I spent some time interning at a magazine last summer, and was tasked with helping to create their new It-List. It would be one of many such lists, like Forbes’ formidable 30 Under 30 roster, that would hit the shelves at the beginning of 2016. Mainstream media’s obsession with youth is nothing new (see Mad About The Boy, an exhibition exploring the historic allure of male youth currently showing at London College of Fashion), and will never grow old, but the focus of this idolatry has, I feel, shifted perceptibly from the young and beautiful to the young and successful. Imputing hundreds of potential names, ages and glittering professional accolades into a spreadsheet, it quickly transpired that the basic formula for making the cut was, essentially, the younger the better: pre-teen artists and activists were the list’s gold dust, and it all got less impressive from there. Reading these lists, I feel, at 21, old. And frankly, a little (a lot) jealous of the tastemakers of tomorrow – I haven’t yet achieved anything extraordinary, and despite always getting good grades and trying wholeheartedly to blunder on down the badly signposted path to success, I am, on the whole, average.  

The generation in question though, the ten-somethings who get me wistfully thinking about what I should have been doing after school instead of watching Friends re-runs, contains such notable names as 16 year old Lily-Rose Depp, model, actress (and Jonny Depp’s offspring), 17 year old Jaden and 15 year old Willow Smith who are both making names for themselves as outspoken young musicians and philosophers of life, and 17 year old Amandla Stenberg, who has been fighting for better racial representation in Hollywood. According to MTV, this ‘Generation Z’, distinct from Millenials for never knowing a world without touch screens, will be the ‘founders’ among us. This founding spirit can be seen in the fruits of the young Instagram coterie’s labours – from starting up online movements which have taken up roots across the globe, like 15 year old Mars’ Art Hoe collective platforming creative young POC, to making music and garnering fame from the moment they upload a cover to Soundcloud, like Lorde, who at 19 already has two Grammies.

The democratising plurality of the internet is such that qualifications and experience aren’t worth anything; anyone can start their own international media empire by developing a network of writers online, and garnering an international audience for your artwork through Instagram is as meritocratic a process as I can think of. For example, artists like 19 year old Chloe Sheppard have become successful based on the quality of her photography and the beauty of her vision, rather than going through the motions of formal academic training to legitimise her voice. I wondered that creating such a social-media sensation isn’t a sustainable route to success IRL, however girls like Tavi Gevinston with her Rookie media empire have proved that you should patronise young bloggers at your own behest.

So unlike Bret Easton Ellis’ constant condemnation of ‘Generation Wuss’, or Simon Doonan’s opinions on youth culture as stated recently in Slate (one extract reads ‘the young folks of today are a bunch of insanely overachieving, materialistic, poorly educated, distraction-prone, conformist, mentally turgid losers, whose only discernable skill is the ability to sext pics of their genitals to one another’), I don’t think that today’s teens are inherently much worse, or much better for that matter, than their predecessors. Some things have definitely changed: apparently because of the socio-economic uncertainty of adulthood, teenagers are getting much less fucked up than they used to, with underage drinking and narcotics use much lower than it was a decade ago according to a 2013 Department of Health study. We’re all being called the ‘precariat’ because of the uncertain nature of our futures – destined to live in far-out suburbs working endless unpaid internships and forever chasing the dragon of a fulfilling career. 

We have been made to think that, after university, we will all be fighting for the same shitty jobs, forced to compete against each other for the same scarce breadcrumbs of a post-credit-crunch world. Maybe then it is the looming shape of a bleak 20s that is pushing young people to work harder, to carve out a place for themselves in the world if it looks like that space doesn’t yet exist. That Generation Z can found a future not based on crippling student debt and apathetic inertia shouldn’t make me jealous or bitter. There’s enough time for us all. 

When I first walked into the Metropolitan Museum’s Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style exhibition a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the dark atmosphere, punctuated throughout with sharp spotlights, and the huge fi lm being played in black and white directly across from the entryway. The two-room exhibition, designed as a loop around a centre space with short videos playing, gives off the air of a high-class cocktail party with music streaming and mannequins touting sumptuous dresses in brilliant colors, poised as if preparing for the flash of a camera and a subsequent feature in a socialites tabloid. Another large film screen greets you as you enter the second room to the right of the lengthy entrance, which is in itself part of a strategy aimed at isolating the whole exhibition from the rest of the museum’s more sunlit rooms with its long flight of descending block-like stairs. Passing the massive profi les of De Ribes’s strikingly angular face, which was often shielded by some sort of half-veil or piece of tool and highlighted by chignon bun, as well as videos of her at work streaming quietly and continuously and blending in with the murmur of people walking past, I wondered what could make someone who designed such clothing so much more interesting to people today than her actual designs.

