With a new adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love on our screens, the peculiarly Mitfordian combination of ballgowns and homemade knits look appealing again
“Elegance in England,” wrote Nancy Mitford “is of such different stuff from that in any other country that it is not easy to make foreigners believe in it at all.” Nancy – and her aristo sisters Diana, Decca, Debo, Pam and Unity – have been part of the case for English elegance since the 30s thanks to a mixture of tweedy suits, ballgowns, tea dresses and jumpers. And with a new adaptation of Mitford’s 1945 novel, The Pursuit of Love, now on the BBC, the charm of the Mitfords look is likely to hit the radar of yet another generation.
The Mitfords, the daughters of Lord Redesdale, who grew up in a country pile, stink of privilege, and some of them were downright heinous: Unity was in Hitler’s inner circle, while Diana married Oswald Mosley and was imprisoned for her Nazi sympathies. But, partly thanks to Nancy’s novels, they remain a reference of eccentricity, up there with Big and Little Edie from cult film Grey Gardens. “How they get away with it is what fascinates me,” says Laura Thompson, author of Nancy Mitford: Life in a Cold Climate and Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. “My theory is that it’s a lot to do with The Pursuit of Love. It reimagines them, as it were, and creates what I would call the Mitford mythology wherein everything is submerged in charm.”
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