Notes from the Hill...
*or how the other-half dress
Hello there,
apologies long time readers of After the Fact - this is a re-post from about a year ago- for various reasons I had to temporarily delete this one from the Substack but now it’s going back up - I hope you enjoy the re-read or indeed the debut read! As always, readers old and new, thank you for reading and supporting this writing.
It’s always interesting to look back and it seems that this time last year I was focused on writing Haikus with a friend you can read those here as well as hiding in a crypt -looking at the back-end stats the crypt posts seems to have been one of my most popular, which is intriguing and suggests that I am not the only claustrophile out there!
Love,
Emma x o x
Photo credit: but what does this ensemble suggest about me?
I watch the wealthy while I gulp my morning coffee, early for work, killing time, scribbling, they mooch down the sparkling streets, so much cleaner than those on the other side of the river where I live, (a bus, two tubes and a trudge to South London). I encourage my young creative writing students to focus on seven elements when ‘building character’: their character’s mannerisms and movements, their opinions and how they express them, their appearance, lifestyle, age, their background or ancestry, and finally anything unusual or eccentric about them. The students are tasked with aligning these seven elements in order to create both a believable and interesting character. But out here in the real world of a pavement cafe on a Saturday morning in North London the surface tells a confused story. Appearance and mannerism clash with lifestyle and background in that age-old trope of the disjoint between image and actuality. Put more simply: the rich are dressed in rags, or at least the contemporary equivalent of them: tracksuits. Grey hoodies with matching sweatpants. The kind formerly reserved for handymen and workmen on the job, painters, decorators, builders, grafters.
An authentic or original workman’s set will set you back circa fifty quid, less on sale, purchased from JD’s own brand Supply and Demand, Footasylum, or Sports Direct. It’s different here of course, here being the Hills, not the more famous Hollywood ones, but the still passably glamorous inclines of Notting and Primrose. If you’re financially lucky enough to make your home here then make sure to shop right, Eleventy for your hoodie, (circa £295), Pangaia or Palm Angels for your jogger bottoms, (from a reasonable £95 to a cool £220), topped with a plain grey tee courtesy of Vresh, (at a mere £46).
The most important thing, however, way beyond brand or cost, is to wear that set with a slouch. Be cool as you walk the streets surrounding the Hill, as you stop off at ‘The Roastery’ for your oat latte on a Saturday morning, out dog walking, out for a trip to the salon, nattering, perusing, cruising.
You must learn to slouch. It is not your natural way. In fact you visit a Chiropractor on a fortnightly basis and your posture is ballerina-like, impeccable. The true bodily diction of the original wearer of the piece is unobtainable to the likes of you, however much you try. The truly deflated worn down shoulder curve and head bow of the entirely exhausted grafter is but a pipe dream. A genuine slouch is reserved for the unentitled, the five AM man, the man with Monster energy drink coursing through his veins, the man chain-smoking packs of dopamine-rich cigarettes on break, the man just about making rent month on month, the man who, even when drinking can after can of Tyskie sat on the pavement with comrades, can never truly rest. This supreme level of tension is far removed from your apparent busyness. (What is it that you do exactly? Property developer, wealth manager, app creator?) Your tracksuit chic is a universe apart from the labourers you copycat, not just in origin but in lifecycle, while your suit is laundered by a Filipino housekeeper, his is paint and Ronseal splattered, complete with worn and torn extremities.
