The death of ‘shabby chic’

After more than 200 years, a uniquely British taste is on the way out. Shabby chic has been vacuumed, whitewashed and dry-cleaned out of existence. Frayed shirt collars, egg yolk on the tie, soup stain on the crotch, roses rambling out of control over the crumbling terrace flagstones, walls cluttered with pictures, tables covered with teetering piles of books. The quintessentially British air of decayed gentility has been destroyed by a combination of minimalism, modernism and nihilism. For the first time in history we live in a civilisation where, the richer you are, the fewer things you have, and the newer, cleaner and more stripped-down those things must be.

Shabby chic meant the opposite. The idea was that the richer you were, not only did you have more things, but also the things were older and more run-down. ‘I’ve got so much stuff, and it’s so old that of course it’s going to get dusty and battered,’ went the mantra, ‘but it’s so stylish that it’ll never go out of fashion.’ Compare the Duchess of Cornwall, when she was plain Mrs Parker Bowles, with Diana, Princess of Wales. One is the embodiment of shabby chic — before she was forced to act like a prince’s consort, did Mrs PB ever use a moisturiser, visit a smart hairdresser or bother with the mud from the borders trapped under her fingernails? The other was far too soignée to be truly representative of old Britain. But modern British clothing is now much more Diana than Camilla — a mixture of leisure-wear and branded clothes, always spanking new, always spotless, always approaching its sell-by date.

Shabby chic lasted into the closing years of the 20th century. In 1988, the journalist Nicholas Coleridge composed a list of things that rich, heroically shabby British women would rather spend money on than a dress — from a new horse trailer to the children’s school fees.