to each his own

Hello folks, it’s London Fashion Week wowow!!

What am I doing to celebrate? Not sure if anything. Probably just putting on my typical ensemble- tank top, cargo shorts, Oakley Oil Rigs, and Jordan slides- in hopes of getting street style’d by Tommy Ton.

Most of my time recently has been devoted to studying/writing papers for midterms, so naturally I got sidetracked and decided to give this blogging thing a go again.

This post might be the most important of the semester. It’s a culmination of thoughts I’ve been thinking for years and serves as an extremely rough draft to my doctoral thesis.

I present, PERPLEXING NEXUSES: FASHION EDITION

RALPH LAUREN (originally named Ralph Lifshitz) was born in the Bronx to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Belarus. After dropping out of college and the army, he pursued his passion to design wide European-style neckties. In 1966, he started stitching ties together from rags in his workspace, a drawer in the Empire State Building

Ralph’s ‘Polo’ brand from the get-go was crafted to project an intelligent, timeless, all-American lifestyle of idealistic preppy-ness; however, what I find interesting is how it has also been adopted by other demographics.

In the 80s and 90s, people in the projects of Brooklyn created an entire subculture around wearing and collecting Ralph Lauren, calling themselves the ‘Lo-Lifes’. In an interview with VICE, rapper Mayhem Lauren explains, “It was more about the pieces for me. I didn’t care about buying, I didn’t care about racking, I just wanted it. There was a time in my life when I was racking Polo, pulling schemes for Polo, and spending checks from my day job on Polo. At the end of the day, it was about coming through fresh.”

Let’s not forget the most vocal wearer of Polos and backpacks:

But while I have been thinking about this American-based Polo link between peppiness and hip hop culture for some time now, I learned about other interesting connections from walking around London.

FRED PERRY was a championship-winning English tennis player and former World No. 1 who won eight Grand Slams. Most impressively, the dude won three consecutive Wimbledon Championships from 1934 – 1936 and was the first player to win a “Career Grand Slam” at age 26 (what am I doing with my life?? Oh right, blogging).

Besides creating the first sweatbands, Perry’s legacy lived on via his still-popular clothing line. What’s cool is that his tennis shirt of white knitted cotton pique with short sleeves and a buttoned placket was first launched at 1952’s Wimbledon, an event known for snobbish and elitist vibes, but grew in popularity due to counterculture adoption.

The Mod culture first rocked Fred Perry in the 1950s and helped the brand truly launch. Mods typically focused on looking sharp as well as listening to jazz, soul, ska, and R&B. They also cruised around in motor scooters and were associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night dancing clubs. Countless millennials have to thank David Bowie, a young mod once, for founding The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, Fred Perry support continued from teenagers in the Northern soul and skinhead scenes, among others.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:

-What does this all mean??? I’m still synthesizing!!

-Is this any different than Jamaicans wearing Clark’s Wallabees or frat bros sporting Patagonia?

-I loved this New Yorker article that traces Japanese subcultures adopting idealistic Ivy League preppy-ness in the 1960s

-How did certain patterns become associated with ‘prep’? For example, madras takes its name from a city in India

-Da Vinci once said, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” …Was he talking about Ralph, though??

gentrification sensation :(

To the naïve eye, London can appear as one big POSH paradise. Countless Rolls Royces align the streets of multi-million-pound flats from the 17^th-century. £85 is paid at certain swanky hotels for afternoon tea. People strut around the city in Givenchy like it’s gym clothes.  I could go on.

These posh vibes have unmistakably been felt since I arrived, but only after watching a BBC documentary in class called London On Film – The Secret History of Our Streets did some of these feelings become contextualized.

This episode features Portland Road in Notting Hill, the archetypal London banker street, dominated by homes worth as much as £6,000,000. Yet when Booth [a famous British social researcher and reformer] visited in 1899, it was the worst slum in London and, even today, the bottom five per cent by income in Britain are living on the same street as the top one per cent.

I especially found interesting the story of Henry Mayhew, a descendent of Samuel Gurney, an original founder of Barclays, who recently lived on the street, got sick of the ‘boring’ banker lifestyle, and moved to a cabin in a forest in East Anglia.

