CLAMOUR

ISSUE TWO: “Sometimes you throw brunch, and sometimes brunch throws you” 1

CLAMOUR IS throwing brunch before it throws you CLAMOUR IS eating an iced bun for the free French manicure CLAMOUR IS Cate Blanchett’s lockdown chainsaw accident CLAMOUR IS video calling your friends with a full contour to tell them you’re depressed CLAMOUR IS contracting carpal tunnel because you miss Tinder during lockdown CLAMOUR IS happening upon a discounted gateau at the Co-Op CLAMOUR IS the first speck of blood in your knickers that says you lived another month

without getting knocked up

CLAMOUR IS Shameika telling us we have potential CLAMOUR IS sinking a statue of an old racist in Bristol Harbour CLAMOUR IS drinking blue WKD until your piss looks radioactive CLAMOUR IS Jon Snow wearing a different silk tie every night to present the news from his

living room

CLAMOUR IS Brian Dowling printing Suggs from Madness’ holiday pics CLAMOUR IS the residents of Whitby asking you to piss off, please CLAMOUR IS cradling a giant vegetable on a pedalo during a day trip to London CLAMOUR IS goths going to buy semi-skimmed in lockdown CLAMOUR IS Louis from 1D’s little sister’s fake tan line (well done Lottie - it works a treat) CLAMOUR IS Jamie Dornan sounding like a swung bag of cats in the celebrity Imagine video CLAMOUR IS making a magazine with your best mate and calling it work. We hope you have

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This Country director, Tom George, looks back on the beloved show’s three series as we wish hopelessly for a fourth

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1. Charlie and Daisy May Cooper on the set of filming This Country in Northleach, The Cotswolds.

Photographed by documentary photographer, Diana Markosian, for The New York Times in 2020 2. The Mucklowe’s having a freak-out in Kerry’s bedroom, no doubt over another plan-gone-wrong.

Photographed by Inez Gordon at the BBC for Huck in 2017. Gordon worked as an assistant producer on the first two series of This Country 3. “In this village, people respect me because I’m hard as fuck”, so said Kerry Mucklowe. Here she poses with her gang of tweenagers from Year 7 at the local school, in an empty lot at the edge of the village.

Photographed by Inez Gordon at the BBC for Huck in 2017

3.

“A HARD HAT may protect you from a falling brick, but it will not protect you from banter. You don’t need a hard hat, you need a hard heart.” So goes the philosophy of Kerry Mucklowe. Kerry and her cousin Kurtan pottered onto our TV screens in 2017, when This Country first aired and set about it’s course to win the hearts of critics (most notably four British Academy Television Awards) and millions of viewers (as of April this year, the show’s three series have been requested over 52 million times on BBC iPlayer).

The mockumentary explores the triumphs and trivialities of life for young people in rural England as the Mucklowe duo dawdle into adulthood in the Cotswolds village they call home. It’s a show that somehow juggles topics like which chocolate is best in a box of Celebrations and how to grieve the death of a friend. Always funny, sometimes serious and very occasionally sad: This Country has in just 19 episodes achieved a balance so few shows are able of finding.

Sibling stars and writers of the show, Daisy May and Charlie Cooper, are joined by Tom George, who has worked with them as a story writer and directed every episode of the show. “My main aim was for it to be really funny, of course.

From right at the start I felt like the way to do that was to make sure these characters felt grounded in reality. I thought the comedy would be all the funnier if it felt like the characters were real and the world they live in felt like it was a real place”, says Tom. The show is filled with the awkward pauses and mundane blunders of everyday life: neighbourhood feuds, driving lesson mishaps, failed pyramid schemes run out of Kerry’s garden shed. The Mucklowe’s world is one of turkey nuggets, Bowls Clubs, Swindon FC merch, “shits and roundabouts” (a phrase coined by Kurtan in Season 1, Episode 2). But, it is a world that feels real and for many viewers, a world that could very easily be their own.

The mockumentary format is one we keep seeing in modern British TV - from The Off ice to People Just Do Nothing to Twenty Twelve - and as a nation notorious for our relentless awkwardness and self-conscious politeness, it is a format that suits us and our stories perfectly. For Tom, Daisy and Charlie, the mockumentary style allowed them to pull against Kerry, Kurtan and their feckless entourage becoming sketch characters - they needed to be hilarious, but believably so.

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4. Behind the scenes filming of the third series of This Country, photographed by documentary photographer, Diana Markosian, for The New York Times in 2020.

From left to right: Paul Chahidi (who plays the Parish Vicar, Francis Seaton), Charlie Cooper (Kurtan Mucklowe), Daisy May Cooper (Kerry Mucklowe), Tom George (director and story writer)

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“Once we’d settled on the mockumentary format it shaped the entire writing and production process. The scripts had to feel much more fragmented than a typical sitcom and that took a lot of work to get right. We were really strict with the rules of our documentary - where they would be filming, where they wouldn’t, how far away would the crew have to be if the characters are saying something personal and so on. For example, we never see anyone going to bed or waking up, because the crew wouldn’t be there.” Along with such rules, it wasn’t uncommon for the crew to complete filming a perfect scene and re-do it to make it look rougher. So convincing is this style of wobbly frames and harsh zooms, that many viewers didn’t initially realise that This Country wasn’t an actual documentary.

Throughout each episode, scenes are divided by facts about country life for young people. “Initially we thought it would be a nice way to remind people this is a ‘serious documentary’ and as the series went on they turned out to be a great way to tie the events of the show to real-world issues that effect rural areas, such as unemployment, poor transport networks and social isolation.” Characters can be doing something completely unimportant and banal - one episode is set entirely inside Kerry’s kitchen while her and Kurtan argue over who gets to use top shelf of the oven - and such facts stand in ironically poignant contrast.

“At its heart the show is about boredom and the way that At its heart the little things become massively important when you haven’t got much going on in your life. I think most people can relate to show is about that. It’s also about looking at the place you live in and thinkboredom and the ing, “surely there’s something better than this”, which is something everyone has been through.” way that little Along with its laugh out moments - see the plum attack of things become the first ever episode - This Country lends itself to moments of real sadness as well, namely the ongoing relationship, or lack of massively relationship, between Kerry and her waste-of-space dad Martin important when (played by the Cooper’s real-life dad). The same dad who Kerry explains, “actually wrote the song Wonderwall on the back of a you haven’t got beer mat in the space of ten minutes”, forgets her birthday and gets her arrested for helping him flog stolen vacuum cleaners. much going on in Every episode was also written and filmed in the Cotswolds, your life where the team all work together for five weeks to complete each series. Now that the final episode has aired, Tom reflects, “It’s a lovely process and only possible because Daisy and Charlie are such ego-free writers. They want each episode to be as good as possible and never hold on too tight to specific jokes or story points. Lots of the inspiration for characters comes from Daisy and Charlie’s life”.

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5. ‘Big Mandy’ is the village brute with impeccable hearing and a weaponised tattoo gun. Played by Ashley McGuire, here she is photographed in Northleach by Inez Gordon at the BBC for Huck in 2017 6. Charlie and Daisy May Cooper on the set of This Country photographed by the BBC and used in NME’s Reel Talk, a ‘weekly interview feature with the biggest names in film and TV’, earlier this year 7. Kerry’s dad, Martin Mucklowe (played by the Cooper’s dad in real life, Paul Cooper), wrestles Kurtan topless outside his caravan on the outskirts of the village. Photographed

by Inez Gordon at the BBC for Huck in 2017

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6.

Kurtan: “No-one round here is on Tinder, so, you know, I had to keep setting my radius further and further and further, then the radius got to France. And it just got silly by the end. You know.

I can’t afford to be going back and forth on the tunnel every other weekend”

7.

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“Of course, it’s really hard work as well - 12 hour days, shooting scenes, but also re-writing things on the floor and thinking about extra shots or scenes we might want to grab as we go. But it’s brilliant and so satisfying when the episodes start to come together. We laugh the whole time. It’s like making something with your mates.” At one point in the second season, Kerry sprawls out along a bench in the village and asks the camera crew, “Does it not get a bit boring just following us two about?”. Considering the show’s bloopers and deleted scenes have amassed millions of views on YouTube alone, “boring” doesn’t seem the right word.

The show’s close-quartered study of its two central characters You realise they is undoubtedly what has resonated most with the British public. have real hopes Kerry and Kurtan are such recognisable, household figures with their wardrobes of staple Reebok and Lonsdale trackies and and dreams and vocabularies of phrases like “nosey old cockwombles” and “faffwounds, and just meister general”. And yet, they keep surprising you. Tom says, “You think you have them figured out from the first moment you when you start see them in the first episode, but the more you watch the more you realise they have real hopes and dreams and wounds, and just to sympathise when you start to sympathise with them, they act like complete with them, they idiots again - they’re selfish or rude or petty or childish. They’re like all of us”. act like complete As the village redevelopment looms closer and the Muckidiots again lowe’s say their forlorn goodbyes to their friend, the Vicar, in the last episode, we viewers fill with the same wishfulness. Except they’re selfish or we are wishing that the announcement of this being the show’s rude or petty or ‘final’ series was a threat rather than a promise. This Country tottered onto our screens three years ago and while it is finished (for childish. They’re now), the realities it presented for life around our country have like all of us not. Young people like Kurtan and Kerry and the rural communities they live in are overlooked and underfunded and we need shows like this to tell their stories. For now, let us remember it’s 19-strong episodes with a classic Mucklowe line: “That’s the beautiful thing about living in the village. Everyone comes together on days like the Scarecrow Festival and just forgets their utter hatred of each other”.

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Kerry: “You know my Dad actually wrote the song ‘Wonderwall’ on the back of a beer mat in the space of 10 minutes, don’t you?”

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8. Kerry and Kurtan looking at Martin Mucklowe’s caravan, where he is exiled to after being caught “peeping on the women in the tennis club” in the show’s first series.

Photographed by by Inez Gordon at the BBC for Huck in 2017 9. Behind the scenes filming of the final series of This Country. In this episode, Kerry is left in charge of the Parish chickens while the vicar is out of town. She ends up leaving their cage open and letting them get eaten by a fox. Photographed by documentary photographer, Diana Markosian, for The New York Times in 2020 10. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper at the 2018 BAFTA TV Awards where Daisy won Best Female Performance in a Comedy and the show won Best Scripted Comedy. Daisy also took home the prize of making it onto the Daily Mail’s worst dressed list from the awards show, transforming Kerry’s staple Swindon Town football top into a customised polyester crepe dress made by dressmaker, Fiona Hesford

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Against Uniformity Would you like a lobotomy with that? Photographer and former sausage roll server Jessica Parsons sends up the service industry in this sardonic series of selfportraits

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JESSICA PARSONS was sick of smiling over sausage rolls as a shop assistant at Gregg’s. She had been working part-time in a Portsmouth branch for three years while studying for her degree in photography, when she hit on the idea of channeling her grievances with the service industry into art.

So she photographed herself in uniform against a plain backdrop, hair pulled back low under her red hygiene hat, effecting what could be termed the service worker smile: a 100 watt, face-eclipsing grin that’s more convincing as a grimace.

The resulting shot was too pointed, if also slapstick, for the project to stop there.

A friend who had recently quit a job at McDonald’s lent her his uniform to do another; same set up, same smile. (What her friend declined to mention was that he hadn’t washed his uniform since his last shift months prior. “It stank.

I was standing there smelling like old McDonalds.”) A friend who worked for Deliveroo lent another, and then a friend whose gran worked at Tesco was roped in, too.

The resulting pictures were simple, unfussy, to It is the knowledge of the point – like any other posed stock image you how close a service might pluck at will from the careers section of a corporate website. But displayed altogether — Parworker’s performance sons’s smile identical in each, her pose only fractionof politeness runs to ally altered, and her eyes staring down the barrel of the camera all from the same height — the farcical hatred that renders veers very quickly into the eerie. It is the knowledge Parsons’s ostensibly of how close a service worker’s effecting of politeness runs to hatred – or at least, the desire to gob in anodyne portraits your coffee – that renders Parsons’s ostensibly anofrightening dyne photographs frightening.

“I decided that I was going to make it really simple, but really visually pleasing and enticing, so it’s the bigger picture the viewer is looking at – so that they face these bigger themes.” Parsons put out an appeal on social media, and across the three years of her undergraduate photography course for more uniforms.

“Everyone who lent me a uniform related to the project, and they were very, very helpful. I was sent all sorts – Starbucks, The National Trust. For a while there was a lot of uniform admin going on in my bedroom,” she says.

