Our national style is ‘not too polished’, apparently, and ‘a little bit undone’. Can we be a bit more specific?, says she has settled back in seamlessly after 20 years out of the UK. “I realised just how much growing up in London shaped me,”. “I’ve been talking a lot with my friends about this idea of British girl energy; it’s just an irreverence, kind of a cheekiness, it’s not too polished, and it’s a little bit undone …”; something to be spoken of in vague, reverent generalities.
British girl energy hasn’t fully formed as a concept yet – Google it and you get a Shell advert for an engineering course for “young women”. My mental mood board offered up only multipacks of M&S pants, politeness wielded like a deadly weapon and those nice girls from Leeds on Gogglebox who love snacks and sofa-based gossip, so I asked around.
One friend delivered an instant bullet-pointed ad-agency-style list, as if she had been sitting poised, just waiting for me to ask. “Spandex, fast talking, false eyelashes; they have a work bestie, love a bargain, holidays are a fundamental human right.” Someone else offered the haiku-like “Jacket potato beans and cheese/Going out with no coat because you’ll lose it/Rimmel lipstick.
So far, so confusing, but that’s good news: nebulous, possibly contradictory definitions are a key part of making BGE elusively enviable. All we need is a Brit girl equivalent of