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A 'No Tracksuits' Dress Code Is Social Engineering At Its Worst

How could they have ever thought this was a good idea?

A screenshot from the Brixton Beach Boulevard website.

No tracksuits. It is a dress code that, to me, was mostly heard on the car radio when advertising parties at Brixton's now-closed Fridge Bar. Smart dress was encouraged, shoes and shirts. Ladies free before 12.

Now in Brixton, this warning has taken on a different mantle. One that serves not as knowing and wily move by club promoters within the community, but as an exercise in social engineering. It's an implicitly unwelcoming bark to the people of the area by those who are not interested in engaging with them. A dismissive flick of the wrist towards the people of a place that is experiencing the most hostile of takeovers. Fridge Bar closed in 2015 after 20 years of business. Ten years ago the arches in Brixton were filled with people shopping for necessities. The covered marketplace had stalls with various bits and bobs that served the community. But now the community has changed, and it serves a different clientele. It serves people who only care about where their next fucking mojito comes from. It serves people who only care about how authentic their £12 southern fried chicken is. It serves people who have a pit-of-the-stomach revulsion of everyone around them who doesn't conform to their new ideal of a utopian south London. No children on bikes, no mums with pushchairs, just brand managers and marketers, ad men and women, the feckless horde of bores with nothing to say who have somehow managed to hold all the keys here. A street food tsunami washing over the town, upending cars and smashing ground floor windows with chipotle mayonnaise and ramen broth, dragging whole families away to drown in the milieu of extreme gentrification.

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But this goes beyond gentrification. Sitting atop this mountain of sourdough pizza is a new place the Brixton tourists can call their own, and feel safe from the danger of the area they want to plunder, but don't want to look at. Brixton Beach Boulevard, it's called. And guess what the only thing you're not allowed to wear is?

Brixton Beach Boulevard. It's a Miami-themed pop-up beach. It has street food. It has DJs playing inoffensive soul and funk. You can dress like a cunt if you want, and let's be honest, if you're going to this, you will want to dress like a fucking cunt. "Escape the hustle & bustle of London & transport yourself into our immersive 80's experience" says the website. Why does everything have to be an experience? Are the people that run and attend these things such a gaggle of dullards that a drink and a chair is not enough for them to enjoy themselves? Everything has to be thematic, everything has to be a secret cinema, a dress-up occasion. Whose idea of "unwinding" is putting on a mullet and eating a bowl of £10 mac'n'cheese? Someone unaware of anything that goes on around them, as if they're wearing an Oculus Rift with a Normal-Arsehole-360° video playing ad infinitum. Someone who is so stuck in the matrix of their own ignorance that they would even for a moment patronise a place with such a door policy.

Perhaps the greatest question is, how could Brixton Beach Boulevard be so incredibly obtuse? How could they not realise that opening a fucking 80s-themed beach in the London district in the throes of the most widely reported gentrification case in recent times, and implicitly excluding the people whose lives on which they are encroaching, was a bad idea? Have fake cops scattered around the place in a region where there are famously tensions between the people and police (and I'm sure I don't need to spell out to you the extra significance of these police being American in a predominantly black area)? It's because they live in a bubble of remorseless joviality. It would never cross their minds that banning tracksuits from a pop-up where social cleansing is occurring is in bad taste. They do not care. They just want their new thing to be how they want it, and they always, always get what they want.

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If you go to Brixton Beach Boulevard you should be ashamed of yourself. If you accept a DJ booking there you should be ashamed of yourself. If you walk past it without gobbing on the pavement adjacent to it ou should be ashamed of yourself. I hope a cloud of blood rain covers only this pop-up Sodom and showers all the putrescent revellers in steamy sky-born haemoglobin. A giant Carrie-esque biblical punishment of the disgusting, mindless hubris displayed by these terrible, awful people. If you're going to fuck up and ruin someone's area, at least give them a chance to call you a cunt to your face, and not impose your arbitrary dress code rules as a weak armour against the side of a place you don't have the stones to look in the eye.

Brixton Beach Boulevard were approached but declined to comment.

@joe_bish

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