The name Parsons settled on for her self portrait series, by happy happenstance, was ‘Working Title’: “It does what it’s meant to say,” she shrugs. What Parsons herself is trying to say isn’t explicitly damning of the service sector’s treatment of its employees, so much as it is a send up of the placid blankness employees are at all times expected to project. Providing the full Cindy Sherman effect in its knowing triteness – “I’m certainly used to the comparisons at this point,” says Parsons – ‘Working Title’ also draws on Nikki S. Lee’s identity-bending ‘Projects’ series; which, like Parsons’s ‘Working Title’ relies on the artifice of dress to create the varying homogeneity of different social groups — from midriff baring teenagers to corporate city types.

“We both create a visual performance,” says Parsons of Lee. “Distinguishing her in a crowd is just as difficult as distinguishing an employee in uniform.” The uniform in the modern workplace fulfils what the Mao suit in the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s couldn’t quite: a classlessness that ostensibly pinions all employees at the same level of importance; apart from the odd allowance of a coloured tie for management. Which is to say, unimportance. “Don’t you be going and getting notions of yourself, now,” would be the Irish mother’s take.

Where this didn’t work with the Mao suit after the 1950s, when salaries gave way to rationing, was that the suit was made of scratchy grey cloth for the lowest ranking officials, polyester for those somewhere in the middle, and a high-quality wool for those at the top. At Gregg’s, the whole thing’s a bit more democratic, with all employees on the polyester.

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Parsons estimates that she took between 100 and 200 stills per uniform, her jaw nearly locking at the memory. “I’m so sick of looking at my face,” she If you were wondering, she can still recreate the My manager was like, deadpans. smile exactly — though it’s that bit more sinister in peryou need to smile son. Continuity was a strain: “It was a lot of effort having to keep getting my roots redone,” she laughs. “A guy more. The one thing in my class pointed out, because he used to be a manager I know how to do is at Sainsbury’s — that was my uniform plug there — that he appreciated that I’d taken my earrings out for the unismile forms that were food retail, and left them in for the others.

It wasn’t something I considered; it was just something I did automatically because I’d been working at Gregg’s for so long and knew the protocol.”

In a coincidence only a recent graduate with an arts degree could predict, Parsons now works as a server at Nando’s. And the black and burgundy tunic she borrowed from a friend to satirise, is now, to some extent, satirising her. “I know everything about a Nando’s menu and I don’t eat chicken,” she says, rolling her eyes to high heaven. “I literally know how to upsell a sausage roll with a coffee — all of these things I have to pretend to really care about.” (Though in fairness, there are plenty of people not on the payroll who care about them deeply.)

“When I went for my one month review, my manager was like, ‘Everything’s fine, but you need to smile more’. I was thinking: the one thing I know how to do is smile. I’ve got extra crow’s feet from this project. It was so full circle. It was: yeah, we’re back.”

But that Parsons will get the last laugh is a given: the endless cutlery replenishing and table wiping has given her time to think up her next project. Something, she thinks, to do with the complex interpersonal relationships between her colleagues — some of them related, some of them married, some of them worth steering clear of, and none of them too distinguishable from the other in their minor football league-like uniforms of burgundy and black. “ The minute I stop serving someone, I’m thinking of what I can do.” But she hasn’t nailed it down quite just yet — she’s another few tables to serve first.

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Message approved by the British Government, 2020

From butternut squash to buttons, meet Angela, Joe and Kevin, three of Britain’s best obsessives 18

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Kevin Fortey on a day trip to London with his giant marrow, photographed in Hyde Park by Deborah Wangsaputri and Pie Sutithon

Re c o r d - b r e a k i n g g i a n t v e g e t a b l e s a n d w h y y o u should take up gardening for mental health 20

KEVIN FORTEY started growing vegetables when he was four years old, with his father, Mike, who founded the UK Giant Vegetable Championships in the early eighties at his local pub “over a pint and a challenge to see who could grow the biggest pumpkin”.

Alongside his full-time job as a civil servant and time with his family, Fortey spends roughly three hours a day gardening and two hours running all the social media platforms for the championships from his home in Cwmbran, South Wales, having taken over running the competition after his father passed away in 1996.

Despite these seemingly super-human time management skills, Kevin asserts that his biggest achievement has been securing three world records for his giant vegetables, with the title of world’s heaviest beetroot still belonging to him. It took Kevin seven years to develop the seed for the 23.995 kg beet, driven by the opportunity to “engage with people all over the world from all walks of life” and promote the benefits of gardening for wellbeing. He and his circle of fellow avant gardeners, are passionate believers in “horticultural therapy” and encourage vegetable growing to be utilised as a diversionary activity.

Kevin explains, “In terms of gardening for mental health, being out in the outdoors and engaging with other people, reduces feelings of isolation and loneliness and gives people a sense of purpose. It’s moving away from medicinal culture towards a culture of people eating healthily, changing their lifestyles and changing their mindsets as well. Growing a giant vegetable from the initial seed to propagation is quite therapeutic and soil has antidepressant qualities, so literally playing with soil, weeding, having a tidy up, digging, and getting your hands dirty is good for your health as well.”

With the vegetables and the competition’s popularity continuing the expand in size, the championships moved to their current location in Malvern, Worcestershire, where around 200 people now compete each year. Along with the annual event, Kevin and his 13-year old son, Jamie, also work with schools and prisons in the UK and America in a bid to raise awareness for the benefits of gardening.

Recently, one of the duo’s giant cabbages was used for science, maths and cookery classes at a nearby school before going on to feed its 1,000 students and being used as an energy source to heat up the school. Kevin’s biggest ambition is still to grow the world’s heaviest marrow, with his 92.5kg gourd of 2019, which Jamie used to make a thousand jars of chilli chutney, being just a kilo shy of the record.

It is difficult to comprehend how Kevin stays motivated and balances each aspect of his life without combusting. His unwaveringly nonchalant and reserved demeanour leaves only hints at his secret to success: a boyish obsession that he never outgrew, or perhaps a grief-fuelled obligation to finish what his father had started, or maybe just the rare pleasure of enjoying what he does is enough.

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Opposite: Inside Angela’s home in Tonbridge, Kent. This page: She poses with a collection of cut steel buttons, talks through her files of Bimini buttons and her Collector of The Year Award from Kent Life Magazine

B Collector Angela Clark thinks “people take b u t t o n s f o r g ra n t e d ” MOST PEOPLE have the odd tin of spare buttons tucked away somewhere, for Angela Clark, her button tin is room-sized and boasts some 2000 buttons. Her collection, which ranges from Art Deco to mother of pearl, Japanese Satsuma to antique livery, is the result of decades of meticulous hoarding. “I’ve been collecting buttons since I was a child, probably as a result of my grandmother who had a button box and when I used to to visit her, I’d tip all of the buttons out onto the floor and arrange them by their colours or types, and that started my interest.”

For Angela, her fanaticism is rooted in the way buttons, which so often are “taken for granted”, can “transport and enhance” a garment. This is tried and tested on the clothes in her own wardrobe, so many of which she has altered with ornate, unique buttons from her collection.

Clark, with her determined offers of tea and coffee and insistence on walking me to and from the train station and the flat she shares with her husband, Colin, in Tonbridge, Kent, possesses the warmth of a distant family member you haven’t seen for a while. She talks me through her bookcases lined with tens of ring-binders filled with buttons ordered by period or style, which she has devotedly fastened onto individual sheets of card and displayed alongside informative or ornamental pictures and text.

At the core of her enthusiasm is her involvement with the British Button Society, founded 1946, of which she has been a member for almost 40 years, as well as its current secretary and president. The society, with around 300 members across Britain and overseas, hold national meetings once a year and smaller re22

gional meetings three times throughout the year. At these smaller meetings they bring collections of buttons relating to specific themes, to present to each other in “show and tell” formats and work on their magazine, Button Lines, which is published three times a year. The annual general meeting is held in March, often in Birmingham, once centre of the button-making industry, and provides members with an opportunity to buy, sell and learn more about different types of button.

Angela, now retired, spends at least an hour each day on her work for the society, the majority of which involves working on their digital identification service, whereby anyone can send in a query regarding the value or origins of a button and for £5, a member will assist them. This works well given almost every member has a niche interest within the world of buttons. For Angela, this speciality is cut steel and Biminy buttons, to which she devotes a significantly larger portion of storage space. Although there is no doubt about her passion, as she sits opposite me with silver button shaped earrings and a multicoloured bracelet of layered buttons, much of the enjoyment she finds in society membership is in the opportunity to meet other people, who just happen to share her interest.

Aside from her work as a bell ringer at the local church, her dedication to buttons is rivalled perhaps only by a dedication to her husband, Colin. The two have travelled and lived all over the country together, following Colin’s work as a gamekeeper, before finally settling and remaining in Tonbridge for 30 years.

Colin, who has been living with a form of motor neurone disease for some years, relies on Angela very much as a carer, a responsibility which, despite “taking up quite a lot of time” and energy, she embraces gladly and without question.

The degenerative illness, for which there is no cure, has forced the two of them to give up their house, dog and lifelong dream of retiring together in Norfolk, in order to live in a disabled-friendly flat with easy access to the select hospitals that provide the specialised treatments Colin needs. Talking to her more you can understand that button collecting is one of the only aspects of her life that she has not had to change because of the circumstance of Colin’s disability, and this freedom is perhaps part of the reason why she clings to it.

The pair are resoundingly cheerful despite their situation and chuckle as Angela shows me her award for 2018’s Collector of The Year from Kent Life magazine. Aside from the £200 cash prize that came with winning the competition, button collecting has also seen her travel to America for their national convention and source and supply the English National Opera with antique boot buttons for their costume department. In the same way we shouldn’t take buttons for granted; the opportunities, knowledge and independence Angela has gained, prove that collecting them shouldn’t be taken for granted either.

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Aspiring hoarder Joe Lokko crosses his fingers

Go Joe Lokko shows off his thimble collection at home and wears his favourite Brasil football t-shirt 26

OVER THE COURSE of the last two years, Joe Bates has informally ditched his legal surname in place of his mother’s maiden name, and the 23 year old with perfect posture became Joe Lokko.

An extreme hoarder, it’s surprising Joe was able to part with something so essential so quickly. This is the boy who collects Beanie Babies by the dozen and keeps a case of thimbles in his bedroom-cum-trove of body socks and secondhand bridesmaids dresses. Spying the tens of thimbles all neatly arranged in a wooden cabinet for ten quid in a Hampshire charity shop near his mum’s house, Joe was at once “besotted” and adopted the collection to grow himself. “I love the idea that somebody has painstakingly curated this selection of thimbles. I am by no means a royalist but I love that somebody felt such a connection to these people that they would have so many images of this family in their home.”

Having grown up in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, Joe now lives in East London, where time is divided between his final year of Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins and working as an assistant for stylist, Ibrahim Kamara. Much of his zeal for gathering these peculiar objects, aside from the inexplicable connection he feels to them, is rooted in the optimism that they might be of use in a future project. He plans to use Freckles the Leopard and Ringo the Racoon, along with his other Beanie Babies, to reupholster pieces of furniture.

Joe has dyspraxia and as a result struggles with fiddly tasks like sewing and shouldn’t be served red wine. The thimbles, which vary in design from illustrations of badgers to photographs of Prince William as a baby, are therefore likely to remain as ornaments for his Dalston bedroom.

Next on his collection hit-list is a series of vintage postcards from the 1960s and 70s exploring transvestism and crossdressing. Looking ahead, his lifelong ambition is to be able to afford his own house and fill it with objects bought on eBay with total impunity.

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1. Jamie’s open studio of photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures in St Ives, Cornwall, earlier this year. Photographed by Deborah Wangsaputri and Pie Sutithon 2. Yellow flowers in the Romanian countryside near a small village called Floresti, from Jamie’s 2019 series, A Short Pleasurable Journey Part Two

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McQueen to Mongolia: The Preston is my Paris photographer travels for business and pleasure 29

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JAMIE HAWKESWORTH rose to acclaim photographing campaigns and editorials for Alexander McQueen, British Vogue, JW Anderson and Marni, but he is by no means only a fashion photographer. His work constantly teeters between professional and personal with subjects ranging from supermodels to passengers at Preston Bus Station, couture gowns to landscapes in rural Romania. Yet, in each of his photographs is a warmth and a lightness that makes even distant subjects feel familiar. His work is unfussy, banal even, and possesses a golden, sunstarched quality, which prompts comparisons to photography greats like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.

There is a strange buzz about Hawkesworth, as if his self-effacing nature and apparent indifference to fashion seems to entice people more. Although his commercial work for fashion brands and magazines undoubtedly pays his way, fashion is never at the foreground of any of his photographs.

