Can anyone look good in an Alice band?

Beyonce, portraying Alice of Alice In Wonderland. The Alice band was a childish, nursery-inspired trend beloved of Sloane Rangers in the Eighties.

Beyonce, portraying Alice of Alice In Wonderland. The Alice band was a childish, nursery-inspired trend beloved of Sloane Rangers in the Eighties.

Published Jun 8, 2016

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London - The Duchess of Cambridge only has to wear something once for it to become an instant sellout.

It’s thanks to her that the wedge heel, Breton top and nude tights are now more popular than ever.

But surely not even the lovely Kate can bring back the wretched Alice band after she was pictured wearing one at the Houghton horse trials in Norfolk?

Like knickerbockers, pie-crust collars and corduroy skirts gathered at the waist, the Alice band was a childish, nursery-inspired trend beloved of Sloane Rangers in the Eighties, in the days when Princess Diana could get away with anything and half of Chelsea and the Cotswolds would copy her.

Although even she, in all her Sloane glory, would never have been seen wearing the traditional, stiff band — though she did favour a more fashionable elastic version later. Even so, Alice bands were considered anti-fashion. Like quilt, padded waistcoats and ancient Barbours, they were a tribal, upper middle-class statement.

If you wore an old-fashioned Alice band you weren’t in the game. People’s mothers would wear them in the country when they hadn’t had a fresh blow-dry. It stopped their blonde highlights getting mixed up in the garden shears, Aga lids, or the labrador’s collar.

In that sense, nothing has changed. Kate’s on-tour hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker cannot set up a permanent base at Anmer Hall, in which case, what is the Duchess meant to do with that annoying growing-out fringe during family time? Style it herself or, as she decided, resort to a plastic tortoiseshell Alice band? When I joined Tatler in the Nineties, there was one plummy woman who still occasionally wore an Alice band.

We regarded her as an amiable, posh eccentric, a maternal type from another era even though she was only in her mid 30s.

Tatler was probably the only magazine — apart from Country Life perhaps — where she could have got away with it since it was staffed mostly by fellow Hooray Henrys and Henriettas who understood such things.

Alice bands were, of course, named after Lewis Caroll’s Alice, who in illustrations wore a ribbon round her head in just that spot.

In real life they could be velvet and padded, thin and plastic, fat and embellished.

At one point they tried to become cool and were almost a stretchy head band.

As there was no plastic toothy bit to serate the skull and trigger a pressure headache, I experimented with these. One summer, when I was a student, I took to wearing a white, thick, cotton-and-Lycra band. I imagined I looked exotic and loved that it gave my hair artificial height and volume.

The glamorous impression I thought I was giving was cruelly punctured when a kindly old acquaintance of my mother asked what her poor younger daughter had done, because he thought I was sporting an enormous head bandage.

Every few seasons some brave designer tries to bring them back, like culottes or peplums. Currently it’s the turn of Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana who have produced some rather beautiful, much-imitated jewelled affairs with net bows and comfortable thickness. Even I am tempted.

Kate’s Alice band, however, isn’t this enchanting, fashionable version at all, it’s the old, prissy, migraine-inducing sort that I hoped had joined knickerbockers in the great Sloane gear repository in the sky.

Unless you are a schoolgirl with flyaway hair and a particularly insensitive scalp, please, just, no. Let’s leave the Alice band firmly where it belongs . . . in Wonderland.

Daily Mail

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