Dog days / What your whippet says about you |
‘Whippets are simply ducal,’ a grand friend pants at me in her drawing room when I ask her why she owns one. Certainly not a Regency duke, I mutter, looking at the fawn skeleton lying in wait on the brocade sofa. Because to me, whippets aren’t posh, just as Michael Heseltine isn’t fooling me all these years later. Rather, I find them sinister: the endless jutting ribs, the paper-thin coat, the incessant shaking.
But I know I am not in good company. Whippets, the Ozempic-coded dog of our age, have been taken up by high society in their droves. You can’t move for magazine features detailing their storied owners: Robin Birley, of course, whose whippets eat breakfast at 5 Hertford St, or Rose, Lady Cholmondeley, who keeps hers whizzing around the Palladian porticos of Houghton Hall in Norfolk.
Other moneyed grandees to have brought the breed into the damask-lined zeitgeist of ‘interiors’ Instagram include mug-millionaire Emma Bridgewater and Victoria Stapleton, founder of the cashmere empire Brora, whose whippets have, for the last decade or so, appeared in carefully curated ‘quiet luxury’ reels where the dog is indistinct from the brindle-tone cashmere. Zoom in, and you may even spot the biggest giveaway of all: a whippet crest on a signet ring. Oh, and they don’t smell........