Mutton chops are back and everyone's drinking sloe gin

Actor Jacob Elordi and a contestant on the most recent season of 'The Traitors' are responsible for bringing back the sideburns.

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

One of my favourite participants in the most recent season of The Traitors is James, a gardener from Dorset. He emitted countless theories about who the different traitors might be, pointing the finger in a new direction in each episode, and is the proud possessor of an extraordinary pair of sideburns.

It’s official: mutton chops are back. The best-known ambassador of the oft-maligned facial hair was Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy. (‘I seriously believe you should rethink the length of your sideburns,’ Bridget Jones told her very own Darcy in 2001.)

Although Austen-mania is on the wane following the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth last year, the aesthetic embodied by her male characters is on the ascent. In three weeks’ time, Jacob Elordi will grace cinema screens as Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, complete with a brooding Yorkshire accent and sideburns down to his knees.

Abundant purple sloes on a blackthorn in the autumn in the New Forest

Okay, not quite: they end just below his cheekbones. A shame in his case, as they’re so sharp.

‘Look at this,’ said my friend Patrick the other week — in between episodes of The Traitors — thrusting his phone under my nose. ‘I can’t see what you’re showing me, Pat. Stop waving it around. Calm down!’ It was a picture of the menu at Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch. ‘Went with the fam,’ Pat mooed. ‘But look. Look here.’ There, at the top of the page where they list the drinks for the day, were our four favourite words in the English language. ‘Oh my,’ I replied. ‘How many did you have?’

Sloe gin and tonic has become the drink of the season. The berries enjoyed a bumper harvest last year, so it’s no surprise they are more abundant and popular than ever. Achieved by infusing classic gin with sugar and sloes in a sealed jar, the mixture is best paired with a lemon or elderflower tonic. If you’ve not yet broken your Dry January, let this be the drink that tempts you.

This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Will Hosie is Country Life's Lifestyle Editor and a contributor to A Rabbit's Foot and Semaine. He also edits the Substack @gauchemagazine. He not so secretly thinks Stanely Tucci should've won an Oscar for his role in The Devil Wears Prada.