The woman sitting in front of me is the personification of the Successful Fashion Professional, 2025 Edition, with her oversized black blazer, the curation of chains and pendants at her neck, her expensively beach-y hair. Then she waves her pencil case at me, an upscaled leather retool of a Pritt Stick.
“For me, a new pencil case is a bit like a new handbag,” says Anya Hindmarch, purveyor of much-loved — and determinedly quirky — iterations of both. “It does a similar thing. I love going into a board meeting with something a bit silly: a pencil case, or a fun notebook. It gives me pleasure, and it also gives me a sense of control in a weird way.”
Aptly enough we are here today to talk about the new Peanuts x Anya Hindmarch collaboration, the second, which launches on September 30, and has a Beagle Scout focus. Think Snoopy asleep on top of a tent rather than his usual doghouse (available on an Ear Pods pouch, £295, or a zipped card case, £275). Or Snoopy selflessly lying across a crevasse in order that some typically nonchalant-looking Woodstocks can march across it/him (a zipped pocket, £295). And not forgetting the inspired 3D pencil case rendering of the world’s most famous beagle in a quilted sleeping bag (£320).
Beagle Scout Snoopy in a quilted sleeping bag pencil case (£320); Ear Pods pouch, £295
Even Hindmarch’s classy Mortimer handbag has been given the Beagle Scout treatment (£2,250). Plus — the designer being so very about place as well as product — her beloved Pont Street in Knightsbridge, London, otherwise known as Anyaville, is being transformed into a world of Charles M Schulz, with sweet Snoopy treats in the Anya Café (Woodstock cake, anyone?), and Anya’s Trail. Follow the map to collect stamps and — if you are among the first 500 — win yourself a cloth badge like the kind you might stitch onto a scout uniform.
It’s all delicious. But then I would say that, a self-professed Peanuts geek who owns two Snoopy sweatshirts from the cult Los Angeles brand Freecity that cost me more money than I care to admit, as well as more Snoopy T-shirts from the similarly cult TSPTR than I care to count.
Hindmarch and I are of a similar vintage, and both grew up loving Snoopy. “It was very much part of a 1970s childhood,” she says. “If you had a school uniform like mine, the only thing you could do, in terms of personal expression, was decide to wear your ponytail on one side and cover your notebook in stickers. So those things really mattered. They were your way of showing your identity.”
“There’s just something 1970s cool about it”
I suppose what I am surprised by, what my childhood self certainly wouldn’t have dared imagine, is that women like Hindmarch and I would still be showing our identity by way of Snoopy and his inimitable gang so (very) many decades later. I had assumed these were childish things that I would have to put away, and, indeed, for years, I did.
Yet, as Hindmarch rightly points out, there is something about Peanuts that — in contrast to many other cartoon worlds — one doesn’t age out of. “There’s just something 1970s cool about it,” she says. Certainly, I am happy to sit on the front row in a Snoopy T-shirt — and indeed just have, during New York Fashion Week — in a way that I wouldn’t be with, say, Peppa Pig.
Partly it’s the decidedly adult intelligence that interplays with the unapologetically childlike visual language. The exhibition Good Grief, Charlie Brown!, which ran at Somerset House in London from 2018-2019, explored Schulz’s engagement with everything from infant psychology (Linus’s “security blanket”, which debuted in 1954) to feminism (my Lucy “Power to My Kind” tee is a longtime favourite).
The full Peanuts x Anya Hindmarch collection
Partly it’s that now more than ever there’s a confidence, a flex even, that comes with embracing — and displaying — your inner child. Could there be something quintessentially British about it, too, its antecedent the perfectly tailored English gentleman flashing a bit of red sock here, a yellow pocket square there?
Certainly, that element of surprise, of incongruous joie de vivre, has always been at the heart of the Anya approach. “Our very first brands bags were Turkish Delight and Walkers crisps,” the designer says, referring to the sequinned evening numbers that debuted in 1991, and that were, at the time, utterly unlike anything that had been seen before. (A current incarnation channels Heinz Ketchup, £1,295, while a leather McVitie’s Penguin charm is £175.)
The Walkers crisps bag is one of three Anya items now in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection. “Which is rather lovely,” says Hindmarch, making manifest another quintessentially English quality, that of understatement.
It’s not only lovely. It’s also symptomatic of what an aesthetic breath of fresh air Hindmarch’s creations have always been.
