London fashion style

London fashion street style

AN EDUCATION At a London art school, what you wear is as important as what you think (or make).

 Maggie Bullock learns the power of personal style arrived in London with two suitcases. 

When you have only two bags in which to transport two years' worth of supplies—sheets; running shoes; a journal stuffed with pictures from home; a hefty, late-'90s-issue laptop—you don't necessarily have room to pack for various incarnations of self. You pack for survival. Two months prior, I had received in the mail not the standard acceptance packet familiar to anyone who has ever attended an American university, but a single sheet of paper informing me that I had been admitted to graduate school at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), and that I was to report—tuition

check in hand—on October 6. I took the institution's omission of any other type of instruction as a personal challenge: I was 22 now, wasn't I? If I couldn't figure the rest out for myself, well, I had no business moving to a foreign country in the first place.

London street style

In some respects, this bravado was justified. It took only a day or two to find a room in South London, near the Elephant & Castle tube station (which turned out to be a bit shady), in the house of a South African named Luke (who turned out to be a bit grope-y). But when I hung my belongings in the room's flimsy IKEA wardrobe, my sense of victory faded fast. Running shoes? I'd come to London to earn an MA in fashion journalism at the alma mater of

Galliano, McQueen, and McCartney, and I'd brought...running shoes? CSM was an outside-the-box kind of place, an art school to its very core, where  creativity was unbridled by anything so pedestrian as functionality or budget. The school had been London fashion style immortalized in Pulp's "Common People"; in 1975, it was the site of the Sex Pistols' first gig. Had it really failed to occur to me that London fashion street style was a place where it might matter—might be crucial to any degree of social success I could hope to achieve—that 1 dress the part?

With an identity of London fashion style crisis gathering like black clouds on the horizon, I spent my first weekend at Spilalfields, the indoor market, where I purchased from various bohemian artistes a first-day-of-school outfit: a hand-dyed, roughly stitched skirt and a low-slung studded metal gypsy belt. That was my first London street style clothing. But on October 6, as my fellow students and I lined up in a nondescript, badly lit hallway, I clocked their looks and knew that one skirt, no matter how "distressed," was not going to save me. Some of the students' garb exhibited obvious musical references, their denim hip-bone-hung and skintight (and this was pre-skinny jeans of London street style), their shoes punkish "winklepickers" or mod flats. Others

had perfected schoolmarm dowdiness from London street style: ugly lumpen cardigans, requisite wellies. Their London street style clothes bore signs of intent and commentary: If there was a navy blazer, it was worn as a sartorial send-up of the very idea of a navy blazer, with all its socioeconomic  implications.

Among these kids, with their asymmetrical London style haircuts and their

smoking habits and their seeming disinterest in American ideals of fitness and hygiene—elegantly pale and Dickensianly unmuscled, they had lavender bagged hangover eyes (this, at least, I could match) and scratched fingernail polish—1 felt colorless, bog-standard, and pathetically undebauched. My one premove splurge, a boxy Jil Sander topcoat purchased at quadruple discount—my first "investment piece " I'd proudly thought, evidence of my refined eye and newly minted adulthood—now seemed objectionable for these very qualities of London street style. The thing was so.. .beige.

To their credit, my fellow students seemed to accept me despite of my  London fashion street style. I was an American and a journalist (most of the program catered to aspiring designers; only eight of us planned to be writers), so one could hardly blame me for being a bit boring. But one night while we were editing a project, my friend Daniel, a scrawny textile designer given to perennially inkslained T-shirls and fingers, looked over his Buddy Holly glasses

and gave it to me straight. "You need a look, darling" he said. Sensing my devastation—he had, after all, just confirmed my fears—he softened the blow. "Maybe just a haircut?" No American would have made this suggestion. I had good hair: wavy, shoulder length, more blond than brown. But at a British art school, pretty wasn't particularly powerful. Here, the goals were bravery, distinctiveness, and, above all, cool. If you didn't have the budget for a radical wardrobe makeover to advertise these qualities, well, the most readily available, easily transformed billboard was right on top of your head.

Thing is, in a country in which tipping is considered an act of exceptional generosity, my after-hours earnings at a local wine bar would scarcely have covered a top-of-thc-linc shearing. But at the Toni & Guy school of  hairdressing, amateur cuts were free to anyone fearless (or nuts) enough to want one. For reasons that I no longer recall exactly—I do remember that it happened very fast, before I had time to protest—I found myself singled out, sitting in front of a class of would-be choppers, with the instructor, a Debbie

Harry type, giving loud step-by-step instructions as she attacked my mane with a very large and glinting pair of scissors. Strategically, perhaps, the salon owners had not put mirrors in this room. So all I could see while this was happening was shards of my own damp hair flying by, and the quizzical expressions in the class's front row: Does this girl have any idea what she s getting herself into?

When Debbie finished, the small crowd leaped to their feet to inspect at close range, and I was handed a small mirror. What was left of my hair was mostly on the crown of my head, swept boyishly to the side. Above my right ear, a shaved section extended up to a side part, and, on the other side, a few wispy lengths dangled in artistic free-form to my shoulder. 

As I stepped onto the sidewalk, the weak English sunlight hitting my ears and neck, I felt instantly buoyed by a newfound cool, like a balloon rein Hated after hovering at half-mast. I had found my London look, my badge of honor. Better than that, I had found my London self fashion street style.