This fall, when British private-school blazers are a part of the season’s new formality, it seems right to wonder: Does a man want to relive his silly schoolboy days when he gets dressed? The prep-school blazer was layered, navy on navy, at Alessandro Dell’Acqua, paired with jeans at D&G, given a jaunty spin at Rykiel Homme and made into a down jacket at Thom Browne, where the models skated on ice. Surely the bonds of Latin and Chaucer and boyhood rebellion outlast the urge to sport a blazer with a crest on the breast pocket. The City of London may indeed be inhabited by a network of gentlemanly alumni outfitted by Jermyn Street tailors, but not all of the old chaps wear a suit and tie. Meet the anti-Etonian, John Lycett Green.
He is one of England’s most popular D.J.’s, followed by fans from the small clubs of Bristol to the throngs at the Glastonbury Festival. He has been listed as one of Tatler magazine’s 100 Most Invited, and has no less a rival than that most posh of bachelors, Prince William himself.
But Lycett Green wants no part of the old-boy network held in high regard by his toffee-nosed peers. “It doesn’t mean much to be an Old Etonian,” he says, raising the bass on the Immortal Technique track that is mesmerizing him. Lycett Green is 27, and seems at first like a thoroughly modern man: the cellphone never stops ringing with questions about guest lists and weekend plans; his laptop is an ever-present source of music except when the pumping bass shakes from his Smart car. But to see him running through mud and moss in the country is to consider a very particular boyhood.
His pedigree is as British as British can be: he is the grandson of the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman. His mother, Candida, is a best-selling writer and a friend of Camilla. His father, Rupert, owned the Savile Row tailor shop Blades, which outfitted the Beatles in the 60’s. He grew up in the fields of Wiltshire, not far from where locals say St. George slew the dragon. He believes the dragon was real.
Despite the baggy white denim and modishly unruly hair, he could be from another time. There is the glamour of his face; he looks like a young Mick Jagger. There is his aimless melancholy; he could be a New Age Sebastian Flyte. But mainly what there is about John Lycett Green is the willful innocence of childhood. “Be good, be kind, peace you find” is the code he lives by. He is less the product of the elite pomp and circumstance of his education than of something inimitably English.
He spent his formative years in a fitted uniform, following his older brother to Hawtreys, an elite boys’ school established on the 18th-century foundations of Tottenham House, deep in the leafy darkness of the vast Savernake Forest. He was packed off with little blue shirts, matching little shorts and a little navy blue blazer with a red lion on the breast pocket. “This is how I grew up,” he says on a visit to the abandoned grounds. “This was my youth. Going to class in the morning and then running around in the forest. It still smells the same.”
Lycett Green dashes past the old cricket pitch and a huge oak tree. He points to his dormitory window, the drainpipes he climbed down, the remains of a dog’s grave he was made to touch on a dare. Childish mischief brightens his eyes. He sees a deer and runs after it. He has a hard time resisting climbing the trees. “It’s a weird, primeval, dog-eat-dog world when you’re really small and being put out here. It’s powerful. You’ve been sent into the world when you’re 7 or 8. But I loved it.”
At 13, he left the blazers of Hawtreys for the tailcoats of Eton. “I became interested in things at an early age,” he says, walking in a flowering campus lane. “The teachers were incredible. But I hate intellectual elitism. It kills your understanding of everything.” He steps ahead a few paces, looking at the fine stone walls and leaded windows.
“What does it mean to be an Eton man? It means a lot to some people, those who would automatically trust an Old Etonian, say, in the City or something. But what it really means is that most people have a preconceived notion of you, and that’s what I’ve fought against in trying to establish my own identity. Eton has benefited a lot of people. But I’ve seen it destroy people as well. They graduate with an attachment to something that is no longer there.”
And as for reliving his schoolboy days?
“I’d give anything to be 17 again and be at the center of my soul’s beginning. But it’s very nice to leave school.” He’s back in the Smart car and off again.
