Boho-chic is a style of fashion drawing on various bohemian and hippie influences, which, at its height in late 2005 was associated particularly with actress Sienna Miller and model Kate Moss in England and (as "boho" chic) actress and businesswoman Mary-Kate Olsen in the United States. It has been seen since the early 1990s and, although appearing to wane from time to time, has repeatedly re-surfaced in varying guises. Many elements of boho-chic became popular in the late 1960s and some date back much further, being associated, for example, with pre-Raphaelite women of the mid-to-late 19th century.
"BoHo" is an abbreviation of Bohemian Homeless, self descriptive of the style.
Vanessa Nicholson (granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, one of the pivotal figures of the unconventional, but influential "Bloomsbury Group" in the first half of the 20th century) has described it as a "curious slippery adjective". Although the original Bohemians were travellers or refugees from central Europe (the French bohémien translates as "Gypsy or Roma people"), the term has, as Nicholson noted, "attached itself to individuals as disparate as Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes". The writer and historian A. N. Wilson remarked that, "in his dress-sense as in much else", Winston Churchill was "pre-First World War Bohemian", his unbleached linen suit causing surprise when he arrived in Canada in 1943.
In Arthur Conan Doyle's first short story about Holmes for The Strand, Doctor Watson noted that the detective "loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul" and "remained in our lodgings in Baker-street, buried among his old books and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition..". Designer Savannah Miller, elder sister of actress Sienna Miller, described a "real bohemian" as "someone who has the ability to appreciate beauty on a deep level, is a profound romantic, doesn't know any limits, whose world is their [sic] own creation, rather than living in a box".