There is a strange buzz For Miu Miu’s Resort 2015 campaign, Hawkesworth about Hawkesworth, as if insisted on travelling alone along the Trans-Siberian Railway to create a documentary photo series to sit his self-effacing nature alongside portraits of model, Natalie Westling, wearand apparent indifference ing the collection in traditional studio shots styled by Rizzo. The arches of Westling’s body and the to fashion seems to entice Olivier waves of her thick hair look like the twists and bends people more on a bare tree on Olkhon Island in East Siberia. The blues of Lake Baikal and the sky above it the same as those on her Madras goat leather bicolour tote. You are forced not to think of the photographs as part of an advertising campaign, because Hawkesworth is trying so desperately to make them more than that. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious but it’s obviously working.

A certain light is becoming synonymous with Jamie’s work, as if every photograph could’ve been taken in a window of time between late afternoon and evening, when the sun is starting to dip and turn orange. You can see it in his series of frozen landscapes in Antarctica where the warm light seems to melt away at lumps of iceberg, or even on his i-D Magazine cover with Gigi Hadid, who appears to be lit entirely by a residual glow of sunlight penetrating the studio.

It’s hardly surprising that Jamie travelled to St Ives for his most recent project, where artists, like the late Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, have fled for decades to follow the unique light cast across the Cornish pocket of land.

3. Miu Miu Resort 2015 campaign, with model Natalie Westling, styled by Olivier Rizzo, art directed

by Giovanni Bianco and photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth 4. The cover of the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s February 2016 issue, showing a penguin and icebergs in Antarctica photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth as he travelled through the continent 5. Cover of i-D Magazine’s Spring 2020 Icons and Idols issue. Model Gigi Hadid wears Spring/Summer 2020 Maison Margiela couture designed

by John Galliano, styled by Olivier Rizzo, photographed

by Jamie Hawkesworth

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6. Model Felice Noordhoff styled by Camilla Nickerson and photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth for the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2020 campaign 7. Imaan Hammam styled by Camilla Nickerson and photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth for the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2020 campaign 8. Excerpt from The Gould Collection’s On Keeping a Notebook, with essay by Joan Didion and photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, 2019

He first visited the small fishing town last year to shoot the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2020 campaign. Styled by Camilla Nickerson, models wore tailored suits and dresses made of repurposed tulle, organza and lace from previous seasons to be photographed by Hawkesworth along the Cornish coast.

Both the campaign and collection feel like a romanticised reworking of McQueen’s Irere collection for Spring/Summer 2003. Yet here the smeared makeup, shredded chiffon and wet-look organdie of of McQueen’s orchestrated shipwreck are replaced by ‘bare’ faces courtesy of makeup artist Dick Page; the soft glow of Hawkesworth’s light and a perfectly ruffled, cleaner-looking version of 2003’s oyster dress worn by Imaan Hammam. Posing beside the sea, perhaps Spring/ Summer 2020 is the story of the pirates who survived the wreck and got their lives together on the shore.

Not long after his work for McQueen, Hawkesworth booked a studio and returned for a month’s residency to experiment more and find the romanticism in Cornwall that other photographers like Jem Southam had showed him long before. Along with photographs in the travel documentary style typical of his work, he produced an assortment of abstract drawings, paintings and sculptures, to be displayed together in the studio of whitewashed walls and paint splattered floorboards for a resulting daylong exhibition followed by a guided tour of the coastline.

Last year, Jamie’s work met with the seminal work of American author, Joan Didion, in the fourth instalment of The Gould Collection’s series of books which pair photography with literature. Didion’s 1966 essay, On Keeping a Notebook, is revived and republished alongside Jamie’s collection of some forty photographs and five drawings, produced between 2012 and 2019 during his travels across Japan, Mongolia, Russia, the United States and further afield. Although completely unexpected, this is a marriage which makes sense. The master of essays and one of the front-runners for the New Journalism movement of the sixties and seventies, alongside a photographer who’s documentary work is his strongest.

The pair, who have never met in person, are both avid record keepers, observing the world in private and sharing it in public in their own hyper-stylised voices. On Keeping a Notebook explores that which Didion felt the need to record and why that need exists, and somehow gives greater depth to Hawkesworth’s summer-soaked photographs of flowers and transport and houses.

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9.Excerpt from The Gould Collection’s On Keeping a Notebook, showing a charcoal drawing and photograph by Jamie Hawkesworth, 2019 10. Pink flowers outside a house in Mongolia, photographed in 2017

by Jamie Hawkesworth, featured in The Gould Collection’s On Keeping a Notebook in 2019 11. Loewe Menswear Spring /Summer 2015 campaign, styled by Benjamin Bruno and photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth 12. Narguis Horsford, a train driver on the London Overground, photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth for July’s British Vogue, dedicated to ‘ The New Front Line’ 34

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Along with the visual style of his work, Jamie also owes his success to his style of working. “What’s nice in terms of photography is that it’s become a job as well as being a leisure activity, so it all feeds into one. For ages I wasn’t really exercising, I was only doing photography and that’s when I got a really bad back.

Truly now, the only way I divide my time is between taking pictures, or working, and then exercising.”

Jamie speaks very earnestly about “wellness” and if he didn’t talk about everything with the same weighty seriousness, it would be easy to make fun of for it. Maybe “wellness” has earned a bad reputaWhat’s nice in terms of him tion amongst Goop fanatics and 20-something’s who photography is that it’s discovered banana bread in quarantine and throw the become a job as well as term about so liberally. For Hawkesworth, his commitment to practicing wellness isn’t rooted in obscure being a leisure activity exercises or questionable face masks, it’s to maintain good health so he can carry on working. “Once you turn 25 you seriously have to exercise, especially if you do photography. It is a fully physical act and you do have to be pretty much like an athlete, unless you’re Dan Jackson.”

He eagerly puts his health before anything else, whether that’s going to the gym almost everyday, pausing a shoot to run through his physiotherapy stretching routine, or getting rid of his smartphone to avoid social media. There is little space in Jamie’s schedule to develop and be known for a big personality, and he doesn’t want to, instead maintaining a dedicated and strict approach to work-life balance. His level-headed rationalism, not too common amongst those he works with, is perhaps grounded in the time he spent studying forensic science at university before switching to photography after enjoying taking pictures of crime scenes so much.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, Jamie’s nomadic personal and professional work has for the most part come to a halt. Instead, he’s been commissioned to take photographs of key workers in London, from train drivers to supermarket workers, to cover the July issue of British Vogue, dedicated to ‘The New Front Line’. Cycling across the city in protective gear with just one camera and one lens, his portraits depict the frontline workers who have put their lives on the line to keep the capital up and running. The series shows these key workers in quiet moments of respite from working and talking to Jamie in May of this year he said, “The last couple weeks doing this project have been the most joyous time I’ve had taking pictures”.

As well as the series, Hawkesworth has been cycling about the city delivering dinners for around two hours a day as a welcomed intermission to being stuck at home.

Hawkesworth is a difficult subject to write about because he could easily just be another guy you know.

But maybe this familiarity is what has led him from strength to strength. He isn’t outlandish or overflowing with hilarious or shocking anecdotes. He is a painfully real person. And his work is familiar too, both in its idiosyncrasy and the softness that makes his photographs look like how you’d remember something rather than how it actually looked. The past year has seen him publish a book with a Pulitzer Prize winning author, host exhibitions in England and Japan, and travel across the world for fashion and documentary work. Although he has titled two bodies of work as short pleasurable journeys, it is clear Jamie Hawkesworth is here to stay.

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1. Brian Dowling in his darkroom at BDI Colour Lab at 171 Old Street: the site that would see him print some of the most defining fashion images of the late 20th century.

Photographed by Kevin Davies 2. Simon Foxton styles, and Jason Evans photographs an uncredited young model for their series Strictly, published in i-D in 1991. “I could go through half the magazine in those days and I’d printed it,” says Dowling

The Last King of Clerkenwell Legendary photographic printer Brian Dowling: “Yohji Yamamoto rang up to say the pictures were historical. I said, Are you sure he doesn’t mean hysterical?”

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WHAT IS A GREAT FASHION PHOTOGRAPH? 1986: the shaded stencil of a woman, like the shadow of a moth inside a lampshade, blacked out but for the brilliant red bustle bursting from her coat, as designed by Yohji Yamamoto and captured by Nick Knight. 1991: an uncredited young black man dazzling a suburban footpath in a striking orange blazer and flat cap, styled by Simon Foxton and shot by Jason Evans. 1996: Dutch-American model Guinevere Van Seenus, a haughty headshot behind a slanting roll of salmon wallpaper, shot by Craig McDean for Jil Sander’s Spring/Summer catalogue. 1997: Amber Valetta sailing through the gloaming on the river Tiber, wearing a semi-sheer Prada gown, her hair knotted loosely at her nape and Glen Luchford somewhere behind the lens trying to get the shot before the boat began to gain water. (He didn’t — they reshot the next day.)

What is the common watermark that runs through all of these legendary images; that’s there in every print and blasphemous reproduction? The golden touch of Brian Dowling, the former owner of London’s most beloved commercial dark room, BDI Colour Lab. “People say I don’t work anymore, but I’m always bloody coming in,” says Dowling. We are sitting in the Photobookcafe in Shoreditch, Dowling’s base since BDI was bought — staff, equipment, Dowling and all — by print company Rapid Eye last April; following a hard fought, but ultimately lost, battle to keep Dowling in his Old Street premises amid rising rents and deep-pocketed developers.

When we meet (in the heady days of mid March when such things were allowed) Dowling is just back from the Dublin Film Festival, where he was attending the premiere of a documentary about friend and collaborating photographer Perry Ogden. We’re sitting upstairs having coffee alongside tourists and freelancers, while downstairs, separated by a plush red rope, printers are dodging, burning and printing in the darkroom. It’s the perfect Shoreditch set up, without any of the stale gimmickry you’d expect to come tacked to it. Namely due to the steady stream of delivery men and photographers sweeping in and down the stairs, and the rarefied air of actual work being done that follows them. It is a small relic of an East End long since lost to money.

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Despite an unofficial retirement —actually, it’s the busiest retirement I’ve heard of — Dowling is still to be found in the darkroom frequently. His latest project is a book by longtime collaborator Anton Corbijn: a collection of the Dutch photographer’s prolific (in some circles) work for Depeche Mode. “ They’ve got so many followers — I didn’t realise how big they are. Luckily we’re in the 2000s now, so we’re on the straight and narrow,” he laughs. The book, to be published

by Taschen, continues the men’s successful collaborative ventures in music photography — Dowling printed much of Corbijn’s noted photographs of U2, including the band’s first colour album cover for Achtung Baby in 1991. “Before that, everything that Anton had shot was black and white. He was basically a black and white photographer until he met me and decided, alright, let’s do some colour.”

Dowling’s heavy hand in creating some of the most In the early days of memorable band portraits of the 80’s and 90’s was an Dowling’s darkroom he early prophecy: in the first days of BDI Colour Lab he was given Suggs from Madness’ holiday snaps to prowas given Suggs from cess: “ They were at their peak and he didn’t want them going to the chemist.” He says this with the dry insouMadness’ holiday snaps ciance of someone who’s worked a long time within to process: ‘Well, he spitting distance of fame, but remains resolutely unmoved by it. He talks about nascent photographers didn’t want them going — Lea Colombo is among the favourites to have darkto the chemist’ ened his door of late — with the same enthusiasm as he does his prolific work for Nick Knight or Juergen Teller. He speaks in a cutting Cockney that can no longer easily be got. He is the nicest person involved in the fashion industry I’ve ever met.

Dowling started his career as a printing apprentice on Fleet Street in the early 60’s; back in the tobacco fug days of needing to pass a full medical before getting the job. Though Dowling’s fascination with printing had started long before; when, growing up in the East End, his father would print the family’s holiday photos in the bath. “I found it fascinating when you watched them come through — it was like Paul Daniels magic. And even now, if I go into a dark room and just watch the print come up, I still get the same feeling. Not that you see anything with the printing machines they have now.”

He was working a Sunday shift on March 17th, 1968, when the Anti-Vietnam protesters, Vanessa Redgrave front and centre, clashed with the police outside the US embassy in Grovesnor Square. Dowling was on break at home, waiting for his Sunday dinner when he got a frenetic call from one of the other printers asking him to get back. “I don’t think I even had any dinner — my mum had just done it.” He still sounds vaguely disappointed about this, 52 years later.

“It got to the point where there was so much film coming in that even the picture editors came down to develop. I was printing, and another boy was outside glazing. We worked nonstop until midnight. I just remember the picture editor coming down and saying: ‘I know what’s going to happen: this is going to be about the police, not the riot. It will be about the police trying to control it.’ And it was.”

