The flood of streetstyle photographers patrolling the porticoed entrance to Somerset House seems to grow every year – just as the carefully-planned peacockery of the fashion brigade, now elevated to a precise art-form, seems to be increasingly attuned to the needs of the internet’s soundbite-sized attention span. Wacky Statement Shoe + Primary Colour Blocking + Vintage Bag + Pristine Cobbles = London: all neatly packaged, airbrushed and cropped.
But on the other side of that portico lies the other London – a vast, unpredictable sprawl of men and women whose fractious sense of individuality informs the catwalk’s world of colliding shapes and dissonant rainbows of colour. And in the anonymous bustle of that other city, where cardboard-thin walls separate you from neighbours who might as well be a million miles away, people dress as they have always done: for comfort, for shelter, for pleasure. And – perhaps – less for attention, or for love of fashion, than for recognition: a way of reaching out, and finding a common ground with other kindred spirits.
For medieval guildsmen and artisans, it was the complex web of colours and patterns that denoted allegiance, profession and hierarchy: for religious and political dissidents, a dangerous labyrinth of coded symbols and hidden linings: for gay men in the closeted world of Victoria’s reign, the secret frisson of buttonholed carnations. Every era, every subculture has developed its’ own far-from-uniform uniformity, rebelling and reinventing clothing (often subverted versions of the establishment and the elite) as a means of mass expression. And like moths to a flame, entire generations have gathered around these hubs of anarchy, cloaking insecurity in the certainty of a common cause.
And – before streetstyle was even an idea – it was happening precisely where fashion shouldn’t be happening. In alleyways and boulevards, workingmens’ clubs and pool halls, piers and amusement arcades. The scuttlers of Manchester and Liverpool’s teeming Victorian slums, offsetting their sturdily serviceable coats and jumpers and lethal knives with sailors’ bell-bottoms and gaily patterned scarves: ragged Edwardian street-urchins, aping the ostentatious swagger of the era’s underworld bosses with exaggerated suits and sharp two-tone spats. The Teddy Boys of the Forties and Fifties, challenging austerity with the dandy swagger of oversized, velvet-collared coats and skintight drainpipes. The exotic zoot suits and Technicolour brio of melting-pot Notting Hill in the Windrush years. The ton-up boys who swarmed to Britain’s motorway diners, crowding round jukeboxes in sleek quiffs and biker leathers.
There’s an almost unconscious, artifice-free sensibility when you look through the fuzzy, out-of-time photographs of those eras: images that feel uncannily current thanks to our knack, from Mods to New Romantics to Buffalo and beyond, of relentlessly pilfering and re-articulating the styles of past generations to create our own hybrid view of the world. Yes, the poses are studied – borrowed from rock stars and movie icons – but there’s a powerful sense of community which shines through, jarring with our own need to constantly assert uniqueness and difference.
And there’s menace, too. Street style has, for most of its’ history, been an overwhelmingly male form of expression: and it has functioned, intentionally or otherwise, to intimidate as much as to include – to define a visceral, inarticulate, turbulent masculinity, pulling together bands of outcasts and outsiders into chillingly cohesive cliques. Walking past a group of hooded kids these days (because anonymity, swaddled in CCTV-unfriendly scarves and hoods, seems to be our generation’s badge of honour) is to experience an echo of the sense of quiet fear that the genteel middle classes must have felt watching Mods and Rockers rampage on the waterfront at Brighton in the Sixties. Which makes it intriguing to see that menace fetishised, ritualised, and even subverted on London’s catwalks, feted by newspapers who (outside of the prim safety of Somerset House) would react to the same garments in a very different way.
The expression “gang” is as old as the English language itself. It comes from a long-ago, far-away Norse word for journey. And there’s something in that ancient notion of rite-of-passage, or becoming a man, of the painful uncertainty of transition, which strikes at the heart of gang culture – whether the pumped-up gloss of America’s Projects, the dark intensity of punks and goths, or the cosy familiarity of Hoxton’s skinny-jean brigade. The need to see yourself reflected, mirrored, understood, accepted. Not alone.
