Illustration by ESME BLEGVAD
Welcome to 'Introducing', where we get acquainted with Britain's weird and wonderful new subcultures.
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If he's been really inspired, he may have even quit his job to help stop climate change full-time, although this now means that you are paying his share of the rent as well as yours. Or maybe, like so many of us these days, he has pivoted to life in the gig economy, and can now be found in the XR eco-working space, writing passive-aggressive comments about carbon emissions on your foreign friends' photos of them visiting their family overseas.Armed with little knowledge of why it's gross to fetishise arrest, he's spent every day of the past week putting on his yellow Albam x End raincoat, which he bought especially for the occasion, to hang out at the various sit-ins. He is, crucially, definitely not actually staying at the campsite with the unwashed masses; he secretly thinks they smell, and feels ashamed about it.It's important to note that the new XR lad is distinct from the hardcore hippy contingent. He's less Bristol and more Manchester. While the old guard is dressed exclusively in organic hemp items procured in Bali (or Brighton) and refuse to understand cultural appropriation as a concept, he is generally fashion-conscious and woke enough to know that white people shouldn't have dreadlocks. He used to wear Doc Martens; now, he wears vegan Doc Martens. Or maybe he used to wear Nike but now instead wears New Balance (lots of them are made in England, and therefore more ethical).
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