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Boys keep swinging
In London's fiercest nightspots, a new breed of style terrorist is now coming through. Sporting lipstick, lisps and a questionable sexuality, these courtesans of the New Camp are taking centre stage, referencing gender-bending club stars of yesteryear and reinventing the idea of 'street' fashion. It's great when you're not very straight... yeah!
However, there is little fancy attire worn by David Beckham that has not been unveiled earlier in nightclubs across this land. His forays into the dressing up box are the logical, more moneyed conclusion to those glittery UK gents - gay, straight and in-between - who frequented renowned early '90s 'handbag house' clubs such as Billion Dollar Babes, Miss Moneypenny's and Pushca. And his aesthetic nods more to the showbizzy world of pal Elton John than to the likes of the late Quentin Crisp and that cruellest catwalk of all, the street. After all, there is no real danger or sexual subversion in 'Becks' being tweaked-up like a tart, aided by a team of over-excited stylists and crimpers, simply for the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. Nor is he ever likely to have to mince the gauntlet of the Night Bus Massive, with smeared make-up and a broken stillie, on his way back from noshing at Nobu. Beckham's take on camp attire is therefore a safe one - a hunky, pretty interpretation - which can always be relied upon to shift more copies of mags and rags.
Away from the bulging closets of Beckingham Palace, there is a burgeoning return to a more sexually on-the-edge male flamboyance. One that, given half the chance, will lure straight boys between the sheets and have its wicked way, while simultaneously casting aside squeaky-clean scene queens who thrill to the sounds of Steps and try to dress like Blue. Look and you shall see its protagonists parading boldly through the streets of the capital. Recently spied in daylight hours: a teenage boy attired in a red plastic poncho, black drainpipe trousers and black stilettos, queuing sullenly in the Goodge Street branch of Tesco; a lipstick-sporting fop, marching down Charing Cross Road in a flurry of Marc Bolan-like curls, jodhpurs plus vintage New York Dolls T-shirt; a lithe leather-clad lovely, combining biker drag with a painted macquillage, puffing on a cigar as he waits at a bus stop on the Holloway Road.
One such 20-year-old male style terrorist, an aspiring film-maker nicknamed Fanny (who accessorises wigs glued to crash helmets with voluminous polka dot trousers), insists: "I'd wear anything with anything; people have described the way I dress as 'fancy tramp' or 'pig in knickers'. I don't care if it's a compliment or an insult - it doesn't matter. I think everyone looks crap, and if they took notice of what ! said about them, they'd probably have to kill themselves anyway!" In a voice like Kenneth Williams-on-Ketamine, he scoffs, “I’m not interested in being famous, I'm interested in existing in different ways. I'll spend more time getting dressed up for Penge High Street than for a nightclub. I believe in the 24 Hour Look. You should be fearless enough to wear it anywhere."
Fanny's type of preening is a darker, more unsettling genre than that proposed by David Beckham. Stylist Mark Morrison, who shot the images here, defines it as: "A backlash against looking gay or straight, or looking rich or poor. It's all about looking cool and individual - and boys who're not scared to be themselves." This is a genre that kicks against mainstream fashion magazines, would hate to go snowboarding, thinks limited edition jeans and trainers are for bores, commands its own space on the dancefloor - rather than frugging dad-like among the throng, derides most contemporary gays as being ninny-like and seeks, ultimately, to rattle a few heterosexual cages. It swishes, lisps and drawls out its words for effect; it puts clothes, hair and make-up together in ways that have yet to be picked-up on and rehashed by fashion designers; it toys with the deliberate effeminacy and banter of yesteryear's gender-bending club stars.
"At first we had a kind of cult following at the club," says Johnny Slut, "but now as more people are getting what we're trying to do, the place is rammed full of kids dressed up to the nines." When his own band, Atomizer, performed at the night (a gig described by one journalist as being 'like Destiny's Child from Hell') Slut later enthused, "Fifteen minutes before we went on stage, two boys turned up with a large suitcase. Inside the case lay the most amazing costumes, stilettos and pig noses, which they promptly put on - and proceeded to dance around us for the whole of our set. It was so spontaneous, it was amazing - and it's just the beginning."
The huge attention the club has since garnered has resulted in Nag Nag Nag's promoters becoming increasingly cagey towards the press, in order to retain its underground appeal. Creaky old Pete Tong admitted difficulties in gleaning information for his clubs section in the London Evening Standard's Metro Life supplement while news that certain fashion industry luminaries had been refused guest list access was greeted with cackles by the night's paying regulars. Suddenly, a club that reverberates with an innovative, pre-Acid House era kind of gayness and flamboyance finds itself the hottest ticket in town - as was the case with Blitz, Taboo, Billion Dollar Babes and so on.
