I went over to trendy Hoxton tonight to play low stakes poker (I walked away with a £3 profit - at last my live poker year is turning round). Hoxton is not a place I visit very often, though I was here a couple of weeks ago as well. It's the home to lots of fashionable media types as satirised in the TV show
Nathan Barley. Although in some respects the posing dandies are laughable, I rather like them. I guess when they pull it off, I admire their confidence and wish to express themselves through wearing second-hand clothing and unusual make-up like a clown might have. But the line between being cool and avant-garde and being desperate and wrong. I guess it's a burden for the would-be cool to bear. Luckily I have never wanted to be cool and don't have the confidence to dress as a cross between a soldier and a Titanic survivor, so it's a cross that I can just watch being carried by someone else. But I enjoy it if they carry the cross with panache and can laugh at them if they are struggling with the cross and falling over it and hitting other people on the head with it a la
The Plank. This metaphor is getting a bit stretched. But I still like it.
What I like about travelling to Hoxton is the closer you get the more of these fancy dress wearing extroverts you begin to see. A few of them will have escaped the magnetic pull of Hoxton Square and find themselves wandering dazed around the corridors of Bank station, perhpas enjoying that they stand out from the norms, perhaps afraid that they have wandered too far from their home and may be set upon by people who think that wearing jeans and a T shirt is a bit over the top fashion-wise. The trendies look up from beneath the veil on their twenties style hat, with their one eye heavily made up, but with the rest of their face white as cocaines and wonder what it would be like to not express oneself through outrageous clothing.
The closer you get to Hoxton the more of these people you see, until finally when you are in Hoston Square itself, you in your jeans and jacket are the weird outsider. All the other people with their hats made from watering cans and their trousers made out of invisible material that only very clever people can see will now look at you in the way that in Bank the Hoxtonite will be viewed. And it strikes you that it's a bit stupid for all the non-conformists to gather in one place, because then they become the norms and I become the outlandish freak in my blue shirt and tan leather jacket.
Yet mainly I don't mind that, because the proximity to so many other people trying to express themselves throught outrageous clothes will push these people on to greater and more ridiculous excesses - some of which will manage to be cool, whilst others inexplicably won't, despite being almost the same. Also if I ever want to look at people dressed in an unusual way it would be annoying if they didn't all conveniently locate themselves in one place. i would have to scour London hoping to bump into one. But because of Hoxton if I ever get that feeling I can just get the tube there, have a look and go home.
Tonight alas the rain had driven most of the freaks indoors (water will damage their fragile clothing and make their make-up run) so only the ones trying to fill their watering can hats for free had dared step outside. But I saw a couple of them lurking in doorways and sleeping behind some bins or scavanging food from the gutters.
I do like them. But only the ones who keep it up forever and don't get to about 25 and then suddenly decide it's time to conform. only the ones prepared to remain consistent and thus waste their whole lives on their intrinsic vanity will get my seal of approval.
Here's to you Hoxton. Long may you reign and keep away from the rain.
