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Spectator
6 days ago
- Spectator
English? Middle class? Welcome to the Costa del Boden
It was when I saw two other women wearing the same red-and-white-striped Boden swimming costume as me that I realised what I had become. Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been seen dead on a beach in Salcombe in a Boden swimming costume. I would have been topless on a riverbank in Provence, smoking a Gitane and reading Duras. These days, I don't have time to care, and I summon G.K. Chesterton as my guide: 'Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.' I have children, a husband and dogs, and we have come – without really meaning to but by some centrifugal bourgeois force – to the Costa del Boden for our summer holiday. In short, we appear to be in favour of the fence. Where? Has yummy-mummy clothes-retailer Jonny Boden bought up part of the English coastline? Well, sort of. The Costa del Boden, otherwise known as the English middle-class coastline, pops up in more than a few places: Salcombe in Devon, Daymer Bay, Polzeath or Rock in Cornwall, Brancaster in Norfolk, and Seaview on the Isle of Wight. It is where the middle to upper classes holiday in this country. These aren't the middle classes the Telegraph writes about, now apparently priced out of their summer break by rising costs. Neither are they the net-zero middle classes who seek sustainable alternatives to overseas travel. No, these are the moneyed bourgeoisie who routinely spend at least a month of the summer on the English coast before heading to Corfu or France for a jolly in August. At any one of the yacht clubs, status is earned through routine longevity: if you have been coming for 'donkeys yahhs', so much the better. You'll also know everyone you run into – which is all any Sloane really wants; forget cultural exchange or the strange, salty nature of the Continent. All in all, robust, weather-beaten, 'Granny had a house here' boat-y top trumps is the thing. But one hardly needs to be robust to enjoy the Costa del Boden. It's all cloyingly lovely – too lovely, in fact. This isn't the risky carnival of Punch and Judy, the pier or, heaven forbid, dry sand. Far from it. At North Sands or Bantham Beach in Devon, the shoreline is jammed with labradors chasing tennis balls while mothers hare after little Ludos or Harrys togged out in – you guessed it – Boden long-sleeved swimsuits. Conversations I overheard while chasing my own little darling seemed to orbit around commuting, the merits of Bridie and Bert towels and VAT. If you fancy something to eat, you can have artisan pizza by the beach – sponsored, apparently, by Vivobarefoot-trainer tycoon Galahad Clark – or pick up a cortado from the coffee van (no cash, please, begs the sign). In Salcombe, bucket-and-spade shops have made way for an avalanche of boutiques designed to lure in the discerning middle-class female shopper; the brands With Nothing Underneath and Busby and Fox were doing a roaring trade when I stopped in for the briefest of rummages. Of course, if your children are older, the Costa del Boden is all about rummaging – or rather frisking. One friend, a regular on the Costa del Boden's Polzeath strip of coastline, tells tales of public-school teenagers – 'mainly Stowe, Radley and Marlborough, to be frank' – prowling the beach after dark 'like penguins' while their parents drink rosé until 'the police turn the floodlights on at midnight like magic nannies'. 'It's teen mecca,' another friend sighs, adding that Daymer Bay, where the Camerons have a house, is 'still sweet', but 'the teenagers just want to be where they know everyone from school'. All anyone wants, it seems, is to have a jolly good, socially cordoned-off, PLU time, whether procured with a fake ID or not. Ah, identity – that old conundrum. I got to thinking about it, as Carrie Bradshaw would have said, during my week on the Costa del Boden. I thought about how I must have appeared to others in my Boden swimming costumes and Aspiga dresses: invisible death by batik print and nautical stripe. I thought about how strong and persistent the desire to blend in is – and how brightly that desire burns in my seven-year-old daughter's eyes. But I shan't be sad. Chesterton wasn't, after all; he knew that fences were put up for a reason, and that nobody has a good time until someone is excluded. The Costa del Boden, erected to keep others out and let the right sort in, is surely the fence of which he speaks.