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3. Brian Dowling photographed by Craig McDean for The Influential Issue of i-D Magazine in November 1997 4. Dowling examining his darkroom handiwork, photographed by Kevin Davies 5. Nick Knight’s 1986 campaign for Yohji Yamamoto, colour printed

by Dowling. “When Yohji saw the girl in red, he wanted to do all his pictures from then on in colour”

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It was working for the Press Association that Dowling first came across what would become his life’s work: colour. “ They opened a co-let colour lab on Warren Street, which in those days was a load of car dealers, a load of gangsters, I thought. It was a right place to walk down — you daren’t even look at anyone,” he laughs. “It was there that I started learning how to do colour.” He remembers working all night to print the Prince of Wales’ Investiture in 1969; a seismic event for colour printing in the press. “He was 21, the same age as me, and I’d just gotten married.”

Between his shifts on Fleet Street, Dowling picked up odd jobs as a wedding photographer. Many of the other printers at the PA had side hustles doing photography, and Dowling followed their suit in doing a quick print at work, and then taking it back in the evening. Soon he was able to make more from wedding photography in a day than what his job at the PA gave up in a week, and so he rented a dark room at Charterhouse Square, calling it BDI Colour Lab. “And that’s when Nick Knight walked in the door.”

Dowling’s relationship with Knight was one of the most fruitful — if unacknowledged — in the latter’s career. Knight walked into BDI as a student photographer looking for a decent print he couldn’t get himself, just as his career was about to mushroom. And mushroom it did, beginning with jobs for the then nascent i-D magazine and the iconoclastic The Face, and progressing to campaigns for major fashion houses; with Dowling in the sidecar for it all. Between them, they managed to turn Yohji Yamamoto to colour campaigns and catalogues; ushering in a new colour era for the designer who had theretofore favoured the severity of black to showcase his genius cutting. (Dowling’s darkroom seems to have a habit of turning even the staunchest of monochromists to colour.) “When Nick came back from shooting [Yamamoto’s 1986 catalogue] in France, we printed and sent the first six to eight pictures. We’d printed the one of the girl in red, and that was the first colour picture Yohji ever did. Afterwards, Yohji phoned up Nick at BDI and told him he loved the pictures,” says Dowling. “When he saw the girl in red he wanted to do all his pictures in colour. Nick said to him: ‘But you only do black clothes. Why are you having the pictures in colour?’ And Yohji answered, 40

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6. Glen Luchford shoots Amber Valetta for Prada’s 1997 campaign

‘Well, we’ll just have to make clothes in colour’,” recalls Dowling, delighted with the opera of it. His own opinion when Knight hung up the phone and told him Yamamoto thought the images were “historical” was decidedly different: “Are you sure,” he wondered aloud to Knight, “he didn’t mean hysterical?”

With Dowling’s diary booked three months in advance, this was the period that one disgruntled photographer trying to get an appointment called “ The Knight and Day Lab”, because Knight and Corinne Day were the only two people who seemingly could get a foot through the door. Day, who died in 2010, was known for her gauzy portraits of a newly-hatched Kate Moss for magazines including The Face and British Vogue; and was a rare female gaze in a boy’s club.

“Corinne, by her own admission, wasn’t the best photographer in the world,” shrugs Dowling. “At the beginning, a lot of her shots were overexposed, or she couldn’t get the lighting quite right. But we got through all that — we fixed it — and as time went on she improved. But she had a good eye for it, and that’s what counts. I was doing loads of pictures for Corinne with Kate in those early days.

‘I’ve picked up a copy of i-D and there’s a picture on the cover that I printed.

Turn over, and there’s an advert I printed. Turn over and look, there’s another one. I could go through half the magazine and I’d printed it in those days,” he says, bemused by his former stamina. Diary delays withstanding, though, there was always one photographer who miraculously managed to get himself on the books. “Nick would book me three months in advance, and he’d book me three days a week for three months. He never arrived until midday, so he’d give me the print order the night before and say, ‘Bri, will you test them up for me?’ So that by the time he came in, I’d have them all tested up. Well, the amount of times Glen [Luchford] would come in at nine, and ask me to do a quick print. He’d ask: ‘Who’ve you got booked in today?’ and I’d say, ‘I’ve got Nick in at 12’. And he’d say: ‘Great, that gives us three hours then. Let me know when it’s half 11 and I’ll go.’

And the amount of times he was still there when Nick arrived, and he’d say, ‘Oh hello, Nick. I won’t disturb you, I’m just going. Can you get that done next week for me Bri?’ He knew he couldn’t book a day, so he’d just chance it. He’s so funny like that, Glen.”

Dowling cites Luchford’s wispy campaigns for Prada between 1997 and 1998 (“he done three on the trot,” as the printer puts it) among the work he is most proud of. Though his response to Luchford coming to the darkroom door with news of the lucrative campaign was so, typically DowlWhen Glen Luchford ing. “When Glen said to me, ‘Alright boy? I’ve only told me he’d landed gone and landed a Prada campaign’. My response was, ‘What’s that?’,” he laughs. Despite spending a lifetime a Prada campaign, I tangentially — but not at all reluctantly — working in fashion, Dowling remains contentedly outside it. “I still said: ‘What’s that?’ can’t afford designer fashion. I’m not the man at C&A, I’m the man at M&S, me.” The idea that someone might buy seven identical designer pairs of jeans and seven identical t-shirts, as the fashion gentry would have it, is absurd to him: “What sort of fashion is that? What is it with these photographers — they’ve got to have seven pairs of everything?”

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Knight, however, was always to be discerned in a suit. Dowling nearly keeled over the first time he saw him in jeans. “He’s the most immaculate person. When he used to come to me, you’d think he was going to a wedding. I said to him once, forgetting that he’d probably been to four meetings before seeing me, ‘Why do you always wear a suit down to print?’ And he said: ‘I wouldn’t even think of dressing any other way to come and see you.’ I was touched.” Dowling is graceful, if also amused, about the success — not to mention wealth — garnered by the photographers he has spent his career printing for: from Knight being mobbed by Japanese teenagers at the airport, to Luchford opening a boutique hotel on Venice Beach akin to “Fawlty Towers”. They are successes far more trumpeted than his own, quieter ones. But that nearly every photographer contacted by Dowling while he was putting together the book that would be an overdue celebration of his own career, Fashion Image Revolution, allowed their photographs to be used for free, suggests that photographers are all too aware of this man’s indispensable role in their own, branded artistry. Published in 2018 by Prestel and penned

by Charlotte Cotton, Fashion Image Revolution brings together the most defining images of Dowling’s portfolio — and probably of the last fifty years in fashion.

Any reader of the book previously unaware of Dowling’s radical techniques in the darkroom will be wholeheartedly behind Peter Saville’s assessment of Dowling as “the haute couturier of printing”.

One thing glaringly lacking from Dowling’s oeuvre is the presence of female photographers: an oversight owing to the boy’s club sanctimony of the industry, rather than any personal vendetta on his part. (Dowling has two daughters; one of which did his accounts before also getting taken on by Rapid Eye.) “I suppose Corinne was the only woman I worked with in the early days. And funny enough, the photographers coming to me now are women. So to see these young girls like Lea Colombo and Jenny Brough — well I mean not girls, they’re thirty odd, but they’re younger than my daughters — being so fascinated by the craft is fabulous.”

Though that women are now allowed into the arena isn’t exactly a feat for the gender pay disparity: “In those days, when we did Yohji, we had a million quid’s budget to produce the catalogue and all that.” By today’s monetary standards, it’s hardly the going rate — what with the transience of digital advertising, and our own fickle consumption. But where photographic technology is rapidly changing, dragging printing along with it, photographers are all too aware of the spontaneity — which often sparks something brilliant — that can only be found in a darkroom. And though technology might be replaceable, a master craftsman like Dowling is not. He is living proof of what can make fashion brilliant, and what makes it at home in London. “Yeah, those was good old days,” he says; not at all wistfully, but in the assured tone of someone who knows the best days are still to come.

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7. Craig McDean photographs Guinevere Van Seenus for Jil Sander, 1996 8. Nick Knight photographs Devon Aoki wearing Alexander McQueen for Visionaire, 1997 9. Linda Evangelista photographed

by Nick Knight for Jil Sander in 1991, appearing on the cover of Fashion Image Revolution by Charlotte Cotton 10. Excerpt from Fashion Image Revolution by Charlotte Cotton, showing Kate Moss photographed by Craig McDean for Calvin Klein in 1996 11. Prints of Dowling’s personal experiments with flowers from 2011

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1. American astronaut Sally Ride poses in her spacesuit in 1983 — the year she would become the first American woman in space. Ride wears the powder-blue space suit she wore for lift off and re-entry into the atmosphere; decorated with insignia including the American flag, and the NASA “meatball” logo (so-called for its shape). In August 2019, Ride, complete with signature perm, was one of the figures to be made into a Barbie as part of Mattel’s “Inspirting Women Series”

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Very Modern Working Women Love it, hate it, forget until morning-of to iron it. The uniform has been knocking around civil society for almost 200 years. Now, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, uniform has granted a new significance to the essential workers wearing it. CLAMOUR traces a brief history of women in uniform, from Florence Nightingale to Air France

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2. January, 1917: A female police sergeant helps her companion get the tilt of her uniform hat right.

Both women have been appointed for duty at a munitions factory. The first female police officers were introduced during the First World War. The women who volunteered for these roles were usually tasked with maintaining women’s behaviour around factories or in hostels 3. 1945: Twin sisters Barbara and Sheila Gordon pose in their flight attendant uniforms. The sisters likely worked for BOAC (now British Airways) and attended the airline’s catering school

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4. John Galliano repurposes a fireman’s hat from the Royal Berkshire Fire Rescue for his Fall/ Winter 2001 collection. The collection was a nod to children let loose in the dressing up box; the models sporting primary coloured paint and biro scribbled beards on their faces. “With all the pressure on him to continually invent the fashion wheel, and please the big guns at LVMH, Galliano apparently decided to regress to a cozier time,” wrote Hamish Bowles in his show report for American Vogue

WHAT DO a Catholic school girl and Kim Jong Un have in common? Uniform.

(And that they’re both of schools that have deeply anachronistic ideals of how people should live. But uniform’s the hill we’re dying on today.) Uniform is widely defined as an outfit or piece of clothing that’s worn by a group of people to show their allegiance or belonging to an institution or profession. Simply put, it’s what distinguishes them from us and us from them. In Dear Old Blighty, it’s what distinguishes public school from state school; in Northern Ireland, it’s what distinguishes the protestant school from the Catholic school. In nursing, it’s what distinguishes a staff nurse from a specialist nurse from a matron — and all three from the rest of the ward. It’s what distinguishes Millwall from West Ham, and the pair of them from the remaining population who don’t give a shite. If you’re to buy into the marketing of brands who flog the new uniform for the modern working woman, it’s what distinguishes you, a corporate worker living in North London, from the rest of the riffraff riding the overground with you. Lovely calfskin tote you refuse to remove from your shoulder.

The two distinguishing camps of uniform itself are the new uniform, the one that’s about branded corporate identity, and an older iteration that’s about functionality and dignity. It’s the latter, less cynical of these two that’s been spotlighted since lockdown commenced in March. Just as healthcare workers have never been so visible, in this lifetime their uniforms have probably never carried such connotations of heroism to the masses. But where did this idea of having an outfit most people only remember to iron every Sunday night at half eleven come from?

“In the beginning, civic uniform was all about something that was vaguely military because they’d tried that out for centuries and it was working,” says Jane Tynan, editor of Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World, and senior lecturer in Historical and Cultural studies at Central Saint Martins. “You’d put someone in a uniform and hey presto, people are thinking: ‘I won’t mess with that person’.” Tynan traces the beginning of uniform becoming widespread in civil society to the early 1800s. “Prior to that you had livery and domestic servants wearing uniform, but it was a very different thing: they would have had the colours of the estate that they were linked to, and it was very much about households.

Military and livery uniform are both about allegiance. While modern uniform is about showing allegiance, it is also about strategic value. “ Think, for example, about the red coats of the British for the Napoleonic Wars: there was nothing strategic about their clothing. It was about saying, ‘Look at me — I’m amazing, and we’re going to fight the French because we’ve got these big red coats and we’re gorgeous.’ When we go into World War II, we see the British — who are very powerful — wearing uniforms that are really drab, but they are clothes that keep them mobile in battle; that help them to survive. I would say in civil society that it’s the same: the uniform becomes less about showing off, and much more about maximising the performance of the body.”

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5. Beatific bobbies: Catholic members of the Metropolitan Police Force attend mass in Westminster Cathedral, November 1957. They have removed their hats as a sign of respect —contrast to the women surrounding them, who are likely to be donning a mantilla or veil for the same reason 6. 1908: An American suffragette poses in police uniform to illustrate the concept of women in law enforcement in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of the first policewomen in the US, Lola Baldwin, would be sworn in to the Women’s Protective Division in Oregon later that year

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If this decade has a defining uniform, it belongs to nurses: bulwarks of resilience, reliability and competence in a sea of political bumbling. That its provenance is largely at odds with the masculine, military model of many other professions is telling, and it follows none of the prideful ‘pageantry to practicality’ narrative that uniforms historically worn by men seem to. Not on Nightingale’s watch.

