The model and author’s latest novel is a riotous romp featuring a cast of privileged and entitled women who live in the Cotswolds. Just don’t mistake her for one of them, she tells Juanita Coulson
Plum Sykes
Plum Sykes walks into Colbert on Sloane Square, and I must confess to having butterflies in my stomach. Full disclosure: the novelist, socialite and former model was one of my style icons when I was coming of age.
At 54, she is as willowy as ever, with glowing porcelain skin. Well-bred and even better dressed English roses, the Sykes twins, Plum and Lucy, took New York by storm in the late 1990s, as so-called It-girls and rising stars in fashion magazines. Plum, a protégé of Anna Wintour at US Vogue, embodied everything I thought I wanted back then. My younger self would have been starstruck if she had met her, and although my life has taken a different track, I am too.
Her beauty, familiar from fashion shoots and magazine profiles, has a different effect in person: less angular and more expressive. I hate myself for asking, but need details of her outfit. ‘A maroon velvet Bella Freud jacket. A very old jumper by Holland & Holland,’ she says. Leather knee-high boots from ‘a shop in Primrose Hill called Spice London – the owner designs all the shoes’.
Her jewellery is an understated mix of family heirlooms and vintage pieces. Brown jeans by 7 For All Mankind and a ‘super-soft scarf from The Holy Goat’ complete her town look today. In the country she favours vintage tweeds: ‘Oliver Brown cavalry twill men’s breeches in a buttery cream colour (you buy two sizes too big and shrink them); old, stiff riding boots; a really brilliant Belstaff waxed jacket from years ago.’
Sykes’s early novels, Bergdorf Blondes (2004) and The Debutante Divorcée (2006), chronicle the lives of super-rich, glamorous women in the Manhattan circles she inhabited at the time. But we are here to talk about her latest, Wives Like Us, in which the action moves to the English countryside, specifically the Cotswolds, where she lives today with her two daughters, Ursula, 17, and Tess, 13, her dogs and horses.
Her unique blend of shrewd social commentary and knowing humour, with a dash of what she calls ‘affectionate satire’, is reminiscent of Nancy Mitford, PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. It’s no surprise that when asked about her literary influences, these names top the list.
What inspired her to write about this
