BoomBox

From being an intimate club night to having a heaving attendence with almost everyone in London wanting in on the guestlist, BoomBox Club saw the worlds of fashion, design and fantasty costume colide. Celebs like designer Gareth Pugh, model Agynes Deyn, Naomi Campbell, Lindsay Lohan and Kelly Osbourne have all been spotted there, but BoomBox wasn't serious, posey or full of egos; it's fun, inclusive and unpretentious. Full of the most outrageously dressed people and open only to those that make a serious effort, BoomBox was a night like no other.

Yet despite the club’s influence, you’d be forgiven for never having heard of it. You won’t have seen flyers littering the streets, you won’t have been pestered by emails and you won’t have seen it listed in magazines, because BoomBox was marketed strictly through word of mouth.

Anyone who has tripped up on Hoxton Square on a Sunday night during BoomBox era could be forgiven for thinking they’ve entered an alternative reality where drag queens in obscenely high patent platforms and matted wigs, straight boys wearing dresses and smothered in fake blood and girls (or boys who look like girls) with cropped peroxide bobs in bikinis and heels rule.

Welcome to the sublime, ridiculous and totally bonkers world of BoomBox, one of the wildest parties in the world, splicing freaky fashion, a fierce musical mix and carefree flamboyance.

BoomBox symbolised a new surge of creativity that reawakened London's fashion set.

Occasional BoomBox doorman, Nuno, partially explains why London is currently such a fertile stamping ground for those who want to push their look to its limits. ‘When you are in London you have the freedom to wear whatever you want to wear and no one will look twice at you in the street. But when I go back home to Lisbon, everyone is just staring at me and laughing.’

BoomBox was this generation's Studio 54. Where freaks mingled with the fabulous.

So the current mania for dressing up and expressing yourself in whichever way you see fit (whether that’s by covering your face in glitter, wrapping yourself in plastic bags and donning a pair of slutty stilettos) can be seen as a symptom of London’s buoyant, individualistic new spirit. The twenty-first century in this city is about vibrancy, rebellion and celebration. The BoomBox club kids are part of a subculture, but there are no common codes between these individuals. Nothing as identifiable as the safety pins of punk, the DM boots of the skinheads or the mods’ scooters. And it’s this individualism that the rest of the world is currently craving as BoomBox displays the British (or more specifically London) tradition of eccentricity at its best.