When Florence Nightingale was called upon to improve British army hospital conditions during the Crimean War, she insisted that fashionable dress was to steer clear of her practice. Her nurses instead were instructed to dress in plain grey tweed wrappers for winter and printed cotton for summer, with check aprons and white caps. God forbid a hair pad or crinoline was to darken the ward door. God forbid God himself were to darken it either: Nightingale introduced uniform predominantly to usher secularism into the profession. References to religion weren’t to come near it.

“Nursing uniform was about cleanliness and hygiene,” explains Tynan. “But it was also about raising the profile of the profession. Nursing uniform was a gendered object: it was created to give occupational dignity and credibility to the women who undertook the roles.” By insisting her nurses adopt uniforms — a trick likely picked up on her visits to Lutheran minister Theodor Fliedner’s pioneering Kaiserwerth DeaWearing a uniform is a coness Institute in Prussia — Nightingale ensured really big part of being that the nurses under her tutelage didn’t get the too fashionable for competency charge thrown at them. a nurse, and it’s a really A charge still being levelled against women some 166 big part of how you years later.

Kim McCusker, a palliative care nurse at Guy’s disconnect from the job and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, didn’t previously wear a uniform in her current role, but has recently had to wear the statutory tunic and trousers (it was that or a navy below the knee dress and tights) due to Covid-19. It’s a regulation she’s obliquely grateful for. “Wearing a uniform is a really big part of being a nurse, and it’s a really big part of how you disconnect from the job,” she says. “You put your uniform on, you’re a nurse. You take it off 48

7. “ The wartime job that can be your career.” A World War II poster calls for nurses and midwives to join the war effort 8. Florence Nightingale holds court in her bed at home on South Street, Mayfair, in 1906. She would die there in her sleep four years later at the age of 90, after a life dedicated to social reform, and the establishment of modern nursing as we know it. “For Nightingale, adopting uniform was an opportunity to diminish the influence of fashion on nurse’s dress,” writes Tynan. “She was dismissive of fashions such as crinolines and hair pads and sought practicality and humility in the clothing worn by her nurses” 9. ‘Portrait of Nurse Nelly’ by Dutch painter Jan Toorop. Petronella Alida Goudkade, or Nelly, married the Dutch lawyer and politician Ary Prins in 1894.

It’s thought that Toorop made this portrait of Goudkade —a parish nurse in a Hague hospital — shortly before her wedding. The references to religion that Florence Nightingale sought to ban from British nursing uniform are visible on Nelly’s apron and collar

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10. Kiwi artist and photographer Eric LeeJohnson captures a nurse at Whangarei Hospital, in New Zealand’s North Island, wearing a mask and starched nurse’s cap during his time as a patient there in 1953 11. 1890: Three nurses photographed in Theatre D of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Uniform was first introduced in British hospitals nearly forty years prior by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. Nightingale “insisted that her nurses wear uniforms of plain grey tweed wrappers for winter and printed cotton for summer, along with check aprons and white caps”

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12. Nurses at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna listen studiously to a lecture, 1921.

13. Medical and nursing staff wear specially devised overalls and respirators during an outbreak of Primary Pneumonic Plague in this eerily apposite photograph taken in Maryborough, Queensland in 1905 14. Shorter hems and higher hats: Nurses talk to a sister on the balcony of an unnamed London Hospital in 1962 15. 1908: A midwife holds a baby at the General Lying-In Hospital, London. The hospital, which takes its name from the archaic term for childbirth — not, as you might initially think, slovenliness — was one of Great Britain’s first maternity hospitals; opening its doors in 1767. The hospital closed in 1971 and fell into disrepair.

In a familiar London story, the building has partly made up the Premier Inn Hotel in Waterloo since 2013, following a refurbishment

and you’re you. It’s often really difficult, wearing your own clothes to and from work, to disconnect from the role.” Ellen Chan, also a palliative care nurse at the trust agrees: “It does give you a sense of the nursing profession — especially when starting as a student nurse, or when you’re newly qualified. It can help the public and patients recognise a nurse, and sometimes patients and the public will to you differently when you’re in uniform.” While There’s a huge respond the colour of a nurse’s uniform will indicate their seniority, movement towards it can become convoluted as different trusts use different “It used to be standardised, but now it’s more difpatients understanding colours. ficult,” says Kim. “But there’s a huge movement towards uniform. So there patients understanding uniform; particularly in hospices.

So there will be a guide on the wall of the different colours will be a guide on the and what they mean, so you know, as a patient, who’s apwall of the different proaching you. Normally in my job in the community, patients prefer you not to wear a uniform because they don’t uniform colours and want people seeing you coming to their house. But at the if you can’t wash all your clothes at 90 degrees, what they mean moment, you need to be in a uniform, really.”

If Nightingale’s uniform had some vague inclination towards fashionable dress of the time, the current nursing uniform has nearly none. Call the Midwife-chic hats and capes have long been ousted for reasons of hygiene, and now in a bid to eliminate any gratuitous germ-harbouring garment, so have belts. “I started nursing in 1985,” says Amanda Bailey, also a nurse at the trust. “At that time nurses wore dresses with a cape, hat, buckle and belt. It was a celebration of qualifying to be able to wear a belt and nurse’s buckle; often bought by proud parents. But they were not at all practical in terms of manual handling… I was happy to lose the hat.”

Arguably the only fashionable flourish to be found on modern nursing uniform is the mandarin collar worn predominantly by those working in the private sector. What Tynan calls Nightingale’s “discourse of anti-fashion” has held fast.

That’s not to say that nurses don’t have qualms with the functionality of their uniforms: Ellen says she wishes her uniform were less fitted, was made of a lighter fabric and had more pockets. Like Kim, Amanda would like to standardise uniform colours across the country. “If I were to redesign [my uniform], I would make uniforms consistent throughout the UK,” she says. “When I move trusts, it’s initially hard to work out who is who, so it must be even harder to navigate if you are a patient.”

16. 1912: Masks worn by medical staff during experiments with plague in Manila, Philippines

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But the paranoia surrounding women in fashionable dress is far from being confined to female healthcare professionals. A too amusing to be horrifying, recently unearthed, clip of Richard Dimbleby during the BBC’s 1964 election coverage — a narrow Labour victory for Harold Wilson, if you don’t mind — introduces viewers at home to the phenomenon of “girls” in the studio. “We have large numbers of girls in the background, all wearing, I don’t know what the colour is — it isn’t salmon pink — it’s sort of terracotta overalls, because we thought that it’d be less conspicuous than if they were allowed to wear their own clothes, poor little things,” Dimbleby says as the camera lingers on a group of women in identical, name tagged shirt dresses. What colour they actually were has been lost to black and white TV. “ There are charming girls on telephones,” Dimbleby says as the camera pans to another uniformed woman, who glances away. “As if she didn’t know she was being looked at.”

See also Renoir’s depiction of ‘A Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant’ (pictured): her face like a fawn’s, but her uniform of navy dress and white apron modestly matronly. According to a Baedeker guidebook from 1881, the restaurant’s pull was that it offered a small, affordable menu served by women — or girls, as the male parlance seems to prefer — “soberly garbed, and not unlike sisters of charity”.

Contrastingly, newer — namely female — professions seem able to avoid this wariness of fashionability, with women working in areas like air travel simply expected to be made up and manicured, as if they, like the interior of a plane, were also products of modernity. “ This is the new woman”, Cristóbal Balenciaga’s designs for Air France in 1968 seemed to say. “It’s not just that she can be anything she chooses, she’s expected to be everything.” A double-breasted, pink twill short sleeved shirt with a navy necktie, and knee length skirt to match, Balenciaga’s semifitted uniform for the airline was offset with a shallow peaked hat embroidered with the airline’s insignia, (over hair set to within an inch of its life) and mid heeled navy shoes. According to the airline, within a couple of years, “Hostesses were complaining that fashion designers were not taking their working conditions sufficiently into account.”

Of course Balenciaga is just one noteworthy name in this curiously prestigious crossover between two very disparate industries: Air France alone have uniformed their stewardesses in names as illustrious as André Courrèges, Nina Ricci and Christian Lacroix. Halston matched his designs for now-defunct Braniff International Airways to the plane’s interior leather; for a tranquil, if beige, inflight experience. Red or Dead’s Wayne Hemingway is behind Transport for London’s uniforms as we now recognise them. “ There are very few uniforms in the transport industry that are not fashioned,” says Tynan. “What’s interesting about fashion and uniform is that when you get to the end of the Second World War, and the rise of consumer society at that point, you would 52

think uniform would just go, disappear. But it doesn’t. And I think that a relationship develops between uniform and fashion where they’re both sides of the same coin. Because they both speak modernity: uniform as a highly regulated sense of modernity, and fashion a modernity related to individual expression — about freedom, consumer culture and profit. Fashion and uniform are both about transforming the body; they’re both about control and discipline.”

If you live in a city, the most discernible uniform at this locked-down time is that of the Deliveroo driver, whose blue and silver jacket can be spotted through the window at metronomic intervals throughout the day. Their uniform has none of the dignities that that of a healthcare worker might grant, but all the convincing you need to order a pizza with the delivery deal the company emailed you that morning. Their uniform is neither about control or discipline. Their uniform is branding, and it is suggestive of where uniform is headed in the 21st century. But that’s too cynical a note to end. So here’s this: through the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale carried with her a gold watch that had belonged to her father. On returning to England, she spent a large part of her remaining life bedridden. In 1876 she gave the watch to Miss May Coape Smith, a relative, writing: “I do not use a watch now, for I am not moveable.” Let’s live in hope that uniform, and its ability to grant visibility and dignity to the brilliant women who wear it, isn’t so moveable either.

17. 1875: Auguste Renoir’s ‘A Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant’. The waitress Renoir depicts in starched navy and white dress worked at one of several Parisian restaurants established by a butcher named Duval. These restaurants — or “Établissements de Bouillon” — were described by a Baedeker guidebook in 1881 as restaurants offering an affordable, if limited, menu, served by women “soberly garbed, and not unlike sisters of charity” 18. 1969: Air France stewardesses pose in their new, streamlined uniforms designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga. Balenciaga designed both a winter and summer suit for the airline in 1969 — one of his final projects before presenting his last Paris collection and retiring. The winter suit was made of a durable navy serge, while the summer suit seen here came in either pink or blue twill, with a short sleeve. “Designers seem to love these jobs: they’re very lucrative, but also strangely prestigious, despite the fact they’re not directly fashion,” says Tynan

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“No Virus, No Visitors” says Whitby Photographer George Hutton documents life under lockdown in his home town

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EMPTY HIGH STREETS. Couples at their doorsteps. Deserted beachfronts.

Closed-down cafes. These are the scenes of a life under lockdown as seen through George Hutton’s camera lens. For his latest series, the 23 year old photographer from Egton, a village on the outskirts of Whitby in North Yorkshire, follows the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the place he calls home.

Hutton is now on his placement year of studying Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins, before going back to London to complete his final year in September should the government restrictions change. His work experience has ranged from driving tractors, to working in the local cafe, to assisting photographers Jamie Morgan and Will Scarborough. But for now and the foreseeable future, George’s life and work has come to a standstill.

George has a complete lack of machismo and bravado that all at once endears you and alienates him from many of his peers. He is shy, polite and perfectly situated for working as a documentary photographer whose work focuses on others and distracts from himself. His identity as a Northerner is one he clings to in his own sort of quiet pride. Working primarily in black and white analog photography, George looks to the North and the seaside town he grew up in as inspiration for much of his work. In this latest photo series, the Whitby fishermen, Grosmont railway depot workers and Yorkshire farmers which make up his portfolio are nowhere to be seen. Instead, he focuses on the work that is not taking place and the people that are not there. Hutton’s interest in documenting the impact of the pandemic sparked after seeing messages like “SAVE LIVES, STAY HOME” and “PUBLIC TRANSPORT = INCUBATORS ON WHEELS” sprayed across the usually unspoiled bus stops and stations in Whitby in mid-March.

“Usually from around April to September the town is overflowing and struggling to cope with the tourism”, explains Hutton, but this year Whitby will undoubtedly see a decline. George hopes to chart the wane of visitors in the popular seaside town, made famous by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Whitby Jet industry and it’s Blue Flag beaches. “I think it will be interesting and also very strange to see how the people here will react to all these restrictions because when you are from such a small coastal town you can feel quite cut off from the country and the outside world and have the mindset that it isn’t going to affect you”. But Whitby proves to be far less cut off than George once thought.