As an aristocrat born in 1920s France and later married at a young age to a Vicomte, Jacqueline’s struggle to become a designer was less economic and more personal, since her new family did not support her career. Even still, she began designing for ballets, theatre productions and her own society events, which were perhaps the best place for her to advertise her creations. Coco Chanel, despite having been raised in an orphanage, which was also where she learned to sew, likewise got her start designing for high-society women for whom she made custom hats in early 20th century Paris. She was only later able to expand her product base into other garments and perfumes. Karl Lagerfeld, who started a bit later and remains an active and present fi gure on red carpets today, was born into a wealthy though not aristocratic family who allowed him to move at a young age to Paris to pursue design. There he entered design competitions and soon began to work under more established designers like Balmain. He now works with several brands including his own and Chanel.

Designers of the early 20th century are known so well today because they supported their businesses through their own unique personas as much as they did through their actual designs. When clothes were very often still handmade in the average household, the lives and identities of the designers of such upscale clothing were inextricably linked to the image of their own company.

The wearing of mass-produced (or ready-towear) clothing items is still a relatively recent phenomenon, fuelled by the growth of the textile industry in the later nineteenth century as well as the adoption of assembly-line practices from the auto industry. Although some ready-to wear items were developed in the early- to mid-1800s, such options didn’t become popular until factory-made fabric became more readily available.

I even recall photos of my own parents in garments handmade by both of my grandmothers up until the late 1960s (all of which tended to look something like the curtainsturned-play clothes from The Sound of Music to the chagrin of my parents’ 12-year-old selves).

In the fashion world today there are still success stories to be found of fashion designers making miraculous entries into the world of design from more humble beginnings, perhaps most visibly those of designers who have entered televised competitions such as Project Runway.

Yet large corporations still supply a huge portion of the clothing that we wear. While some of these corporations claim to have sustainable and humanitarian business practices, others continue to be successful whilst running their businesses through slave-labour and underpaid workers. People often cite the cheaper cost of mass-produced goods as the main reason why they continue to buy from such companies, and of course, those people shouldn’t be blamed for taking the most economical route available to them.

Still, if some people have begun in recent years to swap out mass-produced foods for organic and sustainably-sourced products, wouldn’t it also be worth a try to do the same with our clothing? Where nudism, which I suppose would be the vegetarianism of clothing, is not yet widely socially acceptable or even practical in the colder months, we need a solution that goes beyond boycotting certain companies.

While for the immediate future it may seem more economically practical for a person to buy clothes from the cheapest seller, if more and more people began to buy their clothes from local seamstresses and designers, the demand for these items would grow and the descriptors ‘bespoke’ or ‘handmade’ would no longer have the social cachet that it has today. While for now ‘bespoke’ has begun to connote something nearly on par with designer labels, it could soon come to connote something more personal and responsibly sourced for all of us.

Though I could never pretend to be a specialist in the economics of the fashion industry, it is an interesting idea to consider that we could all be dressing a lot more uniquely, a lot more personally and a lot more conscientiously if we took a page out of our past.

Along with the advent of greater amounts of leisure time for the middle classes came the desire for more, and more varied, kinds of clothing that could be made in less time and for less money. This desire drove onward the consumption of mass-produced goods to the point where we now have lost touch with where our clothing comes from and the people that design and put it together.

Unlike in the era of De Ribes, the most successful design companies today are those at which the designers seem the most disconnected from what we see in the stores, with many of the largest fashion houses having been taken over by figures other than their founders and practically all labour taken from abroad. The upstart designers of the past can now be mythologized simply because we cannot relate any longer to the personal relationships that they had with the clothes they made and the people who wore them.

Still, the fashion industry is not without hope in this regard, and online shopping centres such as Etsy and Handmade at Amazon encourage people to buy one-of-a-kind items from individual sellers in a format that is convenient, thoroughly modern and, more importantly, cheap. I, for one, will try to make the switch

“The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.” — P.G. Wodehouse

It seems that almost wherever you go in literature, the long shadow of the English country house is always with us. “An Englishman’s house is his castle,” the saying goes, and we just can’t seem to escape these old Edwardian haunts – whether it’s in Waugh’s Bridshead Revisited, Ishiguru’s Remains of the Day or Wodehouse’s adventures of Jeeves & Wooster, the stately home is always lurking smartly in the background, a constant background to long summer evenings on the lawns or high tea in the dressing room. And that’s not to mention its more recent resurgence in programmes such as Downton Abbey and our obsession with and romanticisation of the upstairs-downstairs life.

These places seem to be imbued with some sort of mysticism that we just can’t let go of. The country house way of life died out in the 1920s, after many heirs to these homes and the servants that kept them running died in the Great War. By the 1930s they had become an anachronism, and by the 1970s they were veritable fossils. So why do they mean so much more to us, and why do they keep recurring in our collective memory?