So it is no surprise that among the teen and twenty-something clientele at Nag Nag Nag, the older likes of Boy George, Mark Moore, the Pet Shop Boys, Wolfgang Tillmans, Björk, Steve Strange and Pam Hogg are regularly spotted. Coming from a generation which bore witness to the shocking '70s spectacle of David Bowie's wilful androgyny - under the guise of his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust - and which filtered this down through various subsequent forays into punk, 'New Romanticism', club-running, pop, photography, performance art, magazines and fashion design, it makes perfect sense that they should be attracted to this scene. One that looks defiantly new, yet in its spirit pays homage to when being 'different' (ie homosexual, bisexual or simply arty) was de rigeur. So much so, that in the early '70s and early '80s too, it became extremely fashionable for men to be perceived as, well, anything but heterosexual. Just as it could do now.
In a 1972 Melody Maker feature, journalist Michael Watts writes about Bowie: "David's present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy. He looks camp as a row of tents with his limp hands and trolling vocabulary. 'I'm gay,' he says, 'and I always have been, even when I was David Jones.' But there's a sly jollity about him as he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. He knows that to act like a male tart, and that to shock and outrage, is a ball-breaking business." Similarly, for certain of London's mid '70s punk originators - in thrall to the early Sex Pistols gigs and a buzz surrounding Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop, Sex - there was also a more nerve jangling type of gay resonance.
It is not hard to imagine that, once again, dressing and behaving in the manner of a marginalised, screaming queen - irrespective of your true sexual orientation - might serve well as a reaction to how 'normal' things have become. In an age that sees fashion hacks hail beige as a colour worth getting excited about, and ensures that cosy gay crooner Will Young is never far from a reassuringly lusty maiden in his pop videos, perhaps this is the only way to cause a commotion.
Furthermore, the idea of hitherto heterosexual men adopting androgyny and feigning fey-dom, as it might grant them access to ever-cooler clubs and the liberated ladies who tend to frequent them, doesn't seem at all improbable. In tandem with a re-appraisal of fashion designers who made their names toying with male sexual identity - Bodymap and Gaultier, for example - and an onslaught of 70s Bowie-related/glam rock imagery now creeping back into fashion shoots (following last year's 30th anniversary re-release of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust album and an exhibition of Mick Rock's photographs of limp, trolling David), it's only a matter of time before effeminacy becomes common currency. Quentin Crisp will be chuckling in his grave at the prospect, dear.
However, there is little fancy attire worn by David Beckham that has not been unveiled earlier in nightclubs across this land. His forays into the dressing up box are the logical, more moneyed conclusion to those glittery UK gents - gay, straight and in-between - who frequented renowned early '90s 'handbag house' clubs such as Billion Dollar Babes, Miss Moneypenny's and Pushca. And his aesthetic nods more to the showbizzy world of pal Elton John than to the likes of the late Quentin Crisp and that cruellest catwalk of all, the street. After all, there is no real danger or sexual subversion in 'Becks' being tweaked-up like a tart, aided by a team of over-excited stylists and crimpers, simply for the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. Nor is he ever likely to have to mince the gauntlet of the Night Bus Massive, with smeared make-up and a broken stillie, on his way back from noshing at Nobu. Beckham's take on camp attire is therefore a safe one - a hunky, pretty interpretation - which can always be relied upon to shift more copies of mags and rags.
Away from the bulging closets of Beckingham Palace, there is a burgeoning return to a more sexually on-the-edge male flamboyance. One that, given half the chance, will lure straight boys between the sheets and have its wicked way, while simultaneously casting aside squeaky-clean scene queens who thrill to the sounds of Steps and try to dress like Blue. Look and you shall see its protagonists parading boldly through the streets of the capital. Recently spied in daylight hours: a teenage boy attired in a red plastic poncho, black drainpipe trousers and black stilettos, queuing sullenly in the Goodge Street branch of Tesco; a lipstick-sporting fop, marching down Charing Cross Road in a flurry of Marc Bolan-like curls, jodhpurs plus vintage New York Dolls T-shirt; a lithe leather-clad lovely, combining biker drag with a painted macquillage, puffing on a cigar as he waits at a bus stop on the Holloway Road.
One such 20-year-old male style terrorist, an aspiring film-maker nicknamed Fanny (who accessorises wigs glued to crash helmets with voluminous polka dot trousers), insists: "I'd wear anything with anything; people have described the way I dress as 'fancy tramp' or 'pig in knickers'. I don't care if it's a compliment or an insult - it doesn't matter. I think everyone looks crap, and if they took notice of what ! said about them, they'd probably have to kill themselves anyway!" In a voice like Kenneth Williams-on-Ketamine, he scoffs, “I’m not interested in being famous, I'm interested in existing in different ways. I'll spend more time getting dressed up for Penge High Street than for a nightclub. I believe in the 24 Hour Look. You should be fearless enough to wear it anywhere."