The weekend before 23rd March, when professional prat Boris Johnson announced a nationwide lockdown, saw flocks of people visiting beaches along the Yorkshire coast. Not only locals, tourists from cities further afield were day-tripping to popular seaside towns like Scarborough and Whitby, as if the sea air was an unspoken deterrent for a virus which has put continents on stand-by. And the restrictions didn’t stop everyone from coming back. In early May, one couple from Rochdale on a 200-mile round trip in search of Whitby’s celebrated fish and chips were stopped by police and fined, amongst tens of others scurrying to the seaside and breaking government guidelines.

Frustrated and afraid locals retaliated with defaced road signs and homemade placards to deter outside visitors from nearby beauty spots like Robin Hood’s Bay. During his daily permitted exercise, George captures this fear along with the hope of local residents and small businesses united in isolation and looking forward to better times. More recently he has been making and selling giclée prints of a mural thanking the NHS along the wall of the Parkol Marine boatbuilders in Whitby, with all £227.50 raised going to a fundraiser for the NHS. Although a small few continue to flout government rules and common sense, Hutton’s ongoing series chooses to focus instead on a community which has stuck together and followed these precautions, and hopefully his photographs will live on long after the spread of this virus and the strange new way of life it has forced upon us.

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I Miss Doing Nothing the Most of All

Alone Again (Unnaturally): 80-something days into lockdown and Joe feels pretty but he misses the girls telling him it’s true 62

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Photographed and styled by Joe Bates.

Face cutouts courtesy of Kate McCusker and Freya Martin. (We miss you too) 72

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1. An oil paint on canvas portrait of Jon Snow by Keith Tutt, 2017. After meeting Snow in a restaurant, Tutt asked if he would sit for a portrait for him, to which he obliged.

Displayed on Saatchi Art’s digital gallery and can be yours for $6,250!

2. Jon Snow irons his tie collection as part of Channel 4’s #StayAtHome campaign. The ten second long fly-on-the-wall style films feature an array of famous British faces and aims to promote the public health message, ‘Stay home, Save lives’, during the coronavirus pandemic 3. Snow interviews then president of Uganda, Idi Amin, in 1974.

Amin was nicknamed the “Butcher of Uganda”, on account of the despicable cruelties under the lead of his totalitarian regime 4. The presenters of Channel 4 News photographed in their studio on Grays Inn Road in London.

From left: Jackie Long, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Matt Frei, Jon Snow and Cathy Newman

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Telly news, ties, skunk and socks: the clamorous world of Jon Snow

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THERE IS a bumbling sort of beauty to Channel 4 News that sets it apart from the desperately inoffensive, near-constant offerings on counterpart channels like ITV and the BBC. Rather than run-of-the-mill coverage of what is going on around the world, the team at Channel 4 instead pursue why such things are happening. Its most watched reports on YouTube, with view counts in the tens of millions, range from a debate between presenter Cathy Newman and cultural critic Jordan Peterson about gender equality; actor Robert Downey Jr storming out midway through an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murphy; and weather reporter Liam Dutton correctly pronouncing Europe’s longest place name during his daily forecast (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales). At the helm of the operation and The 72 year old would anchoring the show since 1989 is Jon Snow.

The lanky, six foot four broadcasting maestro has be Jon Snow, OBE, become very much a part of purple walls in the Channel had he accepted the 4 Newsroom during the decades he’s dedicated to the daily show. Snow is eagerly anti-establishment despite Royal Honours. Instead his on-paper status as a boarding school-educated, upper middle class white man working in the media. In he went on to make a 1970 he was kicked out of his law degree at the Univerdocumentary about the sity of Liverpool for taking part in an anti-Apartheid sit-in protest. Since then, he’s inhaled two balloons of outdated, imperialist skunk as part of a live televised experiment, refused to nature of the honours wear a poppy or any politicised symbol on the air, and pranced about shouting “Fuck the Tories!” at Glastonsystem bury Festival in 2017.

The 72 year old would be Jon Snow, OBE, had he accepted the Royal Honours in 2000. Instead he went on to make a documentary about the outdated nature of the honours system and its ties to British imperialism. Snow has of course been met with his fair share of backlash for refusing to do as he’s told or accept anything at face value. Most recently, the unscripted observation that he had “never seen so many white people in one place” during a report on a pro-Brexit rally in London last year, became what The Daily Telegraph proved to be the sixth most provocative broadcast of the past ten years. But despite such disputes over his neutrality as a journalist, he continues to be one of the most recognisable news broadcasters in Britain today and one of the few individuals to have received a BAFTA Fellowship, alongside the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Judi Dench and Charlie Chaplin.

I feel a weird sense of familiarity with Snow, whether it’s because Channel 4 News’ slot was bizarrely sandwiched between The Simpsons and Hollyoaks and so became a regular in the weeknight evening itinerary growing up, or because before answering any of my questions he lets me know his daughter and I share the same name and were both named after the same Freya - the “indomitable explorer Freya Stark!”. I talk to him at around his eighth week of social isolating since his return from Iran to cover the country’s election (at this point Iran has been one of the countries worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic).

A self titled, “people person”, the solitude of the past few months has proved tricky, but unsurprisingly Snow has kept himself relentlessly busy: “isolated with BBC radio, lots of Zoom news conferences and interviews and then the Channel 4 News show transmitted through a camera mounted in my front room and controlled from our Newsroom in Grays Inn Road.” He’s also spent the extra time organising his collection of colourful ties, with which he has become as synonymous as Paul Smith has with stripes or Bridget Jones with Spanx.

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5. Jon Snow and Dr Christian Jessen promote Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial in 2015. In the episode, Snow inhaled two balloons of skunk as part of the live experiment presented by Jessen, of Embarassing Bodies fame, to explore the varying effects of two different types of cannabis on the user 6. Jon Snow pauses a Channel 4 News interview with Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg to tell noisy protestors outside parliament to “shut up” in 2018 7. A tweet from @DannyMillea from 2017, where he describes meeting Jon Snow at Glastonbury Festival where they danced around as Snow shouted, “Fuck the Tories!”

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Vanners is one of the oldest silk weavers left in the industry and was founded in London’s Spitalfields in 1740 by descendants of a family of Huguenots who’d fled France to escape persecution by the country ’s Catholic government decades earlier. Eventually the operation moved down to Sudbury in Suffolk, along with four other ‘manufactories’, as the area became the epicentre of the country ’s silk industry. Vanners prepare, dye and weave imported raw silk in-house, specialising in fabrics for fashion, interiors, and neckwear. It’s team of 80 is one of a small few artisan silk weavers left in the UK and doesn’t show any sign of stopping soon

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So infamous is this collection that in late 2017 it made its way into a temporary display, titled Jon Snow: Colour is My Brand, in London’s Design Museum after attracting the attention of the museum’s founder Sir Terence Conran while he watched the nightly news show. Snow’s personal friend and textile designer, Victoria Richards, has been designing most of his brightly coloured ties for over 25 years, which are produced by historic silk weavers at Vanners in Sudbury.

“Suits are expensive and I felt I looked dull, but I realised no one would look at the suits if I caught their eye with a tie. I have over 100 and give ones I’m bored with to charity auctions.” Jon Snow has successfully Unlike the BBC, dodged the wonted vanilla wardrobes akin to newsreaders and is rivalled perhaps only by Ron Burgundy’s Anchorman ITV, or Sky, we entourage.

Yet, it is both the colour of his accessories and the colhave just one our of his journalism that sets him, and Channel 4 News product a day. All altogether, apart from other broadcasters. “No other nightly news gets a whole hour each evening in prime time. Unlike our toil goes into the BBC, ITV, or Sky, we have just one product a day. All that one hour. our toil goes into that one hour. Consequently the quality reigns supreme - undiluted by having to feed other slits in Consequently the day.” While this difference in show scheduling plays a the quality reigns part in differentiating the different programmes, the value of Channel 4 News rests largely in its approach to journalism. supreme A recent survey by The Independent in May of this year found that while only 49 percent of people trusted journalists generally, 72 percent trusted television news journalists like Snow, viewing them as more authoritative rather than speculative. Although the public seems to trust television journalism more than other forms of journalism, there is an increasing push from viewers for broadcasters to further scrutinise the stories they are reporting. News-wise the past year has had more than its fair share of major stories - from the ongoing pandemic to the general election in December, and with it the need to probe and critique politicians and their actions has surged. Channel 4 is one of the few news broadcasters attempting to meet this demand.

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BBC News is the main competition for Snow’s team. Its palatability and flatly ‘partisan’ portrayal of news topics has earned the ‘Beeb’ the largest view count but Channel 4 News, which lists “exposing injustice”, “holding to account” and “a healthy mix of scepticism, humour and mischief” amongst its core commitments; seems to boast far more integrity as a broadcaster.

During the 2019 general election, the BBC were criticised for giving the Tories an easier ride than other parties. From letting Boris Johnson successfully dodge an interview with Andrew Neil after the Scottish journalist and ball-buster had already disemboweled competing candidates like Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon on national television, to failing to properly challenge falsehoods the Conservative party built their election campaign upon (for example, pledging 50,000 invisible nurses to the NHS).

Channel 4’s coverage on the other hand involved replacing Boris Johnson In his 44 years and Nigel Farage with ice sculptures after they failed to show up to a party leader debate on climate change and hosting an ‘Alternative Elecin journalism, tion Night’ with newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murphy, comedian KathRyan and eternally meme-able TV personality, Rylan Clark-Neal.

Snow has erine Although it is publicly owned and can be extinguished at any moment reported on by the government legislation that allows it to exist, as the Tories have Channel 4 has not been scared into submission by the bigjust about threatened, wigs in Parliament like so many of its rival broadcasters.

Leading the way in this quiet rebellion is Jon Snow, whose personal every major career highlights have been, “Reporting the Iranian Revolution in 1979 news story: and interviewing Nelson Mandela after he emerged from prison”. But, from the fall of you can imagine the difficulty in cherrypicking highlights for the 44 year long journalism career of a man who has reported on just about every the Berlin Wall major news story in that time: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Obama’s to Obama’s inauguration to the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. One interview subject he is determined to add to his list, which reads much like a thank inauguration you speech at the Oscars, is Donald Trump, a name Snow seems to declare and question at the same time.

Over the course of the pandemic, Channel 4 News has recorded record viewing figures, but is under more pressure than ever to remain afloat given Channel 4 relies almost solely on funds from advertisers and is reportedly expecting a decrease of 40% in its TV advertising in the second quarter of this year in light of the outbreak. It is hard to imagine tuning in to the nightly show at 7pm (if the show continues to exist) and not being met with Snow in the purple news studio or his living room, donning a garish tie as he gears up to give a much-needed, sardonic grilling to someone like Richard Branson or Russell Brand. His only wish for the future is for “A greener, more caring world”. Such a wish seems all 8. A rainbow-like the more likely for a world with a man like Jon Snow in it. assortment of Snow’s ties on display in the exhibition 9. Jon Snow posing in front of the pop=up exhibition dedicated to his tie collection at London’s Design Museumin 2017 10. Portrait of Jon Snow by artist John Keane painted in 2009 to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery to commerate Snow’s 20th anniversary as presenter of Channel 4 News 10.

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And The Undead Wore...

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April marked the first year since 1994 that the goths didn’t descend on Whitby for their biannual weekend — a requisite event in the subculture’s calendar. So naturally CL AMOUR wanted to know: what does a goth wear to sit in their conservatory?

TIM SINISTER has a bone to pick with Miuccia Prada and Valentino Garavani. (If anyone has a number for either, please do write in.) More specifically, the Newcastle-based HR manager and long-time goth, has a bone to pick with a Wall Street Journal article penned last September that namechecked the two labels beneath the headline: “Can a Grown Woman Wear Goth Fashion?” Written by fashion journo Nancy MacDonell, the style section article heralded the arrival of goth style, “long reserved for angsty teens,” into the world of “adults — with jobs.”

Sinister, who alongside being an adult with a job runs The Blogging Goth, an online space for news on the UK Goth scene, retaliated with his own headline: “Can An Article Be More Insulting?”

