Friday, March 28, 2025

I like the way he reprimands himself for not having bought his pale blue pegs from the right shop - “should have been from Lord John or Take Six”. The mod/soul boy obsession with these minutiae is the thing that is most alien to me still. I was once poking around a casuals forum when researching a piece and it was amazing to see how ferociously these middle aged verging on elderly types were arguing about which specific month in a particular year of the mid-80s that a certain shoe came into vogue, or the color of the laces that were de rigeur for that precise patch of time. 30 years on. It’s a kind of mystical investment in consumerism. As an indifferently dressed bourgeois from a bit further into the home counties than Burnt Oak I agree with Toyah - “don’t want to be told what to wear / so long as you’re warm who cares”. Music exists in commodity form but it transcends that and you don’t need to own it to hear it - it’s a common culture. Style culture is all about chasing overpriced stuff that only a few get to put on their bodies, a self-imposed prison of rules and restrictions.


1 comment:

  1. Fair. But we're all in some kind of self-imposed prison, aren't we? There's nothing more human than the urge to fit in and the urge to stand out. Some do it financially, some intellectually. Some by buying their pegs from the right shop and knowing what selvage is.

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I like the way he reprimands himself for not having bought his pale blue pegs from the right shop - “should have been from Lord John or Take...