Granny chic: why under-40s want to dress like glamorous grandmothers
It was only after I agreed to a last-minute commission in 2018 to cover the Crillon Ball in Paris – a night where the world’s richest teenage girls put on haute couture to waltz with French aristocrats around a gold encrusted ballroom – that I realised I had nothing to wear.
The day before my train, I rifled through my grandmother’s wardrobe in a panic. “Why don’t you have any evening gowns of your own?” she asked, watching on with a raised eyebrow. I eventually found what I was looking for: a shimmering, sequin scoop-back dress she’d had made in Hong Kong long before I was born. On the night itself, I got a few compliments but it mostly amused me to be in an old dress of my grandmother’s while surrounded by teenage princesses in couture.
And yet from a 2021 perspective, I wonder if I was more fashionable than the lot of them. After all, since then Princess Beatrice has worn the Queen’s Norman Hartnell gown as a wedding dress, Harry Styles has clipped on a granny-style pearl earring to go to the Met Gala and Dakota Johnson has zipped up the same red dress her grandmother as Tippi Hedren for a photoshoot.
Vanessa Redgrave last year wore a menswear-inspired tuxedo with Gucci loafers to receive the Icon Award from British Harper’s Bazaar, and in February appeared in Roksanda's London Fashion Week film with daughter Joely Richardson and granddaughter Daisy Bevan.
Bianca Jagger still wears her iconic slim-fit suits but now with jewel-encrusted canes and blacked-out sunglasses, and Jade Jagger has spoken about how much her two daughters clamour to borrow them.
Clearly Nana’s clothes are more in style than ever before – as evidenced by the fact that searches for ‘granny chic’ have soared in the last few weeks, according to shopping platform Lyst. An American site has coined the term ‘grand-millennial’ for the number of under-40s hoping to dress up like their older relatives, and the glamorous grannies of Instagram are some of the most followed accounts on the platform. Etsy, meanwhile, has seen a rise of nearly 50 percent in searches for items like brooches, vintage clip-on earrings and lockets.
“Some of it is to do with the fact young people care so much about sustainability that they actively search for vintage and second-hand clothes and accessories rather than buy anything new,” says Isabel Spearman who, for her Daily Dress Edit pop-up, has seen a significant rise in women looking for the sort of nipped-in waist, full-skirted silhouettes last fashionable in the Fifties. “But I think that the stress of the last year has also made us nostalgic and dressing in flouncy colourful dresses and big cardigans has brought a lot of women a sense of peace when the world outside has been so unrecognisable.”
This is perhaps why terms like ‘yummy mummy’ have been around for a while but the adulation of granny-style feels new. The roots of it though, can be found in high fashion, notably in Gucci’s crochet-heavy collections that are filled with oversized glasses, faux fur coats and patterned twin sets, and in Chanel’s new breed of glasses chains featuring baroque pearls, colourful lacquered beads, tortoiseshell and gold links. Add to that, this year’s fashion for a heavy knit, chunky buttoned cardigans over midi skirts, penny loafers and Peter-Pan collared shirts and you have a wardrobe Mrs Doubtfire is unlikely to turn her nose up at.
Granny style, however, is hardly homogenous, and following the trend does mean working out what kind of grandma you want to be. Are you more of a knitted cardigan and midi-kilt type, or do you yearn to copy Bunny MacDougal from Sex and the City in her neat Chanel suits and low-heeled pumps?
In my family, I can either opt for the Liberty-print shirts, knee-length pastel skirts and trench coats of my beloved maternal grandmother, or the scarlet caftans, tangerine silk turbans and yes – sequin dresses – of my red-lipped, red-nailed father’s mother. The former has got me through a winter of Zoom calls and park walks – I’m hoping the latter will be a mood-board for a post-June 21 life.
Although why look to your own family when the most famous grandmother in the country has become an unexpected inspiration for designers? Han Chong, the creative director of Self-Portrait, waxed lyrical at the most recent London Fashion Week about how he became obsessed with the Queen’s talent for colour-coordination when he first moved to Britain, and the result was a collection filled with royal blue knits and scarlet shifts with bold black buttons.
A week later, Italian luxury brand Max Mara released a collection for Milan Fashion Week that would definitely pass the Balmoral Test. Designer Ian Griffiths described Queen Elizabeth II as the perfect muse for his city-meets-country outfits that were made up of quilted bomber jackets, calf-skimming kilts, thick wool socks and hiking boots, all of which could have been lifted from the cupboards of Sandringham.
These heritage country staples – headscarves, oversized cardigans, check suits and quilted gilets – also prove the golden rule of granny chic: always add a modern spin. Griffiths dressed models in crisp mannish shirts rather than blouses and wrapped a thin belt around jackets. I have seen fashionable Londoners in quilted coats and ornate glasses chains but worn with jeans and trainers; midi-skirts and Fifties dresses, meanwhile, look better with Birkenstocks or sliders than loafers, and Peter-Pan collared shirts should be paired with slim-cut trousers or jeans.
And as for me in my grandmother’s dress – I wore it with some Giambattista Valli multi-strap heels that looked decidedly 21st century. My grandmother glanced at them when I showed her a photograph and said, “Well, it’s no wonder your generation doesn’t dance as much as we did.”
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