“Every winter you’ll see fashion columnists ‘daring’ each other to go spooky and gothy with dark lipsticks and heavy eyeliner — trying to steal a little ‘rebellion’ to market pretty bland consumer products,” says Sinister. “ The biggest names on the catwalk have no qualms about mining our subculture for ‘new’ ideas.” Though he gives honourable mention to the late Alexander McQueen, “Who was inspired by — but did not steal heavily from — goth.” Other designers who have had the good grace to take from the subculture cleverly are Rick Owens —“When I see young goths in the street, I feel like they’re my children,” he said in 2008— and his former “mentee” Gareth Pugh. Pugh’s A/ W17 collection being heavily influenced

by Liliana Cavani’s 1974 The Night Porter, a film inextricably linked with the 1982 shot of Siouxsie Sioux by Anton Corbijn, is just one small nod to the subculture in an oeuvre of many. The scene in question sees Charlotte Rampling, who plays a Holocaust survivor in a sadomasochistic relationship with a Nazi officer, singing Marlene Dietrich’s Wenn Ich Mir Was Wünschen Dürfte (If I could Wish for Something) to entertain a group of SS men at a concentration camp; topless but for a pair of braces.

That goths might be suspicious of journalists is unsurprising — given the volume of articles scribed on the subculture by the mainstream press that carry the same tone of sneering as an unlikeable aunt at a family function when she invariably enquires, “You’re wearing that? Interesting”. Type “goths” into the search bar of the Mail Online and the first result will be headlined: “Woman accidentally stumbles across a meeting of SATANIC SEX CULT members clad in black robes on her way to the toilet at a vegan cafe.” It’d be funny if they were joking.

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1. A corpse bride puts in an appearence at the Whitby Goth Weekend 2. Tim Sinister with his band The Seventh Victim 3. Martin Parr captures a goth mosh at Whitby in 2014

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4. and 5. Martin Parr documented the weekend in 2014 ahead of the British Library’s Terror and Wonder exhibition 6. Bram Stoker’s Dracula turned Whitby into a gothic literary landmark 7. Julie Fletcher at home in Driffield

Sinister can — and does — rhyme off a list of what the press gets so wrong about goth. “ That it’s a sad little subculture for miserable teens. That it’s a relic of the 80s no longer relevant. That it encourages and sustains self-harm and suicidal thoughts. That it’s utterly entwined with satanism, black magic or some other negative religious connotation. That we kill others. The list will probably never end because good — i.e. profitable — media is built on divisiveness, blame, suspicion and hostility.” For all its connotations, the only thing the subculture is utterly entwined with is music: beginning with the post-punk sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and later, when “gothic rock” began to seep into the vernacular of music critics, Bauhaus, Sex Gang Children and Leeds’ own The Sisters of Mercy.

The fashion followed, owing something to the fetish aesthetic of early punk, but with a DIY dependent on what the bands were wearing. For all the goth subculture’s associations with death, its early days — Thatcher aside — sound like there was no better time to have been alive.

As goth’s big moment began to fade along with its club nights — the most noted of these, The Batcave, shuttered in 1985 — one event, now a requisite in the UK goth calendar, was established in 1994 to sustain the subculture. (Or at least gather together those left over.) It was the Whitby Goth Weekend.

Founded in a pub in 1994, the mass meeting of UK goths has since grown into a spectacle that drives thousands to the would-be quiescent Yorkshire seaside town twice a year. (It went biannual in 1997 owing to its popularity.) Though ostensibly a music festival, “You mainly just prance up and down the street waiting for someone to take you picture,” one goth who spoke to CL AMOUR notes.

It’s like fashion week, except the clothes stay similar every season and those in attendance eat lunch. The residents of Whitby aren’t complaining, either — it’s thought the goths rake in around £1m yearly for the town’s economy. (Though the Whitby Goth Weekend website is currently urging people to stop flocking to the town amid Covid-19.)

It has become an event as much for camera-toting spectators in civvies as it is for goths themselves. Martin Parr is just one famous documentarian to have paid a working visit to the weekend, observing in 2014: “Goths don’t really go in for a lot of dancing, they are wearing too many clothes for starters.” (Parr’s photographs of the festival would attest to this; but old footage of The Batcave in and from a goth night at Xclusiv nightclub in Batley, West Goths don’t London, Yorkshire, shows that as with most things, people gave it a bit more really go in for welly in the 80s.)

But this April marked the first time since 1994 that the long black a lot of dancing, hems of the goths weren’t to be found brushing the floor of Whitby’s they are wearing pubs and clubs. (Albeit the one in October is still set to go ahead.)

Naturally CL AMOUR’s first question following this news was: what, too many clothes presuming they have one, would a goth wear to sit in the living room?

Fletcher, 60, from Driffield, today it’s — disappointfor starters inglyFor— Julie an off-white t-shirt and shorts. Fletcher has been going to Whitby since 2010; at first attending as a spectator with her then-husband, and now going in full goth regalia following a divorce, and a skin cancer diagnosis and recovery. It was after the cancer on her nose had been removed and her face reconstructed that Fletcher became, “Hooked, 100 percent, on the goths.”

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“When I went after I’d had my face redone, I was just dressed in my own, normal clothes,” she says. “But I found this gorgeous, long black dress in one of the shops and tried it on. When the lady in the shop said, ‘I’ll put that in a bag for you,’ I said, ‘Oh no you won’t,’ and I put it on and ran straight up to the Abbey. I was so proud to have my face back.” Fletcher is something of a demi-goth — “Not your true goth, but I wait for the occasions and events.” She commemorated this year’s would-be weekend by dressing in a gown she’d made herself by overlaying her wedding dress with purple lace, and adding a petticoat of black netting underneath and around her waist to make an apron. “I’ve demobbed it,” she laughs.

She decorated a top hat with a disused eye mask and the feathers of a roadkill pheasant, and set off around the streets of her small market town. “Everybody just smiled and thought, Julie’s on one today.” That is, everyone aside from the nonagenarian who wrote into the local paper to complain. She was worried that Fletcher had started a “siege” of goths around her town. “ There aren’t many long haired, big bearded men wearing a bandana and alternative clothing in Rotherham, but that’s my everyday style,” says 40-year-old Nick Shepherd. This April’s Goth Weekend would have had more significance for Shepherd than most: he proposed to his girlfriend Marie by the abbey during October’s festival. “I was raised in Whitby as a young child, and to me Whitby is home,” he says. “I’d taken Marie to Whitby and she fell in love with the place.

She was amazed by Goth Weekend and found it to be an experience she needed more of.” Shepherd had been going to the event for the day since 2002, and first brought Marie two years ago. Although Marie is “fairly new” to the subculture, goth dress is synonymous with everyday dress for her too: although “it’s a little more extravagant for Goth Weekend.” The couple are wearing in their kitchen exactly what they’d have been wearing otherwise — “We feel comfortable in what we wear and so we may as well be comfortable at home.” The financial implications of coronavirus — both are small business owners, with Nick owning Deadwood Crafts, a wooden sculpture business, and Marie, a cake decorator and baker owning ‘Midnight Bakery’ — have brought wedding plans to a halt, but it’s a goth wedding to come. “I’m sure it may be an eye-opening experience for some parts of our families.”

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8. Not always an on duty goth, Julie Fletcher sometimes masquerades as Elsa from Frozen to go to Christmas markets 9. Nick Shepherd proposed to his girlfriend Marie beside Whitby Abbey during October’s Goth Weekend 10. “ The one thing that you can rely on every year is that the weather will be dreadful,” says Julie Fletcher.

11. Carol Ann Bates at Whitby. She starts with a corset, then bases her outfit around it 12. Carol Ann Bates at Whitby Goth Weekend.

The 62-year-old from Stockport had to buy an extra wardrobe to house her corsets

For Heather Brownlee, it was the Marilyn Manson look that did it. “I usually dress up for events, but I do like to wear a lot of goth clothing in general, as I feel more comfortable being different,” says the Scottish 27-year-old, who’s been making the long journey to Whitby since her early teens. Brownlee is autistic and says that goth music helps her cope with day to day tasks that she finds difficult — although what exactly makes the grade of goth music beyond The Sisters of Mercy, is as contentious an issue in the subculture as telling a focus group of Irish people: Bono. Discuss. “Plugging in some earphones and listening to my favourite bands helps a lot with anxiety and dealing with loud and bothering sounds in shops, or just in general,” she says. Among these favourite bands she counts Motionless in White, Escape The Fate and Metallica.

Carol Ann Bates from Stockport, meanwhile, is mostly to be found in her dressing gown during lockdown — albeit it’s a black one. “My style of goth clothing is Victorian era, which I make myself from bedding and fabric I find,” says the 62-year-old. Bates makes her clothes at a work room in I’d find it a little Houldsworth Mill, but during lockdown she has had to set up OTT, even by shop at her dining room table; rising occasionally to go to the kitchen, which she’s using as a makeshift cutting room. our standards, Where Bates is of the old guard, Brownlee is of a new genof goths; who, despite having not even been born for its to wear a floor- eration heyday, are sustaining the subculture and keeping its style in length velvet circulation. (Solely in the interests of Italian fashion houses, of “ There’s going to be resistance. Goths are sadly often cape to get some course.) traditional, stubborn and sneeringly elitist towards innovation,” milk from the says Sinister. “But we aren’t actually vampires and this scene canmoulder away in a tomb with only the withered hope of a supermarket not new album by The Sisters of Mercy to preserve us.”

If not Prada or Valentino, what is the self-described HR “corp goth” wearing in isolation? “I’d find it a little OTT, even by our standards, to wear a floor-length velvet cape to get some milk from the supermarket,” he says. “But then, I’ll wear a waistcoat and pocket-watch just to walk down the street, finding it as typical to wear as a fifty-year-old man with a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit might find squeezing into his football shirt. He’ll still feel utterly justified to hurl abuse or a can of beer at me, though. And he’s the normal one. Let’s just say I’ve never regretted being a goth, and especially not in those circumstances.”

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THE HALTING of everyday life around the world has prompted us to rethink the way we live, or lived, under normal conditions. From the way we interact with others to our relationship with technology, from how we work to how we relax, this period of standstill has forced us to poke holes in the habits that were once routine. One fundamental change has been to the way we consume. Despite the surge in demand around the country for loo roll and every pasta shape imaginable, many people are beginning to realise how many products just aren’t necessary.

With fashion expected to be the hardest hit sector of the retail industry, we look at a printing company that’s unique approach to working, from design through to production, is set to endure an uncertain future and keep its community afloat.

Everpress was founded in 2016 in East London by Alex Econs and acts as a middle man between creatives and consumers. Having already launched another printing company that supplied traditional merch and promotional apparel, Econs saw first-hand the problems faced by creatives and record labels wanting to sell good quality merchandise online. From the “high up-front costs, risk of expensive deadstock if they don’t shift units, the need to set up and manage a webstore” to tedious aspects like trips to the post office and responding to customer queries, the process can often be disheartening for those trying to set up shop.

Along with trying to make merchandising more accessible for artists and small businesses, Econs was keen to implement a successful pre-order model, so the company would only be printing what had already sold. “You see Burberry burning £36.8 million worth of unsold dead stock and it makes you scratch your head. How are companies getting away with this when we know just how damaging the fashion industry is for the planet? It seemed a bit mad that we hadn’t seen more businesses adopting this model. The potential for it to transform the fashion industry looked huge.”

But does this pre-order system actually work? By Everpress’ count it has already allowed them to reduce waste by 7,624 metric tons and save up to 143 million litres of water in the four years they’ve been running. By 2025 they’re aiming to be water and carbon neutral as well. “Brands simply won’t be able to have any credibility if they don’t look after the planet as a priority.”

The Everpress online store has an odd sense of community. Despite the hundreds of designs, created by record labels to graphic design teams, non-profit organisations to independent artists, everything seems to work together quite well.

Yes, there are a few slightly bizarre designs like drawings of slugs driving in cars and cartoons of animated food items having conversations. But, along with these lighthearted, funny tees many of the products are made with portions of profits going to charity with a clear message being promoted, be that a celebration of the NHS or migrant workers in the age of Brexit Britain.

At the moment, the team is looking forward to their annual 50/50 campaign, to be announced later in the year. Each year 50 artists from around the world create 50 different tee designs to spotlight the work of a different charity, with proceeds donated. In the past, Everpress have raised thousands of pounds working with Amnesty International, Justice4Grenfell and UK youth cancer support charity, Trekstock. This year has already been monumental for Everpress, working alongside various creatives to raise awareness and fundraise for the amazing work of frontline workers and charities amidst the chaos of a global pandemic.

During the nationwide lockdown, Everpress’ 30-strong team of full time staff have left their Dalston office to work from home, while still managing to fulfil all of their orders and keep their online blog and newsletter up and running. Most importantly, they have been able to continue supporting independent designers and brands, at a time when they need help most. “We pride ourselves on providing a valuable source of income for independent creatives and now, as many find themselves out of work, or struggling to find work, we’ve been able to work with them more closely than ever to help them stay afloat. It’s amazing to see our mission to support grassroots creators in action at a time like this.” Everpress’ aim is clear: to empower independent creatives and help the wider community, from reducing their environmental impact to charity fundraising. And it’s an aim that so far, they’re achieving.

