On dressing to stand out by looking exactly like everyone else who wants to stand out
One of the great comedies of life in the East End, which I documented for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, where my observations on the local plumage are collected, is the spectacle of several hundred people all dressing with fierce individuality and all, as a result, looking remarkably similar. Shoreditch is where you go to express your unrepeatable uniqueness by adopting the exact uniform of everyone else who came here to do the same, and I find this endlessly, affectionately funny.
The paradox of the look
The defining style of the neighbourhood is a kind of studied nonconformity, an aesthetic of individual rebellion that has, through sheer popularity, become its own conformity. The carefully curated vintage, the deliberately clashing patterns, the haircut that took two hours to look like it took none, the air of having assembled an outfit purely to please oneself, all of it is sincerely meant as self-expression and all of it adds up, in aggregate, to a remarkably consistent tribe. To rebel against the mainstream, in Shoreditch, is to join a new mainstream with stricter dress codes than the one you left.
Why we dress like our people
This is not, I should say, a criticism, or not only a criticism, because the impulse behind it is deeply human and rather touching. People have always dressed to signal belonging, to mark out their tribe, to find their people in a crowd, and the elaborate style codes of the East End are simply the latest version of something as old as clothing itself. The subcultures of London, with their carefully policed aesthetics, are part of the city’s long cultural history, the kind of living heritage that institutions like Historic England document in the broader story of the capital’s neighbourhoods, and the cultural life that bodies such as the Greater London Authority recognise as part of what makes London London. We dress like our people because finding our people matters.
The labour of effortlessness
What does amuse me is the enormous effort involved in the appearance of effortlessness. The look that says “I threw this on and do not care what you think” is, almost without exception, the product of considerable thought, expense, and care, an entire performance of indifference that is anything but indifferent. There is a comedy in the gap between the message and the method, in the hours of curation that go into seeming uncurated, and I confess I am as guilty of it as anyone, having myself spent real time assembling an outfit designed to look entirely unconsidered.
The serious bit, beneath the fabric
Underneath the comedy there is something worth taking seriously, which is that style is one of the few forms of self-expression available to people who cannot afford the bigger ones. You may not be able to afford a flat, a car, or a future, but you can afford, with ingenuity and a good charity-shop eye, to look exactly like the person you want to be, and there is genuine creativity and genuine dignity in that. The style tribes of the East End are, among other things, an art form practised by people priced out of most other art forms, a way of making something of yourself when the more expensive ways are closed off.
The uniform I will keep wearing
So I will go on dressing with fierce individuality alongside everyone else dressing with fierce individuality, all of us unique in precisely the same way, and I will go on finding it funny, and go on doing it anyway. The uniform of nonconformity is still a uniform, the rebellion is still a tribe, and the effortless look still takes enormous effort, and knowing all of this changes my behaviour not at all. We dress to find our people, and I have found mine, several hundred of them, all wearing roughly what I am wearing, each of us magnificently, identically, individual. It is daft. It is human. I would not change a stitch of it.
The economics of looking good
It is worth saying plainly that the style economy of the East End is also, beneath the plumage, a real economy, supporting vintage traders, independent makers, alteration shops, and small designers, the kind of small-scale local enterprise that gives a high street its texture and its jobs. The performance of individuality, however funny, sustains a genuine livelihood for a lot of people, and the second-hand and independent fashion trade it runs on is a more sustainable model than the disposable churn it sits alongside. My jokes about the uniform of nonconformity should not obscure that the uniform is stitched, sold, and altered by people making an honest living from it.
And there is something quietly defiant in a culture that insists on self-expression at all, in a world that would happily dress everyone in identical mass-produced anonymity. The Shoreditch style tribes may all look alike to the outsider, but the impulse driving them, the refusal to be invisible, the insistence on making something of one’s appearance, is a small act of resistance against a flattening, homogenising commercial culture. They rebel into a uniform, yes. But they rebel, and the rebelling matters more than the uniform.
For more on the fashion of nonconformity, the team enjoys NewsThump, dressed to depress since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
