Luella’s Guide to English Style

By Luella Bartley

Top young fashion designer Luella Bartley celebrates English style and explains how to acquire it.

What makes English girls the coolest in the world? What is the English style which girls around the world try to emulate? In this book Luella Bartley – crowned Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards in 2008 – sets out to capture what it is that makes English girls just a little bit special.

First up are the clothes – Luella investigates the combination of smart and scruffy, classic and street-style, which ensures that English girls are always at the cutting edge of fashion. Then there are the icons – the English girl knows that Kate Moss and The Duchess of Devonshire both have a place in the style pantheon.

Luella explains the style tribes vying for the English girl’s allegiance, the social rituals she undergoes – from surfing in Cornwall to clubbing in Berlin – and the status symbols she marks herself out with. All this requires a lot of photographs, drawings, and, occasionally, diagrams.

But Luella’s Guide to English Style isn’t simply a book about fashion and style, it’s a work of social anthropology – delivered with a wink and a kiss on the cheek. Luella describes the English girl’s approach to love and shows how the English girl gets better with age.

With her background as London’s hippest designer and as an editor on Vogue and the London Evening Standard, Luella Bartley is brilliantly placed to map out English style and what it means for girls.

Format: Hardcover
Release Date: 26 Mar 2013
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780007285310

Born in 1974 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Luella Bartley trained at Central Saint Martins before working as a journalist on Vogue and the London Evening Standard. Ten years ago she decided to set up her own fashion label and gave her first collection the title ‘Daddy, I Want A Pony’. Named by Harpers & Queen as ‘the leader of London’s junior style mafia’, she recently moved from London to Cornwall with her husband David Sims – a photographer – and their three children, where she enjoys surfing and riding. Aside from her own collections she has designed for O’Neill, the surfwear company, and Target, the American chain-store.

Praise for Luella Bartley:

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‘A star – a poster child for London cool’ – American Vogue.

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‘The air of effortless cool that surrounds the Luella label’ – The Guardian.

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‘As calm and cool as a raindrop sliding down a windowpane’ – London Evening Standard.

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