Frazzled Englishwoman & intentional clutter
I love a bit of mess
The current trend on interiors TikTok is called Intentional Clutter, which is Gen Z for ‘spaces decorated by people who love stuff’. At the same time, there’s the annual reprise of a more fashion-based trend called Frazzled Englishwoman. This one reappears every autumn/winter and essentially means ‘artless, slightly flushed woman, very much a stranger to the mirror selfie, messy hair, charmingly dishevelled, possibly idiosyncratically dressed, trying to get from A to B in the drizzle on her bike’.
The patron saint of Frazzled Englishwoman is of course the great Helena Bonham Carter (the clip below the photo is extremely funny, do double click on it and put the sound on - the whole thing is a perfect encapsulation of everything I really love about being older).
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Generic Frazzled Englishwoman - we have left Helena behind now! we cast no aspersions! - is a descendant of Barbara Pym’s quintessentially English heroines, except that she has sex, vigorously and uncomplicatedly, like a really cheerful labrador. Afterwards she’s absolutely famished. (She is specifically English - her French counterpart wouldn’t eat at all, her Italian counterpart might wander off naked for a little coffee and a bite of peach, but Frazzled Englishwoman puts on her fleecy dressing down, nips downstairs and makes herself a fried-egg sandwich. Then she gets back into bed and sleeps like a log for a solid 8 hours. I must write a novel about her at some point, I’m thinking - she is such rich pickings).