London Subculture

Editors Letter

I was 15 when I started to wear women’s clothes, and 16 the first time I wore make up. This wasn’t because of some sexual disposition, or a crisis of gender. I wasn’t some outlandish drag queen wannabe. I was just a teenager that wanted to be different, and I wasn’t the only one. My friends and I would raid out mum’s make up bags to put on eye-liner (guy-liner) and buy our jeans from the women’s section of the store to get them extra tight. I would steal clothes from the costume department at school to get something that no one else would be wearing. You can imagine the heads I turned going to the cinema with my school friends in a Victorian lace blouse. I didn’t want to be just another square peg for a square hole. I wanted to be round.

We all listened to the same music, written by people we wanted to emulate. We all hung out at the same bar, a little place in the city that never asked for ID, and didn’t ask questions. Like all my friends, I grew out of it. I stopped raiding my sister’s wardrobe for clothes, and I left my mum’s make up bag in peace. It may have been my first phase of real self-expression in terms of my identity, but it wasn’t the last. I’ll always look back on pictures of myself in my full garb, and cringe a little, but never regret it. At the time we thought we were the coolest people alive. We thought we were being original, we were saying something nobody else was saying. We occupied that teenage time and space with such blind faith that what we were doing meant something, at least to us, and the boundaries that the world around us had built.

I suppose that is what sparked my interest in the subcultures that bubble just beneath the surface of society, like molten lava below the lithosphere of mainstream life. Sometimes existing in harmony, unnoticed by those that occupy the outer shell. Other times these subcultures clash like tectonic plates, and erupt through the surface, cutting a new path through the everyday societal crust.

Extended metaphors aside, since I moved to London I can’t help but notice people that are different. Around every street corner is someone that lives their life in complete contrary to yours. The beauty of the city is the fact that it’s perfectly okay to do so. Recently it seems as though the purity of this notion has become diluted, contaminated even. Appropriation of identity is common place, be it Miley Cyrus absorbing black rap culture and splurging it all over the media, or Topshop selling the latest Punk clothing line. Underground style doesn’t exist anymore, not with the die-hard self-exposure of today’s internet culture. London’s long and illustrious history of exciting and radical subcultures, it seems, has become mining field for behemoth corporate entities (including celebs) thieving creative capital.

In this series of articles I hope to prove myself wrong. I want to find that white of flame of pure rebellion again, and in doing so learn more about why people choose to be different. It’s that choice that defines us as individuals: the ability to express ourselves in not just words, but actions.