Written by Luella Bartley, of the sadly now-defunct eponymous fashion label Luella, and crammed with well-chosen photos and truly beautiful coloured-pencil illustrations by Zoë Taylor which have a feel as if they were taken from a particularly artistically-inclined (and super-cool) teenager's scrapbook.
We may have been taught very young that old adage 'never judge a book by it's cover', but to hell with that - this one's a complete beauty! It's probably worth the price alone to have this utterly charming, faux-vintage, faded dusty-rose hardback with gilded lettering (and a quote from that British icon Mr. Bowie, no less) sat on your bookshelf.
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| Essential for any beautiful British bookshelf... |
Appearances aside, this was a really delightful and, in a strange way, life-affirming read. Althought it's title may suggest that it's a guide book on how to achieve that perfect, insouciant British brand of chic, Luella stresses that it most certainly isn't. Instead, it's a compendium of style icons ('top British birds' - from Siouxsie Sioux to the Duchess of Devonshire), style tribes (Sloane Rangers, New Romantics, Mods) and classic pieces that make up the British wardrobe (band t-shirts, tea dresses, Doc Martens and twinsets). All this is delivered in Luella's warm, knowing and often charmingly self-deprecating tone, with lots of relateable style anecdotes, from the schoolyard to motherhood.
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| Some of Zoë Taylor's fantastic illustrations |
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| First Lady of Britpop, Ms. Frischmann |
Luella's Guide... is a rare treasure of a book, which recaptures that teenage enthusiasm and originality for raiding the dressing-up box and creating that mish-mash of granny-chic and punk rock that makes Brit girls so enviably cool. And besides, any guide that can hold up Justine Frischmann and Vita Sackville-West alongside Kate Moss amongst it's top ten most stylish Brit girls is certainly on to a winner in my books.
h x
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