Tonight:
4°c
The Sunday streets teemed with people out to catch the early sunshine. The East End has long been a fine place to observe Londoners but Shoreditch is the place to watch their perpetual, sometimes demented, quest for coolness.
Tourists thronged Brick Lane wanting an “authentic” trendy London experience, including a ginger dreadlocked human beat-box and his breakdancing pals. Young women strutted around in vintage sunglasses, miniskirts and knee-high fishnet socks, as if the area swarmed with modelling scouts ready to make them the next Kate Moss.
Annoying as hipsters are, there is something admirable about how far they'll go to cultivate an individual style. I wanted to salute the chutzpah of the thirtysomething who, sporting mirror shades and dressed as a 1980s casual, cycled down the street on a battered Chopper — a surreal combination of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and Grange Hill's Zammo McGuire.
I almost shook the hand of a middle-aged fatty who'd bleached his hair and styled it into a sharp wedge and was flouncing around in berry-red knickerbockers and a retro Celtic shirt, showing off his hot-pink nail polish. That's what you call creative courage.
It reminded me of London's biggest attraction: the freedom it gives us to reinvent ourselves. Everyone who comes here turns into someone new. My dad was a wide-eyed, shoeless, topknot-wearing Indian village kid who, within a few years of arriving in the 1950s, had transformed himself into a preening Brylcreemed Teddy Boy — possibly the only Asian Ted in history. My granddad hated his look so much he gave him a hiding for it.
As a result, my dad never batted an eyelid as I went through the fashion spectrum in my teens — from flower-shirted indie-kid with a bowl-cut to baggy-clothed rudeboy with 17 pairs of trainers. Having since been married to an arch fashionista, my wardrobe is now a combination of high street sportswear and Helmut Lang.
Yet what impressed me most on Sunday weren't the misfiring Shoreditch style-seekers but everyone else's indifference to them. It requires a hell of a lot to make a Londoner take a second look, making this the perfect city in which to re-create yourself — however stupid you look in the process.
