I'm of an age now where I'm being released from the expectations of knowing about and adhering to trends. It feels so good to lift that boot off my own face. Grateful to have lived long enough to see things from my childhood come back around, perplexed at how little allure it has to me now. But then I'm not the "target demographic" anymore. Who knew the sheer freedom in being discarded? Not I, someone who used to define their worth solely by their capacity for and to invoke desire!

Coming up for a year since I heard Adam Curtis say the following. "I wanted to put an argument... that the real problem of our age is that those in power do not have a language to describe to us what we are experiencing and the fears and the anxieties and the sense of dread and the melancholy, which I think is very deep in our society." On the publicity tour for Shifty, Max Jeffery interviewed Curtis in The Spectator, saying, "Curtis’s films are always about the past because he, like the politicians he describes, is unable to define the present. ‘There are certain aspects of modern power that you cannot illustrate,’ he says. ‘And they make me cry, sometimes literally. I’m scrabbling for shots."

Coming up for two years since Brat Summer. When we needed her most, she returned. Not that I would want to speak for Curtis but I feel like xcx describes quite accurately how a lot of people are feeling and goes some way to define the present. Holding up a light-bulb trimmed mirror to nature, she laments that there is no hope, no saving us through the pillars of culture she works within - music, fashion, or film. She invokes the vacuous apologies and excuses of celebrity speak, the hollow commodification of elements of her identity to be the most marketable, something she goes into more detail in her underappreciated music industry satire The Moment.

In the official video, xcx appears to be the only model, tripping over versions of herself, falling off the end of the runway and into the void. She doesn't insult our intelligence by offering solutions. She knows that's not her place, nor do I get the sense that it's what she wants to do as an artist. There's an irony in referencing the legacy of fashion seasons when fast fashion has mutated this into 52 "micro-seasons", the planet-wrecking weekly drop. This is a 3-minute collection that speaks about and to now, a distinctiveness that paradoxically gives the song a shot at being more enduring than something that avoids saying anything in a vain appeal to longevity.

Why did we - and I include myself in this - think soft power would save us? What precedent did we have for the redemptive and rescuing abilities of culture? I rewatched Shifty as an attempt to have some ideas about that question, even if I couldn't answer it. Mad to see Mandelson of that era and all the jazz that has elapsed since the series was first released. "Liberal classes turned away from politics and took refuge in culture," declares one of Curtis's iconic intertitles.

Curtis hypothesises this was because these liberal classes couldn't understand why the working class voted the way they did. Feeling that their own patrician values and solutions had been rejected, they abandoned a mass democracy project and turned to culture. Perhaps precisely because it was easy to access and malleable, as unaccountable as all the other growing forces of finance and tech - but fundamentally unable to make lasting change. That's the point of a refuge. You're withdrawn from the world, safe and ineffectual.

The behind-the-scenes footage of the development of the Millenium Dome in Shifty is the trippiest shit to me. I was in awe of the idea of it as a child, couldn't grasp why some of the adults around me thought of it as a waste. When I was taken to this big new place on a school trip, half of it was shut and most of it was broken. I was in awe of the acrobatic show with a mythical storyline that took place in the negative space of the Dome. We sat on the floor, craning our necks to watch it, feeling the music reverberate through our small bodies. A circus worthy of the big top.

Seeing the committees at a loss as to what to put into it goes some way to explaining where we are now. Like how the Spirit Zone interpreted spirit as a fog, something that obscures a way forward rather than something that motivates or unifies. But it's shipping kids from all over the country to witness the projection of a library while their actual libraries are shut down that clinched it for me. Quarter of a century into the dawn it was built to herald, it is apt that the place formerly known as the Millennium Dome is only fit for purpose as a corporate-owned multi-purpose events arena.

"In his films and in person Curtis does not make arguments," continues Jeffery, "he summons moods. He also refuses to use the word ‘vibe’..." Kyla Scanlon does not have the same vibe qualms. She coined the neologism "vibecession" in 2022, meaning a disconnect between a country's economic indicators and the public's negative perception of the economy. Another of Curtis's intertitles, "The very idea of money as a measure of real value was dissolving". I constantly mishear "attention economy" as "a tension economy".

What are between fragments? Gaps. So it follows that, from a more fragmented society, there are more gaps between reality and experience. We - and I'm including a few generations as well as my own - acted in order to strengthen democracy and increase equality, but we've somehow ended up reducing people power and making everyone viable for extraction, bar a literal handful of men.

Permit me to coin my own neologism - "slopsism". An obsession with one's internal processes, appearances, and outputs, without consideration of quality and to no actual benefit, only in service of its own relentless perpetuation. Like xcx's endless streaming of selves, each with slight uncanny variations, marching past one another, their only points of interaction to crash and fall.

Curtis and xcx both use the fashion show as a metaphor for presentation, the uneasy meeting place between art and commerce as they capture and shape the current and near-future. Throughout Shifty, Curtis credits Alexander McQueen as the artist who initially falls victim to then becomes the chronicler of confrontational art being muzzled into statement marketing for the middle classes to buy luxury handbags, scarves, and perfumes.

For his show Voss, McQueen started the show fashionably late by a whole hour. This forced the elite audience to look at themselves in the mirrors of a vast glass cube at the centre. The show was an elaborate display of madness, models tearing at their clothes and hair while they peered at each other, their reflections, and out of the box, as if seeing nothing but their own reflections.

The climax of the show was the collapsing of the walls of a box within the glass cube, a structure that had been rendered invisible and in plain sight the whole time. It revealed a naked Michelle Olley, journalist and fetish club founder, her body a strikingly different shape and size from the supermodels, wearing a rubber gas mask surrounded by butterflies, referencing Joel-Peter Witkin's photo Sanitarium. And when did this happen to happen exactly?

SS01.