The bewildered boy clutches his fruit salad and searches for a seat at the back of the bar. He’s wearing a vintage flannel shirt and skinny jeans, a pair of pointed brogues and pink plastic-framed sunglasses. His hair is a peroxide crop in the androgynous, Agyness Deyn style. This hipper-than-thou hangout in the Truman Brewery on London’s Brick Lane, with its indistinct electronic soundtrack, is a popular spot. Emos, nu-folkies and post-post-punks mingle on Moroccan-style cushions. A guy in a ripped white V-neck T-shirt is stretched out on the leather couch in the corner, his face lit by the pale glow from his MacBook. For an aspiring scenester like the boy in the flannel shirt, standing out from the crowd is going to be a struggle.
We’re in the crucible of London cool, a district so packed with poseurs that it attracts as many satirists as it does followers of fashion. But forget any tired talk simply of Shoreditch twats and Brooklyn hipsters. Across the developed world, from Copenhagen to Cape Town, from Tokyo to Sao Paolo, from Kreuzberg to Williamsburg – from Grangemouth to Guildford, for that matter – today’s scenesters all wear the same clothes and accessories, listen to the same sounds, ride the same bicycles, and read the same magazines, e-mailouts and style blogs.
“There always used to be a particular city that was the centre of cool at a particular point in time,” says Ted Polhemus, style anthropologist and author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. “But now there’s no longer a place where it’s ‘at’; there’s no longer any centre of the world’s popular cultural universe. For a time it seemed it would be a simple matter of shifting from London to Tokyo. But instead, street style is everywhere and in places you’d never have guessed it would be.”
The Truman Brewery is a microcosm of an international phenomenon. Across the alley from the bar, Rough Trade East – London’s coolest independent record store – is celebrating its first birthday with a limited edition run of Rough Trade-branded Converse All Stars, the global scenester’s shoe of choice. Next door, there’s a hairdresser cutting the “do” of the day, its clients reclining in Japanese Belmont Cadilla styling chairs “for ultra-comfort and design”.
There’s the local scooter dealership with a rank of Mod-ish Italian Vespas lined up on the pavement outside. And at the end of the row is a clothing store that specialises in stitching together two old pieces of clothing to make something new. Want your pinstripe suit grafted to a hoodie? This is the place for you. And this is what global scenester culture has come to in the Noughties – a succession of styles from the past half-century, patched together to form a single, strangely familiar whole. There’s a bit of Eurotrash here, some British punk there, a swatch of Asian minimalism, and a sizeable off-cut of blue-collar chic from both sides of the Atlantic. So how, exactly, did hip get globalised?
Like every other American Apparel clothing store worldwide, the East End branch – a stone’s throw from the Truman Brewery – stocks Spandex hotpants and sequined tube dresses, white Eighties gym socks and DayGlo sports sweats, maroon corduroys worthy of Woodstock, even the latest album by French electro-auteur Sébastien Tellier. The shop is so popular it’s moving to bigger premises.
American Apparel is an archetype for the globalisation of “cool”. The retail chain was founded in California in 1997 with an outsider ethic. Most of its clothes are produced in an 800,000-square foot factory in Los Angeles, and its Canadian founder, Dov Charney, actively associates his brand with the city’s multicultural melting pot.
Today, American Apparel is the largest domestic clothing manufacturer in the US, and boasts around 200 stores worldwide – in Canada, Mexico, Israel, Japan, Korea and most of Western Europe. There are outlets in Glasgow, Brighton and Liverpool, and the locations of its London branches read like a historical tour of capital cool: Portobello Road, Carnaby Street, Covent Garden, Camden. The further its global reach stretches, the more easily the company can study and copy street style, before repackaging it and selling it back to the originators of that style, with an American Apparel label attached.
Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing giant, is another outfitter of the global scenester. Until 2004, the chain was known as a cheap and nasty Asian C&A equivalent. Its first move into the UK, in the early Noughties, met with little success. So Uniqlo executives went back to the drawing board and hired top creative director Kashiwa Sato to transform its fortunes.
Sato’s strategy was to make Uniqlo a global brand, but one unafraid of flaunting its modern Japanese origins. Now the company’s website is world class, its store interiors sleek and minimalist, its global logo (in both Roman and Japanese script) ubiquitous, and its clothing cutting edge and inclusive. Today, Uniqlo has almost 800 stores worldwide, including outlets in the UK, US and France. What Sato was looking to replicate, he recently told Creative Review, was “the ultra-contemporary cool aspect of Japan, its pop culture rather than something traditional and Japanese-y.” He’d tapped into the global scene.
Down the street from American Apparel, past the London College of Fashion, is The Old Blue Last, a shabby-chic pub where Vice magazine, style bible to the global scenester, hosts regular parties. Outside, a blackboard advertises “fuzzed garage, punk, post-punk, freakbeat and more in an anything goes night of really GOOD music”.
Once, style tribes defined themselves by their music. There were disco divas, electro heads, hippy West Coast rockers…. But in the age of the MP3, anything really does go: Parisian lounge jazz bands can cover the Ramones (as did Nouvelle Vague); Belgian producers can make a Kylie Minogue song sound like The Prodigy (as did Soulwax); and DJs can drop The White Stripes into a hip-hop set – Mark Ronson made his name on the New York club circuit doing just that.
Today’s music scene is a global swapshop. One of the coming bands of this year, for instance, are Johannesburg’s Blk Jks, whose style choices include the global scenester’s familiar Elvis Costello “dork” glasses, 1970s ski vests, vintage Nikes and, yes, skinny jeans.
The band that defined the US branch of the global scene was The Strokes, a quintet of monied Manhattanites posing as Lower East Side hipsters. Lead singer Julian Casablancas’s vocal persona is insouciant, unimpressed, too cool to try harder. His latest project is the song “My Drive Thru”, commissioned for a Converse advertisement; the ad is the centrepiece of Converse Century, a celebration of the company’s first 100 years, and a smart marketing campaign that condenses decades of global youth subculture and rebrands it for the mainstream.
The print element of the Converse Century campaign features a row of international, intergenerational scenesters, each wearing their pair of Chuck Taylor All Star trainers – among them are Hunter S Thompson, James Dean and Sid Vicious. The UK version of the print ad features Joy Division’s Ian Curtis; the French version, actress and singer Jane Birkin; the Chinese version, singer-songwriter Cui Jian. Converse means cool in more than 20 languages.
When the first edition of the glossy freesheet Vice came out in Montreal in 1994, its founders could hardly have believed that, 14 years on, it would be sought out by 900,000 readers on five continents. Now, the Vice empire includes a clothing chain, a record label and an online TV channel.
The Vice aesthetic has had an abiding influence on global scenester style. The magazine’s photographers popularised a street-verité photographic vernacular, with touches of soft porn and a sense of menace. The Vice Photo Book, a collection published earlier this year, boasts images of guns, sex, drug-taking, blood and vomit.
It’s no coincidence that American Apparel’s often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look, nor that Vice photographer Terry Richardson is the principal photographer for Uniqlo’s in-house magazine, Paper. His style has countless amateur copycats worldwide, whose photos have found a home on fast-growing photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and MySpace. Snapping away at a party in Portland, Oregon, or in Harajuku, Tokyo, a global scenester can disseminate their local style worldwide before sunrise.
“People like Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson just took pictures of their friends on basic cameras,R
Watch her slide from a whole load of “I’m awesome, thanks” over to “Barack Obama for President”:
