The unwelcome return of the Sloane Ranger’s staple headdress
Thanks to the Duchess of Cambridge, the tribal symbol of the Sloane Ranger is ready for a revival, says Rowan Pelling
In the summer of 1985, I remember driving down the King’s Road in Chelsea with some school friends, and counting the Alice bands on girls marching along in Laura Ashley florals. We reached about 100 before we stopped, choking with laughter.
I freely admit I committed many heinous crimes against fashion in the Eighties. I wore royal blue pedalpushers (a particularly vile form of knickerbocker), ra-ra skirts, disco pants, puffball frocks, neon-pink pumps and Lycra bodies, which were basically leotards with popper fittings on the crotch so you could peel them back for a pee. But I can put my hand on my heart and swear I never, ever owned or wore an Alice band.
Why the aversion to this adornment? It’s because no other accessory or garment screamed “Sloane Ranger” as loudly. No self-respecting Henrietta or Charlotte would have had a dressing table that didn’t house a thick, black-velvet band to restrain her tumbling tresses. Traditionally, she would have tugged the band on, then pushed it forward until a sort of Knightsbridge quiff rose, Mekon-like, to accentuate her alabaster forehead.
The real problem was all the barely subliminal messages that accompanied the band. If Marianne’s Phrygian cap was the symbol of liberté, égalité, fraternité, then the Sloane’s headpiece of choice stood for heteronomy, conformity and matrimony (preferably quite swiftly, to a Tory MP or substantial landowner). If you wore an Alice band, it was tantamount to saying you didn’t smoke or drink vodka from the bottle and would only have sex with a man if you believed the encounter might end with an engagement ring. (In fact, the only human being who can get away with an Alice band, I feel, is Emma Watson – but that’s because no one wants Hogwarts’ favourite schoolgirl to have anything redolent of sex appeal anyway.) The eternally brilliant Jilly Cooper summed this all up wonderfully in her 1985 masterpiece when she outlined caddish Rupert Campbell- Black’s early impressions of his wife-to-be Helen, as she knelt to pray in the Guards Chapel. “While she was kneeling, he examined the freckled hands with their slender wrists and colourless nail polish, the small, beaky nose, the very clean ears, the lipstick drawn not quite to the edges to disguise a large mouth, the frightful Alice band holding back the gorgeous, dark-red hair…”
Cooper knew that any selfrespecting bad girl would let her mane cascade seductively down her shoulders. Back in the Eighties, there were two tribes of women: those who modelled themselves on Lady Diana Spencer (yup – often seen in an Alice band) and those who wanted to be Madonna, with her bed hair and ripped lace gloves.
So if there is to be an Alice band revival, then it seems appropriate it’s being led by Diana’s daughter-in-law. For the Duchess of Cambridge was spotted this week at horse trials in Norfolk wearing a tortoiseshell band to hold back her glossy, brunette mane. Nor was there the faintest whiff of irony, as there might have been if a twentysomething celeb – Cara Delevingne, say – or even a metrosexual such as David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo appeared in one (they’ve both got form).
As style guru Peter York, co-author of The Sloane Ranger’s Handbook, points out, Kate is old enough to remember her mother’s generation wearing the hair-tamers, so the adoption of one signals the fact “she’s never rebelled”. And, of course, there’s only one small step between the Duchess and the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
Although I feel one important element has been overlooked. Alice bands are what doctors call NFN, or “Normal for Norfolk”. Here, they never went away. When every other female started sporting limp, ironed tresses, or dip-dyed pink hair, or just a chic tousled bob, the Norfolk brigade carried on lunching, shooting, drinking and spectating at horsey events in hairbands of every hue.
I’ve spent a fair few summer weeks over the past decade in north Norfolk’s Burnham Market. It often seems as if the Eighties never died. Young men wear rugby shirts, or push shirt collars up to their chins, while the women wear gilets, pearls and – yes – Alice bands. So, it’s possible Kate’s just trying to fit in with her retro-loving neighbours. It’s only when she sports the band beyond a 50-mile radius of Sandringham that we should press the panic button.