Fanny's type of preening is a darker, more unsettling genre than that proposed by David Beckham. Stylist Mark Morrison, who shot the images here, defines it as: "A backlash against looking gay or straight, or looking rich or poor. It's all about looking cool and individual - and boys who're not scared to be themselves." This is a genre that kicks against mainstream fashion magazines, would hate to go snowboarding, thinks limited edition jeans and trainers are for bores, commands its own space on the dancefloor - rather than frugging dad-like among the throng, derides most contemporary gays as being ninny-like and seeks, ultimately, to rattle a few heterosexual cages. It swishes, lisps and drawls out its words for effect; it puts clothes, hair and make-up together in ways that have yet to be picked-up on and rehashed by fashion designers; it toys with the deliberate effeminacy and banter of yesteryear's gender-bending club stars.
"At first we had a kind of cult following at the club," says Johnny Slut, "but now as more people are getting what we're trying to do, the place is rammed full of kids dressed up to the nines." When his own band, Atomizer, performed at the night (a gig described by one journalist as being 'like Destiny's Child from Hell') Slut later enthused, "Fifteen minutes before we went on stage, two boys turned up with a large suitcase. Inside the case lay the most amazing costumes, stilettos and pig noses, which they promptly put on - and proceeded to dance around us for the whole of our set. It was so spontaneous, it was amazing - and it's just the beginning."
The huge attention the club has since garnered has resulted in Nag Nag Nag's promoters becoming increasingly cagey towards the press, in order to retain its underground appeal. Creaky old Pete Tong admitted difficulties in gleaning information for his clubs section in the London Evening Standard's Metro Life supplement while news that certain fashion industry luminaries had been refused guest list access was greeted with cackles by the night's paying regulars. Suddenly, a club that reverberates with an innovative, pre-Acid House era kind of gayness and flamboyance finds itself the hottest ticket in town - as was the case with Blitz, Taboo, Billion Dollar Babes and so on.
So it is no surprise that among the teen and twenty-something clientele at Nag Nag Nag, the older likes of Boy George, Mark Moore, the Pet Shop Boys, Wolfgang Tillmans, Björk, Steve Strange and Pam Hogg are regularly spotted. Coming from a generation which bore witness to the shocking '70s spectacle of David Bowie's wilful androgyny - under the guise of his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust - and which filtered this down through various subsequent forays into punk, 'New Romanticism', club-running, pop, photography, performance art, magazines and fashion design, it makes perfect sense that they should be attracted to this scene. One that looks defiantly new, yet in its spirit pays homage to when being 'different' (ie homosexual, bisexual or simply arty) was de rigeur. So much so, that in the early '70s and early '80s too, it became extremely fashionable for men to be perceived as, well, anything but heterosexual. Just as it could do now.
In a 1972 Melody Maker feature, journalist Michael Watts writes about Bowie: "David's present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy. He looks camp as a row of tents with his limp hands and trolling vocabulary. 'I'm gay,' he says, 'and I always have been, even when I was David Jones.' But there's a sly jollity about him as he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. He knows that to act like a male tart, and that to shock and outrage, is a ball-breaking business." Similarly, for certain of London's mid '70s punk originators - in thrall to the early Sex Pistols gigs and a buzz surrounding Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop, Sex - there was also a more nerve jangling type of gay resonance.
It is not hard to imagine that, once again, dressing and behaving in the manner of a marginalised, screaming queen - irrespective of your true sexual orientation - might serve well as a reaction to how 'normal' things have become. In an age that sees fashion hacks hail beige as a colour worth getting excited about, and ensures that cosy gay crooner Will Young is never far from a reassuringly lusty maiden in his pop videos, perhaps this is the only way to cause a commotion.
Furthermore, the idea of hitherto heterosexual men adopting androgyny and feigning fey-dom, as it might grant them access to ever-cooler clubs and the liberated ladies who tend to frequent them, doesn't seem at all improbable. In tandem with a re-appraisal of fashion designers who made their names toying with male sexual identity - Bodymap and Gaultier, for example - and an onslaught of 70s Bowie-related/glam rock imagery now creeping back into fashion shoots (following last year's 30th anniversary re-release of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust album and an exhibition of Mick Rock's photographs of limp, trolling David), it's only a matter of time before effeminacy becomes common currency. Quentin Crisp will be chuckling in his grave at the prospect, dear.