This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

If one takes one’s lead from those young adults not exposing their genitalia on Love Island this summer, then the look of the season is meno-core, aka the Coastal Grandmother Aesthetic. TikTokers are wild for the CG vibe, with us since Man Repeller’s Harling Ross coined the term back in July 2017 to describe a look “inspired by the aesthetic of a middle-aged woman on a low-key beach vacation”. Ross pointed to the classy-ish but casual, chic yet marginally quirky guise of the middleaged heroines of Nancy Meyers’s movies, principally, Diane Keaton in 2003’s Something’s Got to Give. We’re talking seaside ease, sans preppiness, but with homemade-granola boho.

A bleached, sludgy morass of sun hats, long sweaters, Birkies and drawstring linens, meno-core is the antithesis of the bandage dres

A bleached, sludgy morass of sun hats, long sweaters, Birkies and drawstring linens, meno-core is the antithesis of the bandage dress: sexless, soothing, self-care manifested as a wardrobe. The combined effects of #MeToo and the pandemic have only exacerbated the retreat into these protective, natural-fibre layers, as Millennials opt into premature perimenopause.

Meanwhile, those technically menopausal have gone the other way and are infantilising themselves with a nymphs and shepherds guise by way of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. I attended some grand, all-female, Gen X dinner the other day actually to discuss matters meno, and was the only woman not clad as Little Bo Peep; all candy colours, puffed sleeves, and frilly flounces. It left a sickly feeling, another rejection of sexuality, only this time as a collective tribute to Violet Elizabeth Bott.

What’s the adult dresser to do? Well, this one’s sporting Hayley Menzies and has no intention of ever donning anything else again come summer. I’ve written about my love of Menzies before en passant. However, this penchant has now gone off-the-scale and I have rid myself of anything remotely hot weatherish other than a handful of her insanely flattering, silk, maxi shirt dresses. To date, I have sported HM in Venice, Necker Island, at the races, down the boozer, from Buck House to the big house, as it were, less a fan than the poor woman’s stalker.

This is a shame, as Hayley is ace: 45, tiny, blonde with a fabulously erect yoga arse. She grew up in an artsy west London clan, before studying design and styling at the London College of Fashion. Menzies raved, she downward dogged, she ran a club, a “rock ‘n’ rolling stone”, before setting up a stall on Portobello Market in 2011. Groupies followed, urging our heroine to launch her own brand flogging spirited ready-to-wear to “life’s refined rebels”.

Now in its twelfth year, said brand is stocked in over 100 stores in 17 countries, with a cheery bricks and mortar presence in Chelsea’s Duke of York Square (opened between lockdowns), and a thriving online trade. The company’s growth during the pandemic was the stuff of fantasy given we were fed the line that fashion had perished. Instead, between 2019 and the end of 2021, HM business grew 320%.

In part, this may be attributable to the label’s cunning positioning as a luxurious, eco-conscious option occupying a far loftier position than high-end high street, yet without the artificially-inflated price tags of designer wares. “That sounds fair,” the customer reflects. “An incredibly beautiful, thoughtfully-produced frock that will last me a lifetime probably should cost 460 quid. Plus I am in love.”

Frankly, it’s the coolest girl gang I’ve ever levered myself into, with a Nineties/Noughties boho feel

Design takes place in London. Yarns are chosen by Hayley in Florence, then a mother-and-daughter-run Romanian factory produces the knitwear. Silks are developed, printed and produced in Blighty, then pieced together in a family-owned factory in Bulgaria. There is a pleasing focus on genuine relationships, both with HM’s largely female creatives, and her customers alike.

Frankly, it’s the coolest girl gang I’ve ever levered myself into, with a Nineties/Noughties boho feel — only better, more elegant, and entirely possible to do if you remember it from first time around; or, indeed, eschewed it altogether. We’re talking insouciant flamboyance: silks, coatigans, eruptions of edgy volume, “lasting treasures made for life’s maximalist souls”, as Menzies herself puts it.

There is colour, ornament, joy; there are palm prints and jungle animals. To quote our heroine: “Expressive, spontaneous and a little wild, the Hayley Menzies woman is never afraid of being ‘too much’.” Moreover, for once, it’s actually the case that she can be 17 or 70+, a mother, daughter or grandmother — coastal or otherwise — haunting the King’s Road store in search of a little light decadence. Whatever your hormonal persuasion, you will find a home here.