It dominated the charts—the Publishers Weekly ones—over the next two years, along with our 1983 follow-up, the Sloane Ranger Diary. This summer's fashion contains so many elements of original Sloane fashion, one could think that all those Hooray Henrys and Fulham Fionas had jacked in their jobs in the city and PR, and turned their hands to designing. Diana wore traditional country clothes familiar to the upper classes, but made them visible nationally, becoming the archetypal Sloane Ranger. But it suggested a less positive series of identifying characteristics: bad posture; a blend of confidence and deep emotional insecurity, constrained by the conventions they’ve inherited; boozy; predictable; unable to look beyond their own tribe for either friendship or love.

The rest of the country was still boarding up factories and shedding jobs, and the real early 80s tonics to the nation were strictly symbolic: victory in the Falklands War and the royal wedding. 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. Toothsome, affable but rather limited in outlook, privileged, not work shy but not exactly short of a leg up either, set to be wedded to Lady Sophie Dim-But-Royal.If you missed out on the Fulham scene in the early 80s, the internet helpfully provides specific definitions of the Sloane Ranger, much in the way it does a rare species or a little-known technical term: "An upper-class, non-intellectual, conventional . The book sold more than a million copies, was reprinted several times, dominated the Publishers Weekly charts for the next two years, and recently featured 87th in the Sunday Times’s bestselling books since the list began 40 years ago.

This was the Brideshead moment (the Granada dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel had been on ITV in 1981), when nostalgia and aspiration, hard-core toffs and rising middle classes, were conflated and confused in the blur of mid-market “posh is back” coverage. If a Sloane sounds a bit like a preppy—or a preppy sounds a bit like a Sloane—that's probably not an accident.Most of what we sold then would still look good today, because young guys preferred clothes that were well made, but not too trendy. We explained the characteristic understatements (“ rather boringly my entire family has been wiped out in an avalanche”) and overstatements. Diana-fever was then at its most doe-eyed and beguiling, and a whole host of young clones had begun congregating around SW7 ('Heaven') and the top end of the King’s Road in pleated skirts and Gucci loafers and Hermès scarves and Renault 5s and whippet-scented Barbours.

Or I’ll wear a navy club blazer with a faded denim shirt and white jeans to give the jacket an edge – often with a popped collar for good measure.As a consequence, year by year it continued unchanged and so became a pillar of the British motoring establishment that all patriots could be proud of. In the section about the Royal family, the entry for Prince Andrew is prophetic indeed: “Very brave.