The Daily Telegraph - Features
Tweed jackets and cardis: you’re never too young for Rich Grandma Style
Your nan’s twinsets and pearls, top-handle bags and slingbacks are now high fashion – just don’t wear them together. By Lisa Armstrong
There are, as you may have spotted, several million things wrong with the world right now. But the sartorial options for grandmothers are not among them.
So varied, accommodating and (even) cool has Grandma Style become, that Vogue has just decreed Rihanna to be a poster girl/ woman/figure for the movement.
You’ve probably spotted several odd things about this too, chief among them being Rihanna’s age (36), the age of her sons (two and one) and the fact that RiRi is too young to be a granny.
That though, is not the point. The salient takeaway here is that Grandma Style – or to be 100 per cent accurate, Rich Grandma Style – has become aspirational. Just look at Mango’s tweed skirt suits, Me+Em’s lemon crochet, Soeur’s mauve and Brora’s cotton twinsets. Much of this should be approached with a degree of caution (“You can think twinsets, but you must never wear them,” as Kate Moss once said; mauve, or as Queen Camilla refers to it, “menopausal mauve”, needs a lot of white or navy to look modern; those twinsets might look good mixed and matched), but it could all work out charmingly.
The ubiquity of the cropped tweed jacket is another victory for Rich Grandma Style. Not so long ago, this was an item only hardcore Chanel fans would opt for. Boxy, pastel-y and instantly ageing by at least 15 years, Chanel’s classic bouclé cardigan jacket was fine if you were Kristen Stewart and able to partner it with a semi-sheer skirt, but less good if you were an actual grandmother. Or anyone in their 30s whose workplace isn’t the best environment for all the “sexing up” those jackets require to seem youthful.
But then Hedi Slimane began reworking the bouclé tweed jacket at Céline with his characteristic flair for taking other people’s classics and somehow making them just that bit better. Céline’s Chasseur jacket remains a commercial pillar of the brand since Slimane reintroduced it four years ago, with pre-worn versions fetching as much as new ones and spawning many, many copies on the high street, some of them excellent, like the H&M giltbuttoned cream version. Other luxury fashion designers, whether consciously or subconsciously, have taken note, and many of their collections also feature iterations, including the Gucci one worn recently by Rihanna.
Talking of vintage, the rise and rise of the second-hand market only adds lustre to Rich Grandma Style. Put badly, many of its key components – top-handled Hermès Kelly and gilt-chained Chanel 2.55 bags, Hermès silk scarves and gold watches – keep rocketing in value. So while the buy-in price for even second-hand Rich Grandma Style isn’t cheap, chances are, you can get your money back if you resell.
If you can call on your own grandmother for the necessary booty, as Zenouska Mowatt has – wearing a checked jacket once owned by her grandmother, Princess Alexandra – extra brownie points. If not, try Hardly Ever Worn It, eBay, 1stDibs – or, for high-street versions, Vinted.
“Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto”, the V&A’s recent sell-out exhibition on Chanel, has kept Rich Grandma Style in our fashion consciousness. After years of Balenciaga-inspired Grotesque Chic on the catwalks, the luxury of pearl necklaces, bracelets, medium-high slingbacks, tophandle bags, brooches and yes, actual cardigans, come as a deep, psychological exhale.
British designer Molly
Goddard’s pale-lemon, satin-edged cardigan from her current spring collection has already sold out. “Almost everyone in the studio ordered it and they’re wearing it with jeans,” Goddard says. “To me, cardigans are really practical.”
Practicality is one explanation for the popularity of Rich Grandma Style. So is the fact that some of the fashion industry’s highest profile women (Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour) are themselves grandmothers, demonstrating the many facets of granny-ness.
Then there is the proven longevity of its components. Everyone, including the superrich, is looking for long-term return on their sartorial purchases these days – while stamping them with their own style. Charlotte Casiraghi partners an orange tweed jacket with jeans, Kristen Stewart wears classic burgundy pumps with – yes, knickers: it’s a look. Molly Goddard says she often slings on her pastel cardis with tracksuit bottoms. Billie Eilish wears a tweed knee-length Chanel skirt with socks. Each to their own.
There is a lesson here, and it’s this: no one, least of all a granny, should wear all the elements of Rich Grandma Style together. Cropped tweed jacket + pussy-bow blouse + matching skirt + corespondent slingbacks will probably read like a pastiche or parody these days. But slip the jacket over a V-neck T-shirt; wear the slingbacks with denim; mix the pearls with a khaki jacket and you’re on your way.
In case you’ve forgotten – seriously? – Bunny MacDougal was Charlotte York’s New England mansion-owning first mother-inlaw in the hit TV show, Sex and The City. Acidic of tongue, sharp of mind, she was impeccably dressed. And in SATC, style is the most serious currency of all. Bunny’s wardrobe, she would doubtless be superciliously gratified to know, seems to have been a key inspiration for many designers.
Gucci’s most recent collection under its new creative director, Sabato de Sarno, could be read as one long love letter to Bunny MacDougal, with its embellished car coats, brocades and twinsets. After the crack-den aesthetic of Gucci’s Autumn/Winter 2023 collection bombed (no huge shock there), Sabato’s pastels, tailoring, kitten heels and ladylike handbags, including a new interpretation of the classic top-handle Bamboo bag, is proving to be far more enticing to women of all ages.
The increasing visibility, vitality and glamour of women of grannyage is incrementally removing the stigma of getting older. It’s not a straightforward progression, of course. Kristin Scott Thomas on the catwalk at Miu Miu or Rita Moreno at the 2024 Oscars doesn’t mean ageism has been done away with for good. The storm around Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated cover last year suggests we’re still confused as to what growing older might look like these days.
Probably it will look like many things. And in the meantime, grandmothers, with their wisdom, experience and earnt right to be indulgent of their grandchildren, seem currently to have the best of all worlds – even if they’re not rich.