Here’s everything you need to know about the way I dressed when I was at university. During Freshers Week, I got tickets for a boat party – you know the drill: everyone piles onto a Thames Clipper that sells Coronas and you go up and down for a couple of hours. At this party, I decided to wear a Prison Break t-shirt. A black t-shirt, illustrating that I was a fan of the show: Prison Break. In 2008. This was very much the tip of the iceberg. I had a lot to learn.
At the time I was spending the majority of my life walking to and from my halls near Waterloo Station, and King’s College London’s main campus on the Strand — a labyrinthine, brutalist tangle of tiny corridors, screening rooms, and staircases that literally lead to nothing, which happens to sit adjacent to one of London’s most beautiful, opulent buildings: Somerset House. No university, and no building, throws your wayward fashion sense into keen focus quite like Somerset House in February, when it plays (or did) host to London Fashion Week, and you have to walk past it multiple times a day.
At first, it’s like you’ve been dropped into a movie. Indeed, when you move to a London – any big city, really – and you’ve come from a small town, you sort of expect you’re going to feel a bit out of place, bewildered by the bright lights and the multiple choice of takeaways (JustEat is very much not a thing in mid-Wales). Running for 9am lectures clutching a Gregg’s meal deal, hair still wet from the shower, while Noemi Lenoir just idly checks her emails, that dislocation feels even more apparent.
London Fashion Week isn’t like other events, where there’s a sharp sense of build up, and time to mentally prepare. I live in Edinburgh now, where all year round you’re reminded that a big Festival happens in August and maybe if you don’t like crowds you should haul ass for that month. No, unless you are a direct part of it, London Fashion Week swoops in and swoops out, the general public – and the majority of King’s College students – unawares, until the gateway next to the bus stop starts filing in blacked-out cars, and giving shelter to some of the most immaculately dressed people you’ve ever seen, sharing cigarettes and making calls in between, presumably, talking to even more immaculately dressed people. None of whom, you can safely assume, own a Prison Break t-shirt.
If I have gleaned one thing about London Fashion Week from those three years, it’s this: there seems to be an awful lot of standing about.
Though it’s only on for a week, the rush and freneticism that surrounds your place of study over those five days does make you feel like it’s going on a lot longer, and very quickly, any sense of glamour that you may feel isolated from quickly turns to a relatable feeling – boredom. Not just the boredom of having to shuffle past paparazzi to get to class, or queue up behind a put-upon intern at Caffe Nero gamely trying to get a massive, complicated coffee order right, lest he or she be thrown to the wolves (is this you? It’s not worth it, get yourself a toastie and have a sit down. Start a podcast). More, the boredom that seems to be coming from the people involved themselves, because if I have gleaned one thing about London Fashion Week from those three years, it’s this: there seems to be an awful lot of standing about.
Of course, these kind of revelations aren’t specific to London Fashion Week. As you ease yourself into a new city, the things that used to give you cause for anxiety before, or used to seem so far removed from the world you occupied, begin to feel normal. Once you’ve seen a Radio 1 DJ walk out of a coffee shop because the queue’s too long once, every subsequent time (a surprisingly regular occurrence during LFW, maybe they should just get that intern to do it) feels less and less like a story to tell your mates at The Waterfront, and more just a part of your everyday.
The cynic might say that all this is evidence of how events such as London Fashion Week, and concepts like celebrities, don’t actually matter. That they’re transient and without value, and that the reason you can so easily ignore them is because once you peek behind the curtain, they become so easy to ignore.
But there’s another reason I like a little better. Leaving home to go to uni is a process of self-discovery, maybe of things you’d never even considered before. I’ve no doubt for some of my friends who walked past London Fashion Week in February, they felt like they wanted to be a part of it, and that close enough to touch, they could be a part of it. For others, maybe they don’t remember it at all. And for some, maybe they just thought about that one item of clothing they leant on a bit too heavily, that probably should be relegated to pyjama wear. Or the bin.