The answer, perhaps, is the wonderful prism they give through which we can explore other worlds. With Wodehouse we can revel in the glorious farce and decadence of the era; with Ishiguru we shudder at the dark secrets they contain; in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the country house even becomes one of the main characters in the novel. The English country house in literature is ambiguous and varied – and it’s here to stay.

On this very day in 1995, Radiohead released their ninth single: ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, which in March was to feature in their second studio album The Bends. ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ is, ultimately, a really fucking good song.

Through my misfortune of existing only as a nearly fully developed foetus at the point of its release, I’ve only ever known ‘Street Spirit’ within the context of The Bends. The song literally fades out the album, all within a meta-structure as Yorke sings “fade out.” There is something infinitely hopeless about ‘Street Spirit,’ something irreconcilably melancholic. The guitar swells with the melancholy which Yorke piercingly narrates. The lyrics are fragmented, presenting frames of misery rather than a story arc. We are facing melancholy in its purest and irreparable form.

Yorke describes ‘Street Spirit’ as “drain[ing]” and “shak[ing]” him each time he plays it. ‘Street Spirit’ is not pretty, it’s not optimistic. It narrates the unintelligible ineffable feeling that everyone on occasion is struck by – that one day we will disappear, and cease to have any significance. If we ever had any to begin with. We remain oblivious to so much that one day we will have to “swallow whole” – one day we will face all the tragedy and pain that we are desensitised and oblivious to. Much like Yorke suppresses the emotion that ‘Street Spirit’ connotes in order to be able to perform without “cracking”, this is the way in which we conceivably exist. There is no lift in the song, arpeggios build up, play through, and fade out once more. There is no glimmer or release.

Yorke was disturbed at the live reaction to ‘Street Spirit,’ unnerved by the cheers and smiles of the audience. It is certainly not a song that makes you smile, but in artistically depicting something that feels so unpennable, Radiohead have created something hauntingly astute. It doesn’t misfire in its indulgence, it is far from the tepid whinery that ‘sad songs’ are often connected to. There is something mesmerising in melancholia when illustrated well. And Radiohead have done exactly that.

I talk to Huey Morgan in mid-December. He is at home in Somerset; his wife has just gone to pick up his sons from school; and he tells me he’s looking forward to Christmas. It’s almost hard to imagine that this chatty down-to-earth bloke is soon to embark on a world tour as part of the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, as the band celebrates the 20th anniversary of their ground-breaking debut Come Find Yourself with tours and re-issues galore.

Morgan is excited about the tour (which comes to Oxford’s O2 Academy on 11th February), but from the outset it is clear that he sees it not as a business venture, but as a “thank you” to fans who have been there since the release of the self-produced rock/hip-hop/ jazz/funk record that came out of urban New York in 1996. He thinks an anniversary tour is “kinda cool” and “humbling in a real way”, enforcing the idea that it was thousands of fans who grouped together to ask the band for a re-issue.

It is clear that Morgan feels he owes so much to the audiences he has played to over the years, though he’d rather say that he plays “for” the fans, saying “the audience are the most important part of the equation – we play for them, not ‘at’ them or ‘to’ them – it’s been the same for 20 years.”

And much has changed since 1996. The original line-up included Huey Morgan on vocals and guitar, multi-instrumentalist Brian Leiser on bass and keys amongst other things, and Steve Borgovini on drums. This time around, the Come Find Yourself 20th anniversary tour – which includes dates up and down the country and in Europe – will see current Fun Lovin’ Criminal Frank Benbini take to the kit instead of Borgovini.

The album was bold at the time of release; Morgan does not shy away from basking in this glory, telling me how it changed people’s perspectives, with that kaleidoscope mishmash of genres, the punk-rock aggression and politicised lyrics reverberating around an urban population. Reading about Morgan, every writer seems keen to make the point that he really is a Fun Lovin’ Criminal, infamously having had the choice to serve time in prison or join the US Marines after thieving and drug-related crimes in his youth. Of course he chose the Marines. Another article describes his nonchalance at lighting a cigarette in a London bar during an interview in 2012. Morgan is evidently a bold character.

But this was not an expected success. As he is keen to reiterate, at the time they were just young guys who had big ideas they wanted to put onto a record. This brute youth is evident on the album. Even 20 years on, the ferocity of Come Find Yourself’s sound will be at the forefront of the gigs, as Morgan tells me the songs will be played in full, in order, before an interval, and a second half of the “other songs everyone will want to hear” – which sounds like any fan’s dream. And, as Morgan says himself, “10 million people can’t be wrong”