“Like all the trendy areas of London it just gets lived in by investment bankers now. It just becomes very, very boring. You don’t know how boring it is until you’ve experienced it. It is amazing how one industry has completely dominated the best housing in London,” says Mayhew.

As one does research into the history, art, music, etc. of London, it becomes apparent that CLASS has typically been the hot topic, while in the United States RACE has been a more prominent subject. This is of course a generalization- class distinction/economic inequality has been prevalent in the US since its inception and is greatly connected to race issues- but I think it’s a point worth considering.

 

4 da cultjah

LIFE UPDATES:

-Learning quite a bit about Shakespeare from one of my English Lit classes. FYI, 2016 commemorates 400 years since the death of William, so people around here are hyped up. My favorite Shakespeare line is “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” which are the first words that Hamlet speaks in the play. I always wished Pusha T would quote it in a verse.

-Celebrating Chinese New Year!! This past Monday some friends and I went to China Town and ate some top-notch dumplings to celebrate the year of the MONKEY. While it was a jolly time, it made me remember how distraught I am about my personal Chinese Zodiac sign…The Pig. My only goal in life is to disprove offensive Han dynasty astrologists:

Pig is not thought to be a smart animal in China. It likes sleeping and eating and becomes fat. Thus it usually features laziness and clumsiness. On the positive side, it behaves itself, has no calculation to harm others, and can bring affluence to people.

-Experiencing new experiences by doing experiential things. I had fish n’ chips for the first time on Wednesday. It was decent, but certainly better than the oven-made fish sticks that I’m used to. After the meal, we walked around the very posh, secluded NOTTING HILL (I feel obligated to capitalize its name because people here reference the Hugh Grant movie with such reckless abandon). I haven’t seen the movie and don’t really plan to, but I liked the light tropical vibes that the neighborhood emitted thanks to pastel-colored homes and palm trees. Puerto Rico-esque.

-Desperately waiting for a new Kanye album. Last night, I went to a big listening party for THE LIFE OF PABLO in a theatre in Piccadilly Circus and left very confused. My friend Azi and I definitely had a fun time but what the Louie Vuitton Don played didn’t quite sound finished. I’m holding off judgments until the thing gets released on iTunes. Also, he revealed plans of making a video game.

-I’m playing some music and chatting with my man Aiden on Imperial College’s student radio today at 6PM London time (so 1PM for my East Coast fam). If you see this in time, the link to its stream is here. “AMERICAN INVASION” is the theme of this show so I had to think of two crucial tracks that relate to our jeans-wearing, freedom-loving culture. Here is what I chose:

HONORABLE MENTION: Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”

UKV TRAVELS – ‘DAM VIBES

I am proud to announce that today’s post is the very first of the UKV TRAVELS series!!

While this blog dutifully strives to provide authentic coverage of UK vibes and currently serves as the world’s leader in this field, we’ve realized that travel throughout Europe could possibly lead to new perspectives and understandings. Thus why a small crew and I ventured to the capital city of the Netherlands, AMSTERDAM.

Firstly, the trip was filled with some world class eten. We went to a pancake place that puts even Lyndon Diner to shame. Also, I had the first non-microwavable ramen of my life and, surprisingly, it was better than Maruchan! Live vicariously through me via the following pre-eating pics:

Left: Pancake w/ chocolate & nanners; Right: Yummy ramen with a bunch of stuff in it

Other random Amsterdam observations:

-BIKERS rule this place. No no, not obnoxious Harley-driving gangs but actual bicyclers who whiz around the city with ease. I wish other cities put such emphasis on infrastructure that purposely accommodates for emissions-free transportation…Something to consider when we colonize Mars.

-“Thank you” in Dutch is dank je (pronounced DANK ya). Just so perfect.

-People in the Netherlands are SUPER TALL. I was taking the metro system into the city from our hostel and felt extremely short amongst these giants. The internet provided me with some explanation: On average, Dutch women stand 5.6 feet tall while men stand 6 feet. Even more crazy is that average height of a male in the Netherlands has gained eight inches in the last 150 years. Nutrition and natural selection are what scientists have come up with for an explanation.

-Buildings all over the place appear lop-sided due to swampy soil underneath. In case you didn’t know, all of Amsterdam is built on water. Canals align the cobblestone streets essentially everywhere in the city to create beautiful vibes.

