Initially, the term "Sloane Ranger" was used mostly in reference to women, a particular archetype being Diana, Princess of Wales. However, the term now usually includes men. A male Sloane has also been referred to as a " Rah" and by the older term " Hooray Henry". [3] By the noughties, commentators were complaining that the acting trade – a ‘being profession’ – was dominated by people like Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West. Would there ever be another generation of Michael Caines and Terence Stamps, they asked?

York describes the Sloane look as "middle-aged fashion for young people", a description that could apply to many clothes seen in today's fashion magazines. There are primly sweet blouses and strings of pearls from Chanel; striped tops with matching skirt of sensible length from Ralph Lauren and Miu Miu; rugby shirts by Clements Ribeiro; matching shoes and handbags from Louis Vuitton; and as for the floaty floral skirt falling below the knee, twinned with flat shoes, we are positively spoilt for choice - Alberta Ferretti, Marc Jacobs and Prada have all turned their hands to this most archetypal Sloane girl item of clothing. Meanwhile, fashion goes all horsey over at Chloe and Fake London has Pony Club-style rosettes, making the wearer look as though she has just returned from her local point-to-point. But arguably the genesis of the Sloane was not in Peter Jones but in the US. Forty years ago saw the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook, a tongue-in-cheek study of the styles and mores of those scions of Ivy League colleges, the WASPs – white anglo-saxon protestants – who populated Martha’s Vineyard in the summer, and the East Coast’s more salubrious homes and businesses the rest of the year.

She was intensely loyal and generous, with many godchildren and friends, but it didn’t do to get on the wrong side of her: she turned against York in her later years, much to his dismay, as she felt he was getting the glory for her work on Sloane Rangers. He tried hard to stay friends, but Ann was unforgiving. Although she never married, perhaps her most important relationship was with the journalist and poet Alan Riddell, whom she met at the Telegraph. He died unexpectedly in 1977 at 50 of a brain haemorrhage.

My first writing about Sloanes – massively edited and improved by Ann, in Harpers & Queen magazine as was (it’s now called Harper’s Bazaar) – was a huge hit in a relatively small pond: Sloane Land itself and among London media types. It wasn’t Big in Barnsley or Bolton then. What mattered then was having a place in London and a foot in the country; a house, however battered, in When The Official Preppy Handbook hit the shelves in 1980, the east coast American sub culture had flourished long enough, and aroused enough curiosity, to commence poking fun at it. For those familiar, it was such a hit that is spawned a sequel of sorts some 30 years later. On the heels of the The Official Preppy Handbook's popularity, England turned out a handbook of their own in 1982, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The approach feels familiar, riffing on its predecessor down to the title itself. While hard to find, we serendipitously came across a copy in New York while vintage shopping. The era of the Sloane Ranger was also a period of optimism. As author of the 1982 Sloane Ranger Handbook, Peter York, has put it: “The time we’re looking at, Britain was coming out of the terribleness of the late 1970s and an enormous [economic] depression. It was a combination of escapism and aspiration.”

The costumes are among the show’s greatest delights. Moments into the first episode, we understand their importance when Lady Violet (played by Ruth Gemmell) trills, “Your dresses have arrived!”, prompting her daughters to stampede from one drawing room to another to examine their ensembles for an audience with the Queen. “This one is quite ravishing,” Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) declares of a white satin gown with an empire waist, puff-sleeves and delicate gold embroidery. The Regency, which lasted from 1811 to 1820, was a period of great excitement and social development. It was a time that sprung out of deep unrest – King George III having been deemed too “mad” to rule, and his son (the eventual George IV) stepping in as Regent. Under him, Britain flourished, as the Prince of Wales assumed the role of patron for emerging artists, writers and scientists. Preppies and Sloanes became icons around the same moment. Both books demonstrated in satirical—if loving—terms, that while status was something with which you were born, the trappings and wardrobe of a certain kind of social elite could be practiced and adopted. Who needs a country estate in Surrey or Kennebunkport when you have a handbook and the J.Crew catalogue? Exclusion became aspiration. Ann was born in London, the second of four children of a Canadian mother, Margaret Gordon, and a Scottish father, Andrew Greig Barr. Ann’s grandfather, also called Andrew Greig Barr, invented the soft drink Irn-Bru, which still has the Barr name on the logo. In 1939, at the start of the second world war, Margaret took her children to Montreal and put Ann into a private school called the Study, where Margaret had previously been head girl and had a house named after her.

In 1950, the Barrs moved to Eaton Square, in Belgravia, London. Ann got a job as a secretary at the Times, and filled her diary with Ascot, Henley, Goodwood, the Derby, balls, parties, dances and shoots. She spent her evenings at the theatre, and at the Linguists’ Club studying German, or the Times’s swimming club and weekends in Oxford with her boyfriend, Neville Dent. Ann wrote to “Nevskins” daily, but never accepted his proposals of marriage. In the United Kingdom, a Sloane Ranger, or simply a Sloane, is a stereotypical upper-middle or upper-class person, typically although not necessarily a young one, who embodies a very particular upbringing and outlook. The Sloane Ranger style is a uniform, effortless, and unambitious although sophisticated one. Its counterpart in the US is the preppy style and in France is bon chic bon genre. It may be closer to a historical soap opera than a traditional period drama, but Bridgerton does capture the rules “the right sort of people” were supposed to follow – and that includes when it came to getting dressed. The first big split was between London and the country. The new City investment banks, owned by people from New York, Tokyo and Hamburg, rather than PLU, culled the Sloanes. After what had seemed like decades of an intellectual moratorium on big picture discussion of class and inequality, it was everywhere (I’d been told by broadcasters before 2008 “that’s so not today’s issue,” when I’d wanted to look at the rich as anything but lifestyle options, and immediately after 2008 it was off the table).The list of Sloaney jobs for men, seemed to confirm our private definition—that Sloanes were the loyal and devout second bananas of the Establishment; they were the useful people who carried on the great upper middle-class love affair with the toffs and the most assimilated plutocrats. The people who went to Cirencester Agricultural College and then ran great toff’s estates for them, the merchant bankers in The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism (Philip Augar described the end of all that in his 2008 book on the fate of the British merchant banks). And they were the wine merchants and smart estate agents, the army officers, the intake of “nice” law firms of the Farrers and Withers kind. All, as Galsworthy had said of the Forsytes, pretty much indistinguishable from the top toffs to an outsider’s eye. You’d see them on the Tube – all in the same Gucci and Hermès kit – and fantasise about introducing them to each other: ‘Caroline, meet Caroline.’ I was working with girls like that in my proper job as a Boy Executive in Belgravia too.