From Sunday style supplements to fashion catwalks, from London's trendy Hoxton pubs to VIP lounge areas, 2001's essential fashion accessory was that icon of factory toil and whippet breeding - the flat cap.
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Initially revived by twentysomething Trustafarians (1) around London's Old Street area, this distinctly unflattering head gear - designed to make even Nicole Kidman look like a bawling market trader - could be written off as just another quirky fashion statement. It's a statement all right, but not a cute, innocent or quaint one.
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The flat cap phenomenon is another example of the self-loathing afflicting today's middle-class twentysomethings. Alongside the flat cap, it is de rigueur to appear unshaven, wear a black shirt and a tatty suit jacket, just like old alcos do. And for full effect, it is advisable to drink in the kind of decrepit boozers that stink like a piss-stained tramp, has yellowing wallpaper circa 1972, and which considers ice and lemon exotic delicacies. Speaking with a mentally subnormal voice and trying to start fights (but not real fights) completes the new look.
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Rich kids have often dabbled in the ignoble art of slumming it - partly to mock the 'great unwashed', but mostly as a way of expressing disenchantment with themselves and their class. But now that disdain is projected outwards, as a critique of the nouveau riche working-class and, more broadly, the aspirational values that informed British society for the past 50 years.
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The now-dead contestation between left and right was essentially about who could guarantee material advancement. By contrast, today's culture suggests that we're never so bad as when we have it so good - that more wealth and leisure can only lead to more trouble and strife (as captured by the UK intelligentsia's handwringing over footballers behaving badly). So it's not surprising that, instead of getting a slap, the middle-class types who wear flat caps have won themselves an appreciative audience.
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Take the irksome 1980s revival. Before it became part of Saturday night TV viewing, 1980s revivalists were all about the cheap and tacky - batwing jumpers and stonewashed jeans, chunky jewellery and pink leggings. Any references to the arty pretensions and glamorous aspirations inherent in early 1980s Electro pop was - until recently at least - largely ignored. So while those teenage girls in the Human League dressed like grown up and sophisticated women, for twentysomething copycats 20 years later it was the other way round: reverting to a childish state. Not for nothing is the hippest 1980s club night called 'Trash'.
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And it's not just fashion. When Emap launched heat magazine in 1999, it was styled somewhere between the much-missed film magazine Neon and the Radio Times. After low sales put the heat on heat, it was relaunched as a celebrity gossip rag with all the scope of OK! joining forces with TV Quick. Coated with a thin layer of irony, it is now an essential read for young middle-class professionals who want the debasement of trash culture without the embarrassment of buying the real thing. As heat editor Mark Frith puts it, the magazine covers 'celebrity but for a different kind of reader' (2).
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It is in the British film industry, now the creative domain of the dead, where the love of low-life is most striking. You can blame Trainspotting, the mockney buffoonery of Guy Ritchie, whatever - but hardly any Brit flick is now complete without exaggerating and romanticising life's rancid underbelly. If Human Traffic, Beautiful Creatures and Essex Boys weren't gormless enough, at the end of January 2002 Lava is released, Joe Tucker's spectacularly ludicrous film about two misfits planning revenge against a track-suited thug.
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Set during London's summer Notting Hill carnival, the film is apparently a riposte to Richard Curtis' whiter-than-white portrayal of the area in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts vehicle Notting Hill (though with every black character a gun-toting Yardie, I'm not sure which film is less PC). But Joe Tucker's real irritation with Curtis' rom com isn't the lack of token black faces, but the depiction of Notting Hill as well-off and aspirational: 'I wanted Lava to show Notting Hill as a place diametrically opposed to the Richard Curtis-ised place apparently dominated by a gentrified bookshop-browsing, cappuccino-drinking, middle-class elite. I wanted a grittier take on the area during Bank Holiday August.'
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For directors like Ritchie, Tucker, and the flat cap-wearing middle classes, there is nothing so loathsome and deserving of a pisstake than the desire of the nouveau riche to get on and get 'in'. And unfortunately their nihilistic middle-class fantasies of social descending aren't restricted to rubbish Brit films or the minuscule circulation of Sleaze Nation magazine.
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Witness the calls for reducing football players' 'inflated' salaries; witness the green-gilled hostility against the Posh and Beck's extravagant lifestyle; witness how Oasis' Noel Gallagher and former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft apparently 'fell from grace' for buying Gucci clothes and country mansions.
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Doffing your cap was once a mark of knowing your supposed 'betters'. Today, wearing a flat cap suggests we should all know our place once more.
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Neil Davenport is a film and music journalist for Uncut magazine.
Lava opens on 25 January 2002
(1) 'Trustafarian': bohemian lifestyle financed by a wealthy trust fund
(2) Periodical Publishers Association News, 12 November 2001
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