Telegraph
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The man on a mission to bring 1970s sexiness back in style
Yves Saint Laurent, hair coiffed and as reed-thin as his Gitane cigarette, lighting up the dance-floor at Paris's Le Sept nightclub as his yin and yang female familiars Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise flick their hair alongside, as potent as his Opium fragrance. The dandyish figure of Jacques de Bascher, sometime lover of both Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, immaculate in a white three-piece suit, weaving his devastating magic around the hearts of the continental beau monde across the Côte d'Azur. Halston in leathers, slipping through the throngs at Studio 54, trailed by Mick, Bianca and a cloud of scandal. Alain Delon, all lethal cheekbones and feline agility in Purple Noon, or the leonine deadliness of Helmut Berger looking just about the most bewitching example of masculinity you ever did see, on screen and off. Welcome to the world of male seduction as distilled so eloquently by Ben Cobb, a long-time editor and now designer. These references are prime examples of what he evocatively terms the 'Homme Fatale', taking these ingredients and shaking, stirring and pouring them into a collection that he's designed with the Scandinavian house Tiger of Sweden. Consider it a chilled martini in menswear form. 'The 1970s was such a fascinating moment for men expressing themselves sartorially, and it's something I've always been interested in,' says Cobb, who has worked as editor-in-chief of cult titles such as Another Man and Love magazine and most recently helmed ES Magazine. It helps that Mr Cobb happens to look as if he's stepped straight from the smoky drinking dens of Maxim's circa 1976 or the atmospheric film noir stills of Helmut Newton; at 51, he's all dark curls of hair, cheekbones that could shear a shard of ice into your cinzano at Club 55 and some thoroughly excellent suits – strong of shoulder, narrow of hip, with flared trousers and Cuban heels. It's an aesthetic that he's translated into his capsule range for the Swedish brand, a joint venture that's been going since 2022. ' The 1970s aesthetic is fantastic for men because it's sexy but also masculine; there's a lot of structure there in terms of tailoring, but it was an era that allowed movement too – mainly for all that dancing,' says Cobb, who I've happened to see shimmy his snake hips across dance floors from Paris to Berlin. That sentiment's echoed in the sanguine fluidity of the trousers, the exacting precision of the suiting and those seductive, silken shirts, designed to be undone to the navel as the sultry night wears on. 'Nineteen-seventies tailoring actually harks back to other decadent eras, such as the 1920s and 30s, that time between the wars when there was this fatalistic sense of hedonism,' says Cobb, who as a youngster growing up in London was inspired by the films of Helmut Berger and Alain Delon, and by the exceptional vintage suiting from the 1970s that offered a dressy alternative to the 90s grunge of the time. 'It was a time when men really embraced peacockery,' says Cobb, 'but unlike the 1960s, there was a feeling of refinement and louche, elegant sophistication.' Of course, certain sartorial scholars can cite the moments when men's style was more exuberant and expressive, from the era of Beau Brummell to the dauphins of the Court of Versailles, with Macaronis and Maharajas along the way. But for Cobb, who was born in 1974, the decade defined his formative years thanks to early second-hand store and flea market hauls as he explored his look in his teens; 'you could pick up a great jacket for next to nothing that was built to last and had a defined shape that was off that time,' he says. So it's very much not the rather drab and dreary side of 1970s Britain that some of us might recall; blackouts, Fray Bentos and Arthur Scargill in his donkey jacket. 'I've always preferred fantasy to realism,' says Cobb with a wry, moustached (of course) smile. Hold the Vesta boil-in-the-bag meals, thank you very much. It's something more ephemeral and richly evocative, and also a welcome antidote to current dress-down trends. Who is his ultimate Homme Fatale? 'If I had to pin it on one person, it would definitely be Helmut Berger,' says Cobb, whose Instagram account is a veritable homage to the late bisexual Austrian actor prone to dark and dangerous characters, and whose private life was as turmoiled, fatalistic and troubled as his on-screen incarnations. 'The Homme Fatale's a man of drama and disaster, as well as incredible taste. There's a danger to him, alongside that elegant sophistication.' A silk neck scarf alongside a denim shirt undone down to here, with a side of renegade roguishness? 'Something like that,' says Cobb. 'It's about living deliciously.'
