the world’s most famous plaids. Created by the Countess of Seafield in Inverness-shire in the early 19th century as her family’s estate tweed, it was known as the Glen Urquhart Check.
The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, often went shooting on the estate and soon took a shine to it, creating his own variation.
Two generations later, his grandson — the infamous dandy the Duke of Windsor, who later secured infamy with his abdication — took it to America and secured its enduring fame. While the original check used alternating white
and black stripes to create a boxlike pattern, later versions included stripes of colour, including yellow, red and brown.
But whatever you do to it, the POW check still manages to look effortlessly classic and luxuriously expensive, headily evocative of Savile Row suits and inherited wealth. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the very British hero James Bond, in both Sean Connery and Daniel Craig incarnations, wore a POW check suit, as did the impossibly dapper Cary Grant in the 1959 Hitchcock film North By Northwest.
But it wasn’t until the power-mad Eighties that POW check popped up in female fashion — this time, in the form of a woman’s suit.
In the 1988 film Working Girl, Melanie Griffith’s character, Tess, rose from the wrong side of the tracks to a Wall Street office — with help from her POW check power suit and massive shoulder pads.
Princess Diana later revived the check in a superbly cut Dior suit, saved from looking too mannish by silk ruffles on the lapels.
As ever with publicity-savvy Diana, her adoption of the POW check could well have been planned as a cheeky reference to her ex-husband.
So how does a woman of a certain age wear POW checks in 2017?
While young fashionistas may be wearing boxy, Eighties double-breasted jackets over jeans, that particular irony is lost on anyone over the age of 45.
THERE are, instead, a plethora of flattering POW singlebreasted jackets on the High Street, as well as slim, cropped trousers which look great with a fine-knit polo neck and black heels.
Or you could take a leaf out of Joan Collins’s stylebook and team a POW check skirt with boots and a natty military jacket.
But use POW check sparingly. It should be treated like a box of chocs — consume in moderation, one piece at a time, or you could make yourself (and everyone around you) feel really rather ill . . .