Romanticization of destitution is not novel and dressing to look poor is nothing new. The Bloomsbury set used to dress in peasant and gypsy ensembles like refugees from Central Europe, Coco Chanel took her stripes from sailors (or so the fashion-myth goes), those sexy ripped jeans of the nineties appear to be making a comeback, trustafarians posing as heroin addicts has been de rigueur for years, and of course there’s the Hollywood actor homeless look, that derelict runway show from Zoolander that is only just satire, a personal favourite of mine is the mechanic-welder-style boiler suit a la Flashdance, the list extends. Still after finishing my morning’s teaching the question continues to niggle away and so I type into DuckDuckGo why do rich people dress poor? Dressing poor, according to ‘the rich,’ or ‘friends of the rich’ on message board Quora, has been described as a ‘clever tactic’ used ‘to avoid getting mugged’. Quora experts, (an oxymoron?), also explain how such an ensemble helpfully repels the homeless. I wonder if this is true, do the rich really believe they’re fooling that Big Issue seller, that styrofoam cup-holder, that sleeping bagged figure, with their luxe elephant’s breath version of workwear? Like women doing ‘literally nothing’ in their ‘activewear’, (as it was so brilliantly put in Skit Box’s 2015 You Tube hit), everybody knows those women ain’t exercising and everybody knows you ain’t struggling. The other touted truism offered up by Reddit is that this group of very rich manages to remain so through sheer stinginess, it is their miserliness that keeps them majestic, they’re switching off of lights, their bargain hunting, their lack of generosity, their wearing of inexpensive garb. Yet, this convenient theory tends to overlook the passing down of generational wealth, exploitation, unearned privilege, cronyism, a heavily weighted education system in favour of ‘top-tier’ institutions, plus cultural capital’s opening of door after door. Sure Scrooge saved a few shillings by not burning that extra lump of coal, hoarding candle stubs, and eating a meagre supper but the bulk of his wealth came via the counting house, that is he was a banker, one who charged extortionate interest rates and didn’t pay his overworked worker, Bob Cratchit, properly. Dickens aside, is this phoney ensemble of the wealthy more about fetish than either threat, or saving a few stacks? For those creatures of the charming period, white washed and pillared, Hill mansions does this fixation on deprivation-dressing relate, ironically, to power?
I sometimes teach a poem to the kids that live amongst these Hills by popular 1930s poet Stephen Spender, it is called My Parents and the first line of it goes, My parents kept me from children who were rough. Spender was Kensington-born and belonged to a group of writers known as the Oxford poets that included Auden, Cecil Day Lewis (father of Daniel), and Christopher Isherwood. The ‘rough children’ of these stanzas wear ‘torn clothes’ and ‘rags’ that their limbs poke through, they strip bare and leap into ‘country streams’ they have ‘muscles like iron’ and their movements are jerky and swift, more than a little homo-erotically they pin down the poem’s speaker, ‘knees tight on…arms’ they throw mud at him, bark and spring at him, tiger and dog like. They are brawny and potent, the opposite of the lisping, over-protected speaker who longs ‘to forgive’ these unsmiling salty boys. In one reading, the ‘rough boys’ seem to have what we want, the rough boys are what we want, the rough boys are what we really want to be: ferocious, feral, free.
And yet there’s something more unnerving about this newer brand of bland low budget garb. This tracksuit, the barely noticeable uniform of the hyper capitalist tech, finance and property Gods, has a far more sinister aura than, say, 1930s artist Vanessa Bell taking tea in the gardens of Charleston donned in a peasant skirt and colourful headscarf, or a middle-class teenager at a gig wearing ripped jeans. Much has been written about the downplayed Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, tech-bro look, the plain tee, dad jeans, joggers, roll neck, gilet, hoodie, and trainers. These types of male purportedly have far too much to do, far too much to create to consider style, dressing in minimalist monotony aids productivity they say, they simply do not have the minutes to waste on such trifles as fashion, such trifles as trend. (Ironically, arguably, the greatest creative outlet of day to day life). Rubbish! These wardrobes are finely tuned capsule wardrobes machinated over long and hard. There's a logic to the look. (For the upper echelon there’s also a very well paid stylist, she’s called Victoria Hitchcock, charges circa $2,000 a consultation and serves the Silicon elite). The lack of creativity is a creativity itself, one of cunning. Minimalism, effortless chic, whatever you want to dress it up as, like everything these men do serves a manipulative, fiscally motivated, purpose. Yeah, don’t mind me I’m just passing through in my dull drag, as I topple your small economy, blending, don’t mind me while I palpate the election results of your homeland, slouched in my non-threatening norm-core, don’t mind me while I set you to grafting in a tech work camp thousands of miles away from lil’ old me in my boring tee. Romanticising the wretched of the earth, while dressed like them is one thing, decimating them, sculpting and creating and increasing their poverty, while wearing their clothes as disguise is quite something else altogether.