Remember when kids used to wear funny hats and have piercings and stuff? When they shouted words like “Grunger!” at each other from buses, or let Pete Doherty inject heroin into their arms on a beach? You probably didn’t think it at the time, but they were the last days of something we used to have in this country called “subculture”. And it was something that this country did spectacularly well, perhaps better than any other. Until, that is, the great Hollister pandemic of 2012 swept in and Britain started looking like a refugee colony for people who’d been exiled from California for being too ugly and melanin-deficient.
The last teen subculture to really hold sway over here were the emos. They infested shopping precincts from Bluewater to the Trafford Centre, and seemed to make total sense there, their chequered Vans even matching the mosaic tiles of the water fountains they always congregated by.
