Camden
Mass confusion at tube stations, thronged pavements and legions of chancers trying to flog tourist tat don’t lie: To this day, Camden remains a port of call for so many people arriving in London for the first time. It’s not so much a place for the diplomats, oligarchs, property investors and City traders who fly in to the capital before flying out again having invariably increased their cache of power and wealth. But for the foreign exchange students, suburban goths, European radicals and Time Out crowds who flock to the city for what it can offer them in a cultural rather than financial sense, it’s a kind of debutante’s gateway. It’s tough to deny that Camden has undergone significant regeneration in the last decade or so, a smoothing of the edges that has seen multinational chains seize plots along the high street from the independent leather, record, boot and incense shops that used to preside over the stretch. That’s not to say, though, that the area has surrendered its outsider status totally – the overriding impression to any newcomer will still be that of an atypical and chaotic place, the ties to subcultural arcana still eminently there.
Violetta Kassapi is a designer and stylist of Greek heritage who’s been working in and around the upper echelons of fashion, film and music for almost decade. She’s a Camden native, and has spent her life growing up and working in the borough. Her parents earned the money they needed to raise her there, her mother the owner of a stall in the market, her father the proprietor of one of those aforementioned leather shops and – at one point – a hot dog stand that did a roaring trade with the out-late and worse for wear. “Occasionally he’ll be like, ‘Do you know how much money I used to make on that hot dog stand?! I was making grands on a Saturday!’” she laughs. “My mum sold clothes in the market. I used to sleep underneath it in her suitcase when I got tired. My grandma was a textiles designer in Camden, too – one of the best apparently, but I only got to meet her a few times.”
Fashion, then, runs in the family, and Violetta started young, assisting Scott Clark at the studio of renowned portrait photographer Rankin up the road in Kentish Town at the age of just 21. While there, she collided with a world of opportunity that has since led her on huge assignments both close to home – she was costume designer for Ben Drew’s cult London-based crime drama Ill Manors – and in territories much further-flung. “I did a shoot out in India, for the Major Lazer and Mø video ‘Lean On’. I had to get outfits together for about 50 back-up dancers too and I only had a week to prepare for it in London before flying out,” she explains. “We ended up making a lot of the clothes out there in Goa – it was a rush, in both senses of the word; we literally flew in for two days, went to this fake palace, ran around like mad because the Bollywood art directors they’d hired were really slow and then flew back home again. It was so much fun.”
Diplo, the founder of Major Lazer, messaged her earlier this year to tell her how many plays the video has accumulated since it was launched in March 2015. “I think we got 2 billion plays on it,” says Violetta, eyes wide. “It’s mad, I think it’s one of the highest ever on YouTube. I love it when I get into a cab or hear my neighbours booming music that I’ve been involved in. Sometimes I don’t even clock, I’m like ‘What’s this song again?’ Then the experience comes flooding back.”
Camden Town itself is a zone that is almost aggressive in the way it bludgeons visitors with cues to cultural memory. The area immediately around the Lock was bought up by three entrepreneurs in the 1970s, and since then its transformation from derelict space into sprawling clothes market has seen the high street ruled by successive waves of subculture: mods, hippies, punks, rude boys, skinheads, goths, grungers, ravers, Britpoppers, hip-hop heads. In truth, there’s no accurate way to list these groups chronologically; Camden has been a hive of youth activity for such a long time now that most of those clans have died and been revived at least three times over since their initial inception. Traces of each remain obvious, though, to the extent that they all seem to coexist there now at once, as if one weekend a bunch of people showed up for a Specials gig or a hardcore rave or the opening of Cyberdog and simply forgot to leave. To many Londoners, Camden has become a kind of graveyard of the fad, a left luggage facility with abandoned lockers housing every significant style tribe the post-war years have seen. This museum-like quality would seem naff and infantile if it did not speak to a higher cultural truth: if Camden is where subculture is preserved in the UK, that is because in so many other British towns and cities it has simply died away.
“That subcultural mix was way more obvious when I was at school back in the 90s,” says Violetta. “You’d have the serious rude boys and rude girls, punks, grungers, the Cyberdog crew. Skater boys – but not skater boys like they are today, in their Palace and Nike and stuff. I think that’s what people round here mean when they say they want the old Camden back – that tribalism made it special and inspiring. Now, maybe everyone’s blending into each other. I went to a hip-hop show the other day, and they’re all moshing at the front. Skaters are wearing tight trousers. You wouldn’t get that 20 years ago.”
That’s not to say that Camden – or London as a whole – has stopped influencing and living in Violetta’s work, though. Lately, she’s been working on regular editorials for London’s top-tier style mags, styled a video for the Clapton-based rapper Stefflon Don and has collaborated with the fashion designer Wale Adeyemi on a range of unisex tracksuits. Whatever the cultural historians end up remembering this period for, it’s likely that Violetta will have helped shape how it looks.
“I find this area inspiring in that I feel like I know everyone. I went to Camden Girls School, the catchment area was only a mile radius, and I often see faces from way back,” she explains. “To some, that could sound boring, but for me I find the idea of evolving in an area inspiring. I never feel claustrophobic. I walk everywhere; I know someone that lives on every single road. I know the richest person in this area and I know the poorest person. I know all the homeless people, all the shopkeepers. Just everyone. I don’t think it’s been infiltrated by scenesters in the same way that somewhere like Dalston has – I go out there quite a lot, but whenever I start feeling anxious, I get on the train, come back to Camden and I feel like I’m back in my zone. I feel un-f*ck-withable; like I’m me again. I’m glad I’ve been here to see it evolve.”