Pin up, Toni&GuyPIN UP
Published in Toni&Guy's in-salon magazine
Would you like to wear the finest attire and be swirled around the dancefloor in decadent surroundings? Perhaps immerse yourself in an intimate scene where anything goes and often does? Such rhetorical questions, not to mention one’s prayers, are answered by a burgeoning number of bygone era soirees opening up their refined and elegant doors.
“People are brought together through a common love of good conversation and beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes. It’s not about escaping your own reality, rather discovering another,” says dandy about town Viktor Wynd, chancellor of The Last Tuesday Society. Taking its name from the 19th century philosophical discussion groups held by William James (brother of Henry) at Harvard University, the first meeting was a nice course dinner at the Café Royal with a talk by Lord Gawain Douglas on his Great Uncle Bosie in February 2006. Wynd has since been master of ceremony at cocktail galas, tea parties (“We put on a lavish spread – cucumber sandwiches, scones, jellies made from moulds of our bottoms…”) and monthly Hendrick’s Salons on anything from The Arabian Nights to the Frankenstein set. “Each night is constructed around themes,” Wynd explains. “ And only the finest, best looking, most intelligent people come.”
He also hosts séances under the motto ‘Why let death get in the way of a good conversation?’ where both HG Wells and Oscar Wilde have been known to by, and Loss, ‘An evening of exquisite misery’. Filling the 17th century wine cellar Hedges & Butler with rotting fruit, taxidermy and dead butterflies, it becomes a melancholy setting for sad music, films and theatre. Performer Paloma Faith aborts a million fish in one arch and Alex Hamilton lament on an ice trumpet in another while a boy goes around enforcing £1 fines from anyone who smiles. “Everyone comes dressed in Edwardian and Victorian decay and at midnight a classical violinist plays while we chop onions and cry. People really enjoy a miserable evening. It allows you to go out and be yourself.”
The Society attracts a bohemian crowd of artists, designers, vintage fashion fans and celebrities (Lily Cole please take a curtsey) who demand more from their evenings than repetitive beats and/or binge drinking and feeds on a growing trend for individuality and authenticity in our paparazzi-driven, conveyor-belt culture.
Rakehells Revels and The Modern Times Club are two more café society nights similarly dedicated to turn of the century glamour and excess. For promoters Wade Crescent and David Piper, that quintessentially English era of glitzy girls and zoot-suited guys never dies. Likewise, The Whoopee Club and Hip Hip draw connoisseurs and swingers with a heady mix of burlesque, mime and transvestisms. Toot Sweet shakes it own at the sumptuous The Pigalle Club. Dames indulge in bake-offs at Viva Cake. And DJ El Nino puts on a number of specialist evenings where dancing is de rigeur. Do the Vegas jive and voodoo crunch in eye watering corsets at Lady Luck, lindy hop in a tea dress at The Black Cotton Club or boogaloo in Dior’s New Look at The Cat Beat.
It’s not about recreating the past though, says Tony Maggs, co-promoter of Rockabaret, rather reinventing the present. “We’re not retro. I play music from the last 50 years and you can come dressed at as 1920s debutante, a Mad Hatter or a Christmas tree. Dressing up allows you to release your imagination go and enter a fantasy dream dimension.” Dubbing his monthly happenings “glammy, sleazy rock star parties with fantastical interludes”, you’ll be welcomed by some Brechian theatre before entering a Byronesque Victorian ballroom where you’ll hear anything from Marilyn Manson to Bridget Bardot while acrobats spin above your head. Themes such as Venetian Ball, French Revolution and Prima donnas and Don Juans attract pin up girls and decadists dressed for excess.
Words Helen Jennings