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How to fake an orgasm With lockdown scuppering one-night stands, burgeoning romances and sex for anyone who isn’t shacked up, TV screens have brought welcome relief. From BBC’s Normal People to Netflix’s Sex Education, onscreen sex scenes have never looked so good. How? Enter an Intimacy Coordinator: the new experts on all things sex on set “REMEMBER THE GORILLAS. Remember where the tension in their shoulders was, and remember where their hips gyrate.” Intimacy coordinator Elle McAlpine is explaining what animals can teach actors about simulating sex on screen. “If they’re not thinking about it and they’re uncomfortable, people can kind of go into this whole-body movement that doesn’t look real. So it’s great to look at where animals hold their tension, where they are fluid in their movements, and what parts of their body they move when they are mating.” We are sitting in a small cafe beside the British Library, a table of five tradesmen taking their tea break beside us; but laughing loudly enough that when the words orgasm and cock sock inevitably hit the air, they don’t bring the whole place to a standstill.

McAlpine is an intimacy coordinator with Intimacy on Set, an organisation founded by the most in-demand intimacy co-ordinator in town, Ita O’Brien: the woman behind the sex scenes in Netflix’s Sex Education and BBC Three’s Normal People. An intimacy coordinator — a job role that O’Brien and her 18-strong international team have helped guide into mainstream parlance over the last few years — is something that McAlpine believes will become “sacrosanct” for film and TV production in the near future.

“TV seems to be predominantly the medium that is requiring, or at least accepting intimacy co-ordinators,” she says; though film work is growing. (At the end of January 2020, actors’ union SAG-AFTRA declared their support for the employment of an intimacy co-ordinator in scenes involving nudity, simulated sex or other “intimate and hyper-exposed scenes”.)

Intimacy on Set has fast become to the British film and television industry what Intimacy Directors International is to Hollywood. (The latter organisation was founded by Alicia Rodis, the intimacy coordinator for HBO — a network that broadcasts so many sex scenes, you might as well moan the last letter of its name.) And yet, the two main strands of this burgeoning industry are decidedly different in approach: where IDI deals in stunt, Intimacy on Set deals in the more fluid business of movement, so that constructing a sex scene is less about landing all the right cues, than it is moving through them.

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1. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. The show’s sex scenes were some of the most considered and convincing to cross screens in recent years 2. “If a sex scene is just there for titillation or as a way to shock an audience, then I don’t believe in that,” says McAlpine. She cites Kate Mara and Ellen Page in My Days of Mercy as one of her favourite sex scenes

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Steam on the silver screen

McAlpine trained as an actor at Drama Centre London — which is where she first met O’Brien, who was brought in as a movement teacher — and has been on six sets in the past six months. (Pre global pandemic, of course.) Those sets have included Amazon Prime superhero hit The Boys and Hulu’s comedy drama The Great, starring Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as Peter III. Her blonde hair pulled back into a neat top knot, Sex is a part and each of her bottom eyelashes individually coated in mascara for the full Mia Farrow effect, McAlpine has the exacting, but of storytelling: easy grace of someone for who performing is a birthright. If she it’s a huge wasn’t so easy to speak to, the idea of being naked in front of her would be horrific. But then, I’m not an actor. part of human “You know, the days are interesting… just talking about connection and sex,” she shrugs. “There is so much work because of what’s happening with online streaming — there’s so much content being what people made. And sex is a part of storytelling: it’s a huge part of human want to see. If connection and what people want to see. If it’s done well, then it serves so much.” it’s done well, Though, McAlpine acknowledges, there’s a glaring superfluity of onscreen sex that doesn’t really serve anything. “The then it serves number of times I’ve watched sex scenes on screen and thought, so much why am I so uncomfortable? Often because the actors and actresses are so uncomfortable themselves.” McAlpine counts Matthias Schoenaerts and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash, and Ellen Page and Kate Mara in My Days of Mercy among the better sex scenes she’s seen of late. “If the writer or director can give a detailed account as to why they believe a sex scene needs to be as graphic as it is, I’m open to that discussion. If it’s just there for titillation or as a way to shock an audience, then I don’t believe in that.”

The two most plausible reasons for why we as a species are obsessed with sex on screen are thus: either we want the complete, escapist fantasy — chances are if you’re a 38 year old father of two from Chelmsford, Game of Thrones is the closest you’ll come to an orgy with six beautiful women in a stone castle — or, we look to TV and film to have our own interiority and emotions reflected back at us, in the faces of actors infinitely more palatable to look at than ourselves. (That, and to be reminded of what sex actually is, after locked-down months of living as a nun.) Where the former can be served by porn, the latter can only be served by a sustained, engaging narrative and sharply rendered characters. Though those in the business of storyline porn might beg to differ.

“I wish that people would consider porn [to be] just another film genre, because that’s what it is,” Shine Louise Houston, founding producer of queer porn studio Pink and White Productions, told Allure magazine last year, and then reiterated to me when approached for this feature. Not to mention that intimacy coordinators are not always what actors want. As Shailene Woodley said during her press tour for Endings, Beginnings — a love triangle indie drama in which she stars alongside Jamie Dornan and Sebastian Stan: “Intimacy coaches make me uncomfortable because it feels like another set of eyes that I don’t need. The best thing a director could do is ask an actor right off the bat: ‘What are you comfortable with? What are your boundaries?’”

But the job of McAlpine and the growing cadre of those like her is to act as bridge between the (probably male, let’s be honest) director’s vision, and the wellbeing of the actors. From the initial ‘so, what are you comfortable with?’ consultation, to ensuring that all the necessary cock socks, nipple pasties and jock straps are readily available from wardrobe.

“We like [actors] to tell us what their absolute don’ts are and what they’re not happy with, so that we can get onto set prepared,” says McAlpine. “So that down the line, somebody’s not annoyed that they wanted nakedness or nudity in a scene and now the actor is turning around and saying they don’t want that… But an actor has a right to change their mind. So we’re negotiating things like this all the time.”

Five of cinema’s most clamorous sex scenes 1. Ecstacy, 1933

This 1933 Czech film starring Hedy Lamarr as a young woman who swaps a sexless marriage for an affair with the engineer who lives next door (Aribert Mog), is thought to be one of cinema’s first sex scenes. While the film itself isn’t short on nudity — in true Hollywood fashion, Lamarr, a gifted scientist, would spend the rest of her career largely remembered for the skinny dipping scene she shot when she was eighteen — the sex scene itself is largely demure. (See: flailing limbs and a pearl necklace dropped to the floor.) All we needed to convince us it was a top shag, though, was Hedy Lamarr’s face when dragging on that fag in bed afterwards.

2. Don’t Look Now, 1973

Did they; didn’t they? It’s the question that still hangs over this iconic (there, we said it) sex scene 47 years after it sweated its way onto cinema screens. Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie star as a grieving married couple in Venice haunted by apparitions of their dead daughter. If you think this is unlikely grounds for one of the most realistic — if not actually real — onscreen sex scenes of the 20th century, you’d be wrong.

Grief, desire and the glaring chemistry between Sutherland and Christie collide to make this sex scene one of the most memorable in Hollywood’s hallowed back catalogue.

3. Blue is the Warmest Colour, 2013

If ever an intimacy coordinator was called for, it was during the shooting of the seven minute sex scene in Blue is the Warmest Colour. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars opposite Lea Seydoux in this coming-of-age lesbian love story that became mired in controversy shortly after winning that year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes; with Seydoux later admitting she “felt like a prostitute” while shooting the intimate scenes. It’s a fascinating — particularly with the knowledge that, according to Seydoux, the actresses had “fake pussies on”— and voyeuristic scene that feels less like the considered, intimate sex scene the plot deserved, and increasingly, as the minutes labour on, like the inside of a straight man’s head. Which, essentially, is a solid summation of the entire film.

4. Moonlight, 2017

Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture Oscar winner contains one of the most visceral portrayals of early sexual experience in recent cinema. The film follows Chiron, a young, gay, black man trying to come to terms with his sexuality in a world that looks upon it with great hostility. Though the film is set across three periods in the protagonist’s life, the scene in question takes place when Chiron is still a student. A hasty, fumbling hand job, shot beautifully in the blue light of a Florida beach at night; never was an intimate scene so integral to a character’s arc. Nor so jarring in its tenderness.

5. Team America: World Police, 2005

Team America: World Police takes the cake for the most ridiculous sex scene ever to run in a mainstream film. Despite the — decidedly unsexy — scene in question taking place between puppets, it still manages to be one of the most explicit sex scenes ever to make it into a film classified 15. (Filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, had to submit the film 10 times with 10 different cuts of the scene to the American classification board before securing an R rating.) It makes for excruciating viewing — namely, when it ends in the puppets urinating and defecating on each other’s faces — but it also serves as a brilliant send up of the choreographed-to-within-an-inch-of-a-thrust Hollywood sex scene. It goes on for much longer than comfortable or necessary, but to resist laughing at it is as pointless as the scene itself.

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An intimacy coordinator will preferably be involved in a project from pre-production —though many productions have neither foresight or budget to implement this. “Coming in at that stage transforms the whole experience,” says McAlpine. “Your voice has been heard. A lot of people don’t really understand why you’re there or what you’re doing, so it gives you the space to present the work.” As she points out, an intimacy coordinator isn’t solely concerned with aiding actors — they are also there to support the crew.

‘Sometimes intimacy can be really uncomfortable for [the crew]. When people are uncomfortable, they can go into making jokes or being inappropriate to overcome the discomfort they feel.” McAlpine squirms slightly in the high stool that she’s sitting, recalling an experience she had as an actor doing a nude scene with an all-male crew. “I started to get ready and they all put their eyes down. There was no engagement, or no talking about it. It was just: ‘Can you do what it is you do?’ And I just felt so ashamed,” she says, rolling her coffee cup in I started to get her hands. “So what we do is try and just say look, this is a normal day on set and you have to respect the actors, and they have to ready and they respect you. And if you have any questions, you can come to us.” all put their Though she counters that a ‘just another day at the office’ approach to shooting sex scenes can also be ineffectual; referring eyes down. to that sex scene from BBC’s The Night Manager that launched There was no a thousand tweets about Tom Hiddleston’s arse. “Afterwards, we parted ways and ten minutes later met at the tea trolley for a engagement, normal conversation. It was as if it never happened,” his co-star Elizabeth Debicki, no doubt in an attempt at effacement, comor no talking mented sometime after the events to The Daily Mail. “I don’t want about it. And to project my own thoughts onto what she felt, but I think if that was me personally, I would feel shame, and I’d be worried about I just felt so what it looked like because nobody was talking to me about it,” ashamed says McAlpine.

When the full workshop process as drawn up by Intimacy on Set is allowed, it’s vigilant. After initial conversations are had with directors and producers, the intimacy coordinator will speak to the actors. McAlpine says that though they don’t lead with asking an actor about previous bad experiences of acting intimate scenes, it often crops up: “You’d be silly to think that people haven’t experienced some sort of sexual harassment or sexual abuse when you’re going into this work.”

Once a sex scene has been sounded out — what the directors want it to look like, and what the actors assent to — “agreement of touch” will follow. “That will start with an ice breaker, sometimes a hug or touching noses — whatever the actors feel comfortable with — so you can gage where you’re at.” They will then work out the dos and don’ts where to touch. “So you’re never shocked or surprised that a hand has slipped its way down there or whatever. It’s very clear.

And if something does happen like that, you have every right to say: that was not agreed.”

Lastly come the mechanics: hand placement, leg placement, the far from erotic question of ‘how many thrusts?’ “We find with actors that the emotional intention and journey informs the physical movement — so a lot of the time they mould together. But it’s very important that actors know where and how they’re moving, and that they have that structure in place.” And then, like a spool of thread on the top stair, they let the scene go.

Intimacy coordinators like McAlpine are at the forefront of an industry shift — towards a newly coined role that isn’t a good outcome of the Weinstein trial, but a necessary one. (Yes, you did make it this far into the article without having to read his dreaded name.) “You do feel a sense of responsibility,” says McAlpine, shrugging on her coat to go catch a train to Bath for a wrap party. “Because you’re holding a lot — you’re holding vulnerabilities across the board.” And long may we hold fast to them: God knows it’s what makes TV and film worth watching.

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You’re holding a lot — you’re holding vulnerabilities across the board

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3. McAlpine worked as an intimacy coordinator on Amazon’s superhero hit The Boys. Actress Brittany Allen plays Popclaw, seen here inadvertently crushing a man’s skull between her thighs mid-orgasm 4. McAlpine counts scenes between Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts in A Bigger Splash among her favourite sex scenes

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Le t te rs

*Pictures taken from a series

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If i eate did. t it bc I dont ea nt No i did

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