London’s club kids are a very particular species. Though they hide in plain sight during the day, nighttime is when they assume their final form, inhabiting the various characters they long to be: a Napoleonic general or the last empress of Russia; a Victorian aristocrat or a pale-faced mime. They use fashion as a tool for self-invention, rewriting their own lives through vivid clothes and vibrant make-up. This experimentation often generates new creative movements which are then absorbed and diluted into trends – but the club kid pipeline wouldn’t exist without the club itself.

Today’s creatives are operating in a nightlife landscape gutted by closures. Since 2020, over a third of UK nightclubs have shut, with projections suggesting up to 57% of London venues could disappear by 2030. Recent losses include Corsica Studios, which closed its doors in March, and with it the queer rave JOYRIDE. In 2023, LGBTQ+ venue The Glory shut its doors, following in the footsteps of other queer spaces like XXL and Madame Jojo’s. In 2022, Sink The Pink, described as UK’s biggest queer party, announced its final event at Printworks – which itself shut only a year later.

Historically, fashion and nightlife have always shared a symbiotic relationship. In 1980s London, legendary venues such as Blitz, Cha Cha Club and Leigh Bowery’s Taboo became incubators for a generation that would go on to reshape fashion. Among them was milliner Stephen Jones, Vogue editor Hamish Bowles, David Holah and Stevie Stewart of cult label BodyMap, and Blitz kid muse Princess Julia. Clubs like Blitz and Taboo were where a young, flamboyant John Galliano shaped his singular design style into one of theatrical excess. Pat McGrath also emerged from London’s club scene, arriving in the capital in the late 80s and finding inspiration in the Blitz kids, whose approach to identity helped define her own creative language.

Fast forward to now, and today’s club kids are lamenting a London that no longer exists. Sweden-born artist Mäki, who moved to the capital in 2017, argues that the city is “actively losing its edgy, fashion and culture forward space where creatives go to find inspiration – spaces that had such a great impact on my journey both spiritually and creatively.” Similarly, host and performer Angel Fiorucci says that figures like Bowery “created an identity out of passion and artistry, that in turn laid the foundation for major designers like Richard Quinn and Rick Owens.” The closure of spaces that once hosted such talent, he tells Dazed, “means that people are less willing to take risks, and everything becomes sanitised.”

DJ Prince JayJay, who works at venues like The Box, Fire and Electroworks, emphasises the influence that club style has had on fashion. “Club kids have always been the unofficial research and development department of fashion,” he says. “Before trends hit London Fashion Week, or get watered down into something wearable, they’ve usually  been tested at 3am in a sweaty basement in Dalston.” For Prince JayJay, the steady erosion of London’s nightlife is deeply personal. “Losing icons like Corsica Studios, and watching councils enforce those 11pm curfews feels like an attack on the culture, and like the government is choking nightlife”.

But as recently as the 2010s, the picture was a little different. The queer club night PDA – founded by Mischa Nottcutt, Ms Carrie Stacks, Akinola Davies Jr and Siobhan Bell – ran across various venues from 2012, before settling at Bar A Bar in Stoke Newington, where it continued until its end in 2021. Defined by an uncompromising energy and spirit of experimentation, the event became a vital space for a generation of Black creatives including designers like Maximilian Davis, Mowalola Ogunlesi, Jawara Alleyne, Saul Nash, Feben – plus former Dazed editor-in-chief and Off-White creative director Ib Kamara.

“Club kids have always been the unofficial research and development department of fashion”

For Kamara, PDA became a “universe” where he could expand his fashion sensibilities. At the event, and across club culture more broadly, he was able to “experiment, rediscover, and integrate different parts of myself,” shaping his identity and his “sense of style and artistic point of view,” which can be seen in his work at Off-White and recent creative direction of Madonna’s Confessions II era. “Artistically, club kids have been and always will be the blueprint,” Kamara tells us.

“PDA was fabulous, funky, really too fucking hot!” recalls Ms Carrie Stacks. “It was an avenue for pure freedom and pure creation,” adds Davies Jr. “There were so many people with creative tendencies sharing an energy and sharing a space.” But according to Davies Jr, it was, “the safety of a space that was very Black-centric and very hedonistic,” that enabled individuals to create much like “kids making a mess”: embracing experimentation for its own sake, rather than for perfection.

PDA came to a natural close in 2021, and since then almost 100 clubs have followed suit. But though London nightlife may be on life support, the club kid isn’t dead yet. Within the few lasting venues of Dalston and Shoreditch, at events like Inferno and Sero.tonin, the scene survives. “If we lose those spaces, we lose the ecosystems that produce culture, as well as London’s capacity to shape and impact the creative and fashion industries,” says Lewis G Burton, who founded the queer art rave Inferno in 2015. Now at Distillery M17, Inferno continues to nurture creativity, with “countless artists and designers” building lasting careers from connections formed through the night. As venues continue to disappear across London, Burton warns that, “no other institution can ever replace what happens organically in nightlife.”

Without those spaces, the creative worlds of Galliano, McGrath and more might never have been realised. But saving nightclubs – and therefore the culture they produce – requires tackling systemic issues. As rents and a worsening economy means that the financial outlook for nightclubs is increasingly dire, putting pressure on local electives to enact policy change and supporting grassroots campaigning is the only option. The preservation of such spaces becomes critical, especially for an industry worth around £68 billion to the UK economy, and one of its most visible cultural exports. Without such protection, the capacity for club culture to build lasting legacies within fashion and culture is being diminished. In the meantime, the capital will continue to lose its position against cities like Berlin, where nightlife and fashion continue to intersect in ways that mimic London’s own past.