Style on Wednesday
The new back-to-school fashion rules for grown-ups
‘What’s all this fuss about the school run?” I used to think, doing a giant eyeroll. And then my elder daughter started school. “I’ll just wear… clothes,” I said on day one. “With shoes.”
Two hours later, with a pyre of rejected garments smouldering on the bedroom floor, I finally settled on a look that, I fondly imagined, conveyed a sort of nonchalant chic – hinting at an interest in current trends without unduly flagging up that I’d kept every back issue of The Face since the mideighties. I was on maternity leave with baby two, which for some reason made me decide that dungarees would be a good idea, with trainers (nonchalant), a printed shirt (why?) and roots that hadn’t seen a salon since Easter. And off I went: the Fresh Prince With Bad Hair.
Clearly, the Duchess of Cambridge won’t be choosing Nineties-era Will Smith as a style template when she embarks on her inaugural school run to Thomas’s, the private Battersea prep school to which she and her husband have chosen to send four-year-old Prince George. As someone long accustomed to the public eye, the flinty attention of the other parents ought to prove less daunting than it does for most newbies, even following the news that she’s pregnant with her third baby.
And yet few could blame Kate for choosing that morning’s outfit with particular care; after all, no tabloid assessment of her nude wedges or choice of jean could be more damning than the critiques issued by the other mums.
“I’m not sure there is a ‘typical’ school-run-mum look at Thomas’s,” says Estelle Lee, editor of parenting magazine Smallish, and a doyenne of SW11 for 10 years before she moved to the country. “I’ve seen diamanté stilettos and gilets made of rabbit-skin, but those always raise a few eyebrows, and will define you forever more.
“The rules are: wear nothing too challenging. Running kit is fine, although it may alienate the mothers who overdid it with the Whispering Angel rosé the night before. Kate should blend in well with the SW mummies; she has the middle-class, off-duty-dressing thing down to a T. Skinny jeans and her usual wedges will do nicely. No one will want to feel as though they are out-dressing a duchess.”
As Kate will soon realise, this insular world is divided into two sorts of people: those who do the school run en route to doing something else – like open-heart surgery, international law or running a cupcake business – and those who only do the school run.
It doesn’t take long to figure out who is who. But while they may be united in their perpetual air of distraction, working mums are not a sartorially homogeneous group. As one would expect in a country where 4.2 million people now work from home, even in schools where it’s the norm that both parents work, the playground is unlikely to be a sea of sombre navy business suits.
Where to begin in describing the different school run tribes? Let’s start with the largest: Leggings Lucy. Always en route to the gym/track/ yoga studio, Lucy is a symphony of colour-coordinated athleisure wear whose devotion to half-marathons – and telling you about them – is only exceeded by her devotion to Lucas Hugh leggings, No Ka’oi shell jackets and adidas by Stella Mccartney trainers. Then there’s Start-up Sally, who jacked in her executive role at Deloitte to launch an app that matches your choice of coffee to your star sign. She relishes the newfound casualness of her office attire, but fails to grasp that, with her Raey shirt, Mother boyfriend jeans and navy tab (never green tab) Stan Smiths, she has simply exchanged one stringently coded uniform for another.
Scandi Sue hails from Lambeth but is obsessed with recreating the undeniable chic of her Danish and Swedish mum-chums; but however many white plimsolls, Ganni tea dresses and textured Baum und Pferdgarten knits she buys, she can never quite nail it. And let’s not forget Paranoid Penny, whose fear that her slightly younger fintech whizz husband will trade her in for a new model (literally) has led her to imbibe more Volbella than is seemly. Save for the Bracey-wrights’ new nanny, PP is the only woman in the playground wearing skinny jeans and heels.
Although it once filled me with terror, I’ve grown to love doing the school run. It’s easy to poke fun at all the tribes, but harder to convey the depth of support and camaraderie that can blossom at the school gates, if only you’re open to it.
Clothes don’t maketh the woman: they merely appear to. My best advice to Kate? After a week of drop-offs, you’ll stop caring what you wear, and so will everyone else. Actually, scrub that last part: you are the Duchess of Cambridge. People will always care. In which case, perhaps remember that, whether dressed in Prada or PJS, we schoolrun mums are all broadly the same underneath. Whatever we’re wearing, none of us can bounce on a trampoline for long without needing a wee.