For San Francisco readers keeping up-to-date on the latest style news, we are pleased to provide this story/excerpt from The London Guardian.

While retailers are floundering all down the high street, one British clothing outfit appears to be thriving. Shoppers visiting London’s Covent Garden just after Christmas were flabbergasted to see a snaking queue of young teens – girls, sturdy Ugg-booted Chelsy Davey blondes, boys, all McFly hair-dos and Prince Harry complexions – waiting patiently in sub-zero temperatures as a bouncer manning a velvet rope employed a strict, one-in, one-out policy at the door. Why all the fuss? Jack Wills was having its sale.

You haven’t heard of it? Everything this Salcombe-based label does is frightfully, awfully British. This is a Johnny-come-lately of a brand – founded in 1999 and named after its managing director’s grandfather – doing its best to pretend it’s been around for years. If Jack was a real person, he’d be dismissed as a nouveau chancer and have his trousers ruddy well pulled off in the quad.

Instead, Jack Wills has been adopted as a reassuringly expensive (Jack Wills hoodie for £69, anyone?) cod-collegiate, Anglo-preppy quartermaster for the type of indifferent young people who go through life as if on some glorious, open-ended gap year. It is the outfitters of choice to trust-funded surfer Sloanes, landed slobs, ski-bum Wags, chalet girls and wannabe rowing blues. It is the UK pretender to Abercrombie & Fitch’s collegiate, tumble-dry hegemony or “Nike for the middle classes”, as one Jack Wills customer from Shrewsbury calls it.

Accordingly there are branches in London’s leafy, moleskin postcodes – Chelsea, Notting Hill, Clapham – and likely spots for second homes (Aldeburgh, Bath and Cowes).

Peter York, co-author of the Sloane Ranger Handbook, isn’t surprised that the hooded sweatshirt has become a staple among the nu-Sloanes. “There are similarities with Sloane and urban dress codes,” he says, “but the differences are obvious if you know where to look.”

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