We also went to the moving Anne Frank museum as well as the Van Gogh museum. I highly recommend both.

Have any UKV readers been to Amsterdam? If so, what distinct vibes do you remember? To those who haven’t had the chance yet, the place is dope to say the least.

 

DAYTRIPPING OUT

What’s up, blogosphere. Please accept my sincerest apologizes for the delayed post. I do have an excuse, however: I’ve joined a FOOTBALL [soccer] CREW. That’s probably not the correct term to use and my Imperial College squad-mates would surely shun me forever if I uttered it out loud, but here in the blogosphere it sounds tough. We play on Sundays at a park in West London that has a bunch of caged-in mini pitches. I’m the worst player on the team, but my skillz are improving. More on this to come…Football vibes will be fully assessed on a later date after trips to Wembley and Liverpool.

Anyway, let’s get to the most current and confounding vibe to explore. A week or so ago, a bunch of us Americans in London went on a trip to the very mysterious and very mystical STONEHENGE.

Foggy photo by UKV lead photographer Allen Jeon…Look at how small the people are.

For those who live under a rock, Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in rural Wiltshire, England made up of a bunch of crazy huge boulders. The place was first named ‘Stanenges’ in an archaeological study of Henry of Huntington in about AD 1130. In 1200 it appeared as ‘Stanhenge’ and in 1297 it was referenced as ‘Stonheng’. Finally, in 1610 it became known as ‘Stonehenge’. Now onto the spooky stuff.

Regardless of name, this formation has been around for A LONG TIME. Research shows that the site has continuously evolved over a period of about 10,000 years. The structure that we call ‘Stonehenge’ was built between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago and is just one section of a larger, highly complex landscape. Nobody knows exactly what the deal was with this place, but many scholars think it was a major ritual monument that aligned with solar and lunar astronomical events.

Dare I say… ILLUMINATI

What does it all mean?? is unquestionably the heaviest vibe that reverberates around this place. The biggest of Stonehenge’s stones, known as sarsens, are up to 30 feet tall and weigh 25 tons (!!!) on average. Somehow, these big guys were transported from a location 20 miles to the north. The smaller “bluestones”, which weight up to 4 tons, were rolled from sites in Wales that are 140 miles away.

*If you’re like my bro Ryan and rely on the show Ancient Aliens to explain historical conundrums, stop reading and click here.*

Now that those people are gone, let’s get down to business. In search of clues on how these stones got to Wilshire, the research interns at UK VIBES looked at blatant evidence that’s been hidden right under our noses: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.

Rock ‘n’ rolling, a term that originally meant ‘having intercourse,’ not moving prehistoric boulders, started in the 1950s when rhythm and blues and country music fused together. However, in the 1960s UK rock vibes finally began to be felt worldwide thanks to the British Invasion.

Notable moments for British rock in the 1960s:

1963: Dave and Ray Davies form The Kinks in North London

1964: The Beatles’ arrival in New Yawk

1964: The Who’s Pete Townshend smashes guitar onstage, beginning the band’s signature destructive live sets

1965: The Rolling Stones release “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a US #1 single that deals with angsty issues like sexual frustration and commercialism

1967: ‘Clapton is God’ is spray-painted by a fan in the Islington Underground station

1967: Pink Floyd release their debut album ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’

1968: Jimmy Page and the boys form Led Zeppelin in London

Wow, the UK had heavy rock vibes in the 60s. Side note: John Lennon’s old London house at 34 Montagu Square is like three blocks from where I live. A neighborhood tour guide told us that Ringo was originally the landlord of the place and prior to John moving in, he rented it out to Jimi Hendrix. As the story goes, Jimi would do a bunch of LSD and graffiti all over the place, leading Ringo to say something like, “Dude, get out.”

CONCLUSION:

Does 1960s British Rock have anything to do with Stonehenge? Well, um, I suppose there were certain rituals involved like smashing instruments and praising a Cream guitarist as ‘God’. Lunar vibes are later found in Pink Floyd’s 1973 album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. Do the Rolling Stones have any insights on how these stones actually got rolled???

CONSPIRACY VIBES