Despite what the clever subhead might say, there’s nothing called cluttercore. At least not yet. Hopefully.
But there is this website I’ve been obsessed with for some time called the Bible of British Taste. I find myself visiting it a few times a week, often revisiting posts I’ve read numerous times before. Everything featured on the site looks lived in and natural. A nice change of pace to looking at magazine spreads where everything looks perfectly arranged and tidied up. It all feels a bit out of step with our current culture. I suppose there’s a bit of an eccentric feel to it. That would make sense since the English have always had a particular gift for producing oddballs. I don’t consider myself an Anglophile, but I do find myself always appreciating Brits that come off as a bit more off-center.
Eccentricity might get passed over these days because it’s so easy to scroll right past it on your phone. There are plenty of weirdos out there doing interesting things but things are often so easily commodified in our algorithm age that something can go from quirky and offbeat to basic in the tap of an Instagram or TikTok heart. And it’s not that the Brits have some lock on eccentrics; they’ve just been doing it a long time. There’s a certain look and feel to their strain that hits right. It’s not so much London’s neatly tailored look as it is the unsettling beauty of John Alexander Skelton designs or the chill pagan feel of Brighton’s Story MFG. I was recently rewatching one of my favorite films, 1987’s Withnail and I, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the two main characters played by Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann, in their baggy tweeds and cords, leather jackets and fuzzy sweaters, also really exemplify the look to me. Set in the late-60s, the two friends would be hippie druggy dropouts if the film was set in the U.S. And the pair are druggy dropouts, but there’s something charming, quaint, and cool about them failing through life and how great they make it look.
But the way Ruth Guilding, founder of Bible of British Taste, see it, “Eccentric and bohemian are over-used terms — like iconic, they get used so often that they become a bit meaningless.” Before founding the site, Guilding wrote for publications like the World of Interiors and started her own site in 2012. The idea was “an online storybook where I could write and post photos of these kinds of places” and compares it to Napoleon III’s 1863 Salon des Refusés exhibition that showcased artists that weren’t picked for the official Salon. She only published “about things and people I really rated,” and a glance at the site shows a specific vibe (rustic, folksy, artful clutter), but doesn’t aim to call one particular style or look more “British” than any other. But I was curious if she’d call what she features eccentric. I was drawn initially to Bible of British Taste because I was looking for anything that combated against a certain boring, lifeless minimal sort of design aimed at millennials that I was seeing too much of in the States. To me, anything that strayed from that felt delightfully eccentric
And that interest has only increased in the last few years. I’ve gotten really into he zine Weird Walk, a sort of guide to the relationship between England’s more off-beat and nature. The name of the “Journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles” doesn’t over- or under-sell anything. It’s about walking and about “weird” stuff. Less weird in the I’m so funky Kyrsten Sinema sort of way and more the old(e) English Shakespearian trio of witchy “weird sisters” from Macbeth. The cover for each issue looks more like the poster for a Hammer horror film starring Christoper Lee or a 1970s doom rock classic with its Black Sabbath-esque font and slightly distorted images of Stonehenge or a random hill somewhere in some forgotten corner of the United Kingdom. There are essays and pictures of moss-covered ponds and old churchyards, but there are also articles on “dungeon synth,” the hybrid of black metal (often sans the metal part) and atmospheric synth sounds that’s suitable for “otherworldy rambling” for the “solo weird walker.”
Interestingly, as I found myself getting deeper into my Weird Walk obsession, I came across an Instagram, post from Chateau Orlando, the brand created by British artist Luke Edward Hall, whose own quirky, colorful, David Hockney-painting-at-Brideshead art has been impossible to miss over the last few years if you follow enough menswear or design people. The brand put out a zine called Storm Prince of the Old Cornish, featuring essays from Weird Walk and Ruth Guilding from Bible of British Taste. Curiously, I ask Guilding if maybe there’s some joining of forces going on, maybe the new wave of British eccentrics have joined forces. But she’s not so sure. “Perhaps it's incestuous, but Britain is a small island.”
Glad to see another Weird Walk fan! If you haven't, check out Grimoire Silvanus...very similar in feel
I